Three Changes a Best-Selling Author Is Making After Post-AI Sales (I'm Stealing Them Too)

In 2025, his book sales dropped by 46%. That’s what Tim Ferriss discovered when he looked at his spreadsheets. The smoking gun: ChatGPT’s release around 2022, when his sales started to decrease. And that’s the landscape for a best-selling author. Now imagine being a mere mortal without Tim’s reach. Here are some of the changes Tim is making—and how I’m stealing them: Rely on personal stories “For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the deeply personal stories that actually catalyze people to change long-standing habits.” LLMs can spit out facts, but they’ll never create personal stories. As Maria Popova said, “AI can’t suffer.” It can’t have human experience. Love, hate, pride, resentment… That’s how we can fight back. With my books, the best reward has been reading comments like “it feels like a conversation” or “refreshing, given how much AI slop has populated the internet.” Those are the reviews that make my day. As a…