Letters to the Editor
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Wow.
Thanks, guys.
Funny thing, I've had people want me to ghost memoirs. One was/is a prominent religious figure who went through a huge personal transformation, very dramatic. It's not actually an uncommon thing. There are people with amazing life stories who can't write a lick.
Laura, your mother in law sounds like a classic case. Seligman, David Bach, Dr. Gary Small and others are legitimate experts in their fields (psych, finance and aging, respectively) and self-help authors like them have a lot to say. It's the people with no credentials who are dangerous. Typically, the ones I see are professional salespeople who conjure up some "program" of "steps" to help their suckers--er, readers meet some nebulous goal that can't really be measured, so there's no way to hold them accountable.
I wrote a real estate book a few years back for a great guy in Florida, and in it we debunked all the lies the "make a fortune with no money down" guys tell their dollar-sign-in-the-eyes pupils. It's a huge scam. One guy I interviewed told me he asked one of the top names in the real estate boot camp business how his big weekend workshop went and his only answer was, "Well, all the checks cleared." That's the mindset you're dealing with.
I've written two self-help books I can recommend in the last year, small books that are being self-published by their authors, but whose message I totally get behind. You can tell the thrust of the content by their titles. One is "Change Sucks, Get Over It" by Butch Nicholson, and the other is "It Just Might Be You" by Chip Eichelberger. Both come at the subject from a novel viewpoint for this business: changing your life is hard, expect some pain, expect some work, if you want to get out of where you are, put on your big girl panties and deal with it. I'm not getting any share of sales of either book, but if you want to see the kind of empowerment message that should be getting more attention, instead of simple-minded garbage like "The Secret," buy those books.
In general, if you come across self-help material that's not 100% sunshiny and positive, tells it like it is, isn't afraid to tell you, "this won't all be fun and games," treats you like an intelligent person and expects you to work and sacrifice to see results, odds are it's worth buying. The rest is just typeset robbery. By the way, read the book “Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America helpless” by Steve Salerno.