• Come up with an overpromising title (e.g. the new science of X! a groundbreaking way of Y!)

• Devote the first 100 or so pages to explain why your idea is important. Do so by endlessly repeating success stories that exemplify your idea and by citing other books (mostly other modern self-help/business books).

• Explain to the reader that the next section of the book will offer practicable, actionable advice. Break this advice into techniques (or steps, or whatever you want to call them) and add in more anecdotes and citations that prove that the techniques work.

• Wrap up the book by adding 100 more pages of anecdotes that corroborate how important and life-changing your idea is.

If you must read these books, skip the first section entirely and go straight to the section with practical advice. Skim through the anecdotes and try to find where the techniques are hidden. You will usually be able to find a few important insights in such books if you do so, but there are often other ways that yield the same result with much less effort.

I like to check the 3-star reviews on Goodreads first. If I see many instances of "this could have been a blog post", "interesting idea repeated endlessly" and "the book could be made 90% shorter", I discard the book right there. The book's core insights can usually be found in the TLDR reviews.

Another tip is to check the author's blog first. Try to read a few blog posts and check if it is realistic to expect that the book will significantly develop these ideas. I recently found a blog where the posts were much deeper than the $30 book the author was selling. It's almost as if the blog is a space where the author can explore her own voice rather than conforming to a standard set by publishers.

I am a voracious reader and usually hesitate to abandon a book, but doing so with these books has allowed me to invest much more time into good literature and technical, demanding books (SICP comes to mind).