Ben Bova, a science fiction editor and writer, wrote a book about the invention of an electronic book titled Cyberbooks in 1989.The book was set 20 years in the future which would be about now. The book featured an inventor from a university who had created a prototype of an electronic book which sounds a lot like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook. He went to New York to sell it to the publishing industry. The big publishers were not interested in buying his invention but he finally found a small publishing house that was willing to consider it.

          He was invited to hang around the company and see how they did things. His mentor was one of the genre editors. He was invited go to a quarterly meeting to see how they decided which books to publish next. At the meeting, each of the genre editors pitched the books that they wanted the company to publish.

          After the meeting, he discussed what had happened with his mentor. He said that although the presentations were enthusiastic, he got the distinct impression that the presenters didn’t feel that the books they wanted to publish would make much money for the company. His mentor agreed that this was the case and complimented him on his insight.

           He then asked her if this was true how the publishing company made enough money to stay in business. She said that the answer was self-help books. He asked her if self-help books were really that profitable. She said “Of course, just look around any bookstore. There are shelves and shelves of self-help books.” He asked, “Does anyone really get much help from those books?” “Of course not, if they did, they would not keep buying them!”, she replied.

           A small self help publishing company once did a survey to determine who would buy a self-help book in the near future. The best indicator turned out to be that people who had purchased one self-help book in the past six months were likely to buy another one soon. I think that most people who have one of these books tend to have a lot of them.

           The big problem is that in order to make use of what is in the book, you must read it, assimilate the information, apply the information, etc. In other words, you have to become an expert and what you were really looking for was help with a problem.

           I bought a book on procrastination but I haven’t read it yet. I wish that was a joke.