Fact: People love self-help books. They love reading them AND (after they’ve made a breakthrough) they often love writing them. Literary agents love to see self-help books that offer guidance and direction; so do publishers. Books about spirituality, dieting, and mastering our emotions fly off the shelves (so not only are they fun to work on, they also rake in the dough).

There are lots of reasons that writing a book of personal advice based on life experience is a good thing—for the writer, for the writer’s loved ones, and maybe for the world. But if you want your self-help advice to be noticed by the big players in the book biz, you’ve got to know how to play the game.