High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Self-help books are books written with the stated intention to instruct any readers on a number of personal problems. They take their name from Self-Help, the Victorian best-seller, but are also known and classified under "self-improvement", a term that is a modernized version of self-help. They moved from a niche position to being a postmodern cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century - a period marked out by `the burgeoning literature of self-improvement...that expanded dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth century, particularly in its final decade`.