Decoding the Bestsellers: A Comparative Analysis of Top Self-Help Books Across Major Platforms
I am always looking for book recommendations and then trying to make sense of the recommendations I get. Who recommended it? What do the reviews say? Was it referenced in a book I already like?
For this comparative analysis I wanted to compare some lists of books that fall into the category of self-help and personal transformation. While I read a lot of things in other categories, it is January and a good self-improvement book can really make a difference in your life.
(fyi…my book links will use my affiliate reference… because if I am going to talk about books, might as well try to earn a cup of coffee)
My original inspiration for this comparative book list analysis was actually an Audible advertisement in my app called “The Top 100 well-being listens of all times.” After seeing this I started thinking how there list might compare to other sources. So I started to study the Audible list and extracted the data into a spreadsheet. It turned out that Audible’s list had too many proprietary recordings to be effective at comparisons. Instead I used:
- Amazon Top 99 Kindle Best Sellers for “Personal Transformation”. This list is based on current sales volumes. There are only 99 Kindle books, as Atomic Habits was in the list twice.
- Goodreads Top 100 Self Help Books — This list appears to be compiled based on how many times a book has been “shelved as self-help”.
- The Blinkist Non-Fiction 100 which is a curated list by the Blinkist book summary app. As a side note I got side tracked on the Blinkist Self-Help 100 that I expected to be a better comparison, but actually found the general non-fiction list was better, but a few strange titles like “How to win at Chess” and “the NFT Handbook” did sneak in.
So now that we have some background let’s see what the data looks like.
Common Books
Starting with our list of 299 entries from our 3 lists, there were 251 titles in total. 38 titles are shared by 2 different lists and 5 titles are shared by all 3. GoodReads has the most overlap with 40 of its books appearing on the other lists and Kindle has the least overlap with only 22 of its titles being shared.
So what were these 5 books that all the lists agree are top picks?
A few observations:
- Atomic Habits is hands down a winner, appearing at the top of each list.
- The top 2 books are both about habits.
- The next 3 were all published more than 17 years ago, representing staying power.
Top Ranked Books
While the set analysis of the intersections is interesting, each of these lists are ranked, so we can get a sense if there were any books that 2 of the list thought very highly of, but maybe left off the third. For this I created a points calculation(subtracting the rank from 100 as points) and then added up the points. The top 3 were no surprise, but then I saw some additional suggestions.
This is a well rounded list including insights around habits, successful practices, communication and even finance. It also blends recent hits with some classic books on how to be successful in life. Since these books all seem to be on at least 2 lists, getting to these could have been found with either method, but it did give me a what to organize a much larger list (Want more? see the eye chart… I mean the bar chart at the bottom of this article.)
The Authors
I was going finish the anlaysis with the books, but then I was curious about the patterns for authors. Questions like “who was the most referenced author?”, and “how does quantity vs quality compare?” Here is a view of the top 20 authors with metrics for the reference, unique book titles, unique sources and the total points credited to the author.
A few observations:
- Malcom Gladwell and Cal Newport have multiple books, but only one source (GoodReads) reporting them. I think this is indicative there being differences of what the different criteria for the “self-help” categories.
- The list drops pretty quickly with only 5 authors producing 4 or more books that are in list. This may be representative of the competitiveness of book writing and the limitation of being an expert on multiple subjects. Brené Brown and Ryan Holiday are outliers with 6 books. I am not too family with Brené Brown, butI know Ryan Holiday has several of his books based on a repeatable pattern of analyzing stoic principles through the lense of great historic figures.
- Brené Brown is a force in more ways that just the number of books. The books are references across the 3 list 6 times and their ranks earn her 605 points (almost double the next closes author).
There are a number of ways we could continue to slice and analyze this data, but for now I think we are at a good stopping point.
Conclusion
There is so much to learn through a comparative anlaysis. In reviewing the book lists not only do we get 299 ideas for books to read, we can start to understand which have broad appeal. The analysis also tells us something about the lists and which might be the best list for ourselves (are you looking for the latest read or the enduring classics). Finally we get to see the creators behind the books and which ones produce something that resonates time and time again.
I hope this analysis has given you some ideas for your reading list. Below is a bonus chart and a link the full data set for those that really want to dive in.
Now go forth, learn and transform yourself!
Appendix: Top 100 Books by Points
Still want more? If others are interested in doing some of their own analysis you can find the data set hosted from this link.
About This
This is part of my interest in connecting disparate types of information to find the story that exists between the data points. If this interests you please follow me for future articles.
