AI is killing how-to book sales, data from author Tim Ferriss shows

Author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss is seeing dramatic drops in sales across his entire book catalog, and he writes for his personal blog that the rise of AI chatbots is the primary cause. His data, drawn from BookScan domestic print figures, shows a sharp acceleration in decline that closely tracks the mainstream adoption of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude.

A near-vertical drop

Ferriss’s five books, all of them former number-one bestsellers on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal lists, posted the following year-over-year changes in print sales:

• 2023: minus 5 percent compared to 2022
• 2024: minus 13 percent
• 2025: minus 46 percent
• 2026 (projected): minus 57 percent compared to 2025

The projected figure would mean his catalog sells roughly 80 percent fewer print copies in 2026 than it did in 2022. The decline is not limited to print. Looking at all formats combined, the second half of 2025 was down around 45 percent versus the first half of that year.

The broader market reflects a similar pattern. Publishers Weekly reported that adult nonfiction sales fell 9 percent in Q1 2026 compared to Q1 2025. Self-help saw the steepest drop among all subcategories, down 26.3 percent. Ferriss notes that the biggest names in self-help publishing are also posting declines of 40 to 60 percent when comparing 2025 to 2026 so far.

His explanation is straightforward: books like his function as lookup tables and decision trees. In 2019, a book was the best interface for that kind of information. Today, millions of people use a free AI chatbot that delivers a personalized answer in seconds.

Ferriss argues that prescriptive nonfiction is only the first format to fall. How-to videos, advice podcasts, online courses, and newsletters all share the same core value proposition of transferring instructions from one person to another, and he believes all of them face the same threat.

He does, however, see one potential counterargument: carefully structured narratives and personal transformation stories may retain value that a chatbot cannot easily replicate. Despite the bleak sales picture, he says he intends to keep writing long-form books for a smaller, more committed audience.