SELF-HELP HELP
Want to write non-fiction that changes lives? Leading publishing editor Kelly Notaras offers her ten top tips for writing a self-help book
‘Self-help.’ If the term triggers a snicker or an eye roll from you, you’re definitely not alone. For many, the new age promise that a little personal growth work can bring a jackpot of love, prosperity and life satisfaction sounds like so much snake oil. But if statistics are true – which say that Americans alone spend upwards of $11 billion a year on selfimprovement – then there has to be something to it – right?
I’m here to say, yes. And I can say that with such authority because I have not always been a believer. I myself discovered self-help in my late twenties, when I was living in New York City and working as a book editor at a major publishing company. I was publishing on literary fiction, pop culture and memoir at the time, and if you’d suggested I would one day be a self-help editor I would have called you crazy. But behind closed doors, I was very unhappy. When I started sobbing at my desk one day – and couldn’t stop – I made an appointment with my doctor.
She took one look at me and prescribed anti-depressants. A few months after getting on the meds, a friend encouraged me to pick up one of the great personal growth titles of our age: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
Here’s where my story about self-help changed. Because without hesitation I can say that that book transformed my life.
First and most importantly, it introduced me to meditation. (And within a year of daily sitting practice, I was off the anti-depressants.) But reading the book also opened the door into editing self-help as a career. Through my meditation community I was offered a job as the editorial director at a multimedia spirituality publisher. Suddenly the books I was reading for my job were the books I was already reading in my free time: self-help, personal growth and inspirational memoir.