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In a 1954 New Yorker essay “Howtoism,” writer and critic Dwight Macdonald states that authors of how-to books are to other authors as frogs are to mammals, and encourages people to read other genres.

Ten years ago, I tagged along with my father to a weekend conference on how to write self-help books. The conference headliner, Mark Victor Hansen, coauthored Chicken Soup for the Soul, one of the ...

Self-help can feel overwhelming, but many techniques share the same underlying patterns. Here’s what we found after five ...