Letters to the Editor
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Check the credentials
Anyone can write a self-help book. Lots of them read like cheerleading sessions or the kind of crap that the marketing department cranks out to make other marketing types feel like they're working hard. Don't even get me started on the religious ones.
However, some authors are very credible when it comes to self-help books. One is Dr Gottman of the Gottman Institute. His team has analysed the interpersonal dynamics of couples in great detail for many years. Diet books written by actual dieticians and researchers can be valuable as well. The thing to do when shopping around for a self help book is to look up the authors on the web and see if they've submitted scholarly white papers to scientific journals.
Another filter is repetition, self-reference and those dreadful chirpy little case histories. I don't need to read an entire chapter of repetitive episodes (with names changed, of course) where people's lives were changed by the author's books. I'm not taking the book out of the library if its one big advert for itself.
But, yeah, what everyone said. Its a racket.