Is Self-Help All In The Packaging?

Carys Davies

I try my best not to be nosy, but secretly love seeing what people are reading on the tube. Whether it’s beach reads in summer or chunky politics and histories over winter, there’s nothing quite like seeing books in their natural habitat to understand how we’re feeling culturally.

However, what we’re no longer feeling is in the mood for self-help, recognisable not only for their insistent titles but relatively pristine condition, albeit in comparison to my gnarled library books. Now, I rarely see people reading self-help on the tube, but why is that? Booming in 2018-19 with sales hitting 3 million in a sharp 20% rise from the preceding year, self-help’s commercial viability appeared to have sparked a new generation eager to improve. However, in the last six years, I’ve noticed their migration from the central tables of my local bookshop to the peripheral ones, or worse, the shelves. It seems it’s not the advice itself that’s caused the shift, but the way it's packaged. 

A rare sight: heads in the written word in Kurfürstendamm, Germany

The problem with a book on the shelf lies in the lack of ease to casually flick through its pages. You have to put in the effort of reaching up, pulling it out, inevitably snagging your coat on the wood and taking a brief glance at the cover before concluding that it isn’t what you thought it was. This whole dance passes without once glancing at the pages. To understand why self-help isn’t helping itself to fly off the shelves, we need to consider its material aspect. The book, as the physical object we handle, is very different from the text, the word generated meaning within it. When we’re thinking about the exterior book - from its cover design to the pages - we’ve incidentally let the text’s meaning spill out (Price, 4) as our focus point has subtly switched from contents to container. A problem in the bookshop, where the contents would by nature be that much more unknown, it’s inevitable that books are judged, at least in part, by their covers. Self help’s alleged affinity with its reader, as even the genre’s title recommends a kind of interiority, makes it that much harder to take to the till. Unlike fiction, which appears to hold no outward authority over the reader’s self, the genre’s claims are that much bolder than others. Its imposed affinity with the reader parallels the book to text relationship with the reader’s own body to mind (Price, 15). Self-help books try to function as a proxy of our inner selves, which is often something we’re not keen to give away to a little £8.99 object. 

Purchase thus becomes a predicament. By investing in a self-help book, we’re admitting we’re in need of aid. Not only that, we’re relinquishing control to a single book we’ve astutely picked off the shelf. It’s at the till such realisation takes another form, as those who buy one are, on average, likely to buy seven more. If self-help was actually helping, it would reduce interest in the genre, rather than coaxing us back to shelves upon shelves of these books in more bookshops. Here’s the crux—self-help needs to appear to be helping, but not help so much that audiences feel impervious to buying another. In fact, each book drives the reader back into the bookshop, a pattern of continued consumption rather than individual solution. Convenient for the bookseller, not so much for our wallets. 

So, while self-help proudly claims to promote individuality, at the same time it relies on unifying the self in line with a communal ideal. This particularly traces back to its predecessors, such as Conduct Literature and, before that, the Courtesy Manual of the Middle Ages. Nobody’s going to want to sit on the tube with a Courtesy Manual, as its emphasis is on behavioural improvement rather than the emotional growth we usually seek. We’ve seen a shift from self-help texts of the past that normalised parents choosing their childrens’ spouses to encouraging women to refrain from exercising their rights by the end of the Eighteenth Century. Despite modern self-help books' supposed embrace of the personal, it always seems to come with its own terms and conditions. 

The advice itself is important not just in content, but delivery. We want advice to feel personal, even if it comes from a mass-produced commercial product. This is why many writers combine some professional endorsement with a friendly voice, balancing authority with an approachable tone. After all, this opinion is from a book worth less than a tenner, it’s not gospel – although the Bible is considered by some the earliest form of the genre. Familiarity is key to trusting the text and has been built throughout its history by careful dispensation of synthetic personalisation. When language purposefully strengthens the relationship between producer and consumer, the reader is subtly drawn into a closer relationship with the writer than they would typically have. This technique is used in everything from Prime Ministers' speeches to supermarket adverts and was particularly used in Conduct Literature with a familial pattern of synthetic personalisation, such as in titles like Advice of a Mother to her Daughter (1728). The idea of passing advice down the generations mimics the literal passing of the material book between family members. 

Even Jane Austen’s heroines were not exempt from this form of familial prescription: 

“There is a very clever essay in one of the books upstairs upon much such a subject, about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance—The Mirror, I think. I will look it out for you some day or other, because I am sure it will do you good.” (Austen, 1084) 

This example from Northanger Abbey is quite on the nose, although advice nowadays takes a slightly more varied format. Where self-help books are no longer physically circulating at such a rate as before, podcasts are on the rise with a staggering prediction of 619 million listeners by 2026. While I wouldn’t read a self-help book on the tube, I’ll frequently listen to The Girl’s Bathroom. Self-help’s modern twist on the genre reflects a change in where we are getting our advice— swapping parents for peers. The move into online spaces is not only indicative of a resistance to part with £8.99, but also rejects the idea of embedding our sense of self into a text’s alternate physical body. Perhaps self-help’s evolution is one that parts with materiality altogether, as the object’s symbolic weight as an alternate, even preferable, self is made physical as a material reminder of needing aid. The result? I rarely see people reading self-help on the tube— but just maybe they’re listening to it. 

Sources (if not linked):

• Price, Leah. How To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Walker, Rob. ‘Stressed Brits Buy Record Number of Self-Help Books’. The Observer, 9 Mar. 2019.
• Why Self-Help Books Are Overrated - YouTube. Directed by Mark Manson,
  https://www.youtube.com/