The self-help industry is big and getting bigger, with any old Jill having the potential to be a guru. I can't remember that many books of this ilke being available when I was a kid, if one discounts all the tabloid cook books and their funky seventies recipes. The Readers Digest had articles now and then along the lines of the self-help formula and Dale Carnegie's famous tome, How To Win Friends and Influence People, was likely in its 30th edition. The latter is credited with ushering in the whole industry, a precursor to all that followed.

Looking online or in a bricks and mortar shop today, it is astonishing just how many volumes are grouped under the self-help title. Many of them seem fixated on numbers - The Seven Secrets of Successful Bicycling, Twelve Rules for Lying Straight In Bed, The Nine Lives of the Cat and What It Means For You, and so forth. Numbers do seem to have a kind of magical property. There were 12 Apostles, you may remember, and a flood that lasted 40 days and 40 nights, Four Noble Truths, Ten Commandments, a Noble Eightfold Way and so on. This is not even scratching the surface. With self-help books, numbers are a guide to how much you might have to remember - somewhere between 7 and 12 seems optimal. Let's face it, if you only have one or two ways to achieve a certain overarching goal, then you may not have the material for a whole book. So maybe just a pamphlet!

It has been said that there is a self-help book in all of us. All you have to do is successfully achieve some sort of large project, then work out the winning formula a posteriori. There is the book. It kind of writes itself, with each chapter ticking off one of the ways you did it. If you're short on material just add personal anecdotes and testimonies, diagrams and cartoons. Most of these books have lots of waffling filler anyway so don't be afraid to digress, pop down rabbit holes or insert famous or wise quotations. The latter don't even need to be on topic, but will add an air of authority to your work. Then all you have to do is sit back and wait for it to hit the remainder bin.

Speaking of which, I was looking over the discount table in Dymocks George Street a week or two ago. There were a lot of very fine books heavily discounted, and not a few of the self-help genre too. Most of these were titles that were begging to be forgotten - Ten Paths To A Successful Dinner Party, Twelve Tips For Online Dating, The Seven Days Of Abs. There you go, those numbers 7, 10 and 12 recurring! I suspect the Abs man ran out of things things to write, for number 7 was to repeat the first six steps. His number 1 was a thank-you-for-buying the book chapter. So really there were only five steps but five is a very unlikely sell. Somehow he had to get to seven.

I am not going to write one of these books, nor any book, in all probability. This blog is as close to self-help as I want to get. In any event, there are simply too many entries to win over readers, if six hundred and something is anything to go by. And my advice is free, anyway.