Do Dating Books for Men Actually Work, or Are They a Waste of Money?

Sometimes. A book can give you an idea or a way of thinking, but none of the pages we read show measured results, only testimonials and reviewer opinion. A book pays off when you act on one idea and count what changes, and it is wasted money when you finish it and your photos, messages and plans are exactly the same.

Look at what the popular book lists offer as proof. One list of older-men dating books says its praise comes from reader reviews, testimonials and recommendation lists. We found no controlled studies on any page we read. Another list says the author credits the books with moving him past a stalled dating life, which is one man's story, and it discloses that it earns commissions on purchases through its links. A third offers praise for a method but no studies or data.

So the honest answer is that none of the lists we read shows that books work or that they don't. What you can check is whether a book changes your own numbers.

A book can give you a framework. Mark Manson's Models, for example, is described on one list as advice built on honesty and boundaries, without manipulation. Another list says Robert Greene's The Art of Seduction is dense, written for readers who already have dating experience, and can overwhelm a beginner.

A book can also tell you what other men get wrong. That helps, but it is general. It describes the average man's problem, and your problem may be one specific photo.

• Buying five books on attraction when the problem is that your first message gets no reply.
• Reading a pickup system without running it. One list says the Mystery Method produces results only when it is applied properly, and that misapplying it leads to bad outcomes.
• Taking advice that does not match your situation. A list for older men points out that most books assume a conventional relationship, and a widower or a man looking to remarry may need to adapt them.
• Treating a book as a dating book when it is not one. A list of 23 titles itself says Captivate "isn't a dating book" and that To Be a Man is "not a dating book necessarily."
• Reading about apps from a book that is older than the app's current screens.

The Game by Neil Strauss is a story about the pickup community. Why We Love by Helen Fisher is about the brain chemistry of romantic love. The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi is a hard-edged view of how men and women behave.

Each has something to teach. None of them tells you how to pick a lead photo, and none was written with a swipe screen in mind. If your problem is on a dating app, you need the mechanics, and a book on attraction does not supply them.

Dating apps are a chain of small steps, and a book that covers only one leaves you stuck at the next. Before you buy, check that it walks through all of these:

• Which photos to use, and which to throw out.
• What to write on the page so a woman has something to answer.
• What to send as a first message.
• How long to wait between messages.
• How to get from the conversation to a plan.
• What to do when a match goes quiet.

If a book spends eighty pages on why women are attracted to confidence and one page on what to type, it is a book about attraction. It may be a fine book, but it isn't an online dating book.

1. Open the table of contents and look for the six items above.
2. Look for real examples: actual photos, actual profiles, actual messages with a reason each one worked or did not.
3. Look at who is praising it. If the praise sits on the seller's page, treat it as an ad.
4. Borrow it first if you can.

Anything a book says about a specific button, price or limit on an app should be checked on your phone, because an app changes its screens faster than a book gets reprinted.

Read one chapter, then change one thing. After the chapter on photos, swap your lead photo. After the chapter on first messages, send the new opener to your next ten matches.

Then count for two weeks: women you liked, matches, replies to your first message, and plans made. a dating coach's reasoning is that the weakest of those numbers tells you where to work, so a book is useful exactly as far as it moves one of them.

a dating coach's view is that skill is only half of why men fail on the apps, and the other half is quitting in the first week, before the returns show up. He treats a profile like a small business you improve a little each day. A book can hand you that habit.

Keep a document of the messages that got a reply and reuse them. That file will end up more useful than the book.

If you have read two books and your matches are still close to zero, the photos are the first thing to check, and a book cannot see your photos.

Get a second pair of eyes on them. A friend who will be honest works. So does a coach who looks at your actual page and tells you which picture to cut. For photos and written pages, video can do more than print: a dating coach has gone through profiles that men sent him and said what worked, what bored him and what to change, one photo and one prompt at a time. Watching a real page get taken apart teaches faster than a paragraph describing one.