Comment on Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future by Charlie Hoehn

Hey Tim, thank you for putting your numbers on the table. Wish we'd gone deep on this the last time we chatted! Alas, here we are...

You know my seat on this. I helped edit The 4-Hour Body, and I now run a publishing company that uses AI to produce nonfiction books. Yes, it's hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it, but I'm in agreement with your conclusions here.

Copies sold was always the wrong metric. The value your books brought you far outweighs your royalties. The relationships, the trust, the credibility, the lives changed at scale, the passport to unique experiences previously out of reach, the cultural impact. Hard to quantify but it's what makes publishing a nonfiction book worthwhile.

And yes, the information layer is absolutely getting swallowed up by AI. No doubt. But like you said, whether it transforms is another story. Any chatbot can tell a user how to define, eliminate, automate, and liberate. But none of them will move thousands of people to radically alter their lives and become part of a movement (like 4HWW did for me and so many others). That can't be manufactured.

The real cap on transformation has always been the cost of building the journey that makes someone act and get results. The sequencing, the story, the path that fits the specific reader. That took authors years, and most never pulled it off. They either quit or the book sucked. It was an elusive formula. AI is collapsing the cost and time required to nail that formula. So more real experts can actually build the thing that changes people, and more readers get a designed journey instead of a quick answer. I suspect the information market shrinks while the transformation market expands. Which makes the scarce thing exactly what you named. Trust, taste, and the names people believe enough to follow all the way through.

I'll echo what someone else said here. You should still publish the No book. It won't sell a million copies, but people want to read what Tim Ferriss has to say (in a book!) and that is reason enough.

Charlie