Can These Books Really Make You a Millionaire?
By ANDY SERWER

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Everybody knows you need more than $1 million to retire rich nowadays. For one thing, a million bucks ain't what it used to be. Adjusted for inflation, $1 million today would have been worth just $85,911 back in 1930, when FORTUNE was first published. And what with the current real estate boom--the average house in America is now valued at some $280,000--I'd bet that a good many of you have $1 million in assets. (I'll be kind and forgive your credit card debt for the purpose of this calculation.) Yet there is something about the word "millionaire" that continues to resonate. It's still an entry point into a club that most folks hope to join.

For proof, look no further than the book business. A quick Amazon search by my colleague Corey Hajim yields almost 40,000 "millionaire" books. This includes a few romance titles and even some religious and children's books, but the majority of them fall into the investing/self-help category. "The millionaire genre does well because the bottom line is that getting rich is still a major aspiration of the average person," says Adrian Zackheim, a publisher at Penguin Putnam.

These books range from the perfectly reasonable to the perfectly ridiculous. In the former camp is one I've commended to you before, Tom Stanley's The Millionaire Next Door, which has sold over one million copies. (A million is still a colossal number in book publishing.) The basic premise is that the way to get rich in America is by not squandering your money. (Stanley's sequels include The Millionaire Mind and Millionaire Women Next Door.) David Bach's The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich has been a huge seller, and with a cover line like that, it's small wonder. (Who wants to work at this stuff?) While the advice contained therein is somewhat simplistic--e.g., invest a little bit each month--it certainly can't hurt.

Many of the titles, though, are more about a slick sales pitch than life-changing advice. Not surprisingly, they mostly exploit the age-old desire to not only get rich, but to get rich quick: The Weekend Millionaire's Secrets to Investing in Real Estate: How to Become Wealthy in Your Spare Time. Quicker: Lunchtime Millionaire: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Wealth ... on Your Lunch Hour. Or quickest: The Instant Millionaire: A Tale of Wisdom and Wealth. Then there's the not-trying-at-all school--to wit, The Accidental Millionaire. Or an updated spin on the oldest method around: How to Marry a Multi-Millionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating (sadly, no preface by Marilyn Monroe). A few books purport to have a higher underpinning. Who could argue with Becoming a Millionaire God's Way?

At what age should one achieve millionairehood? Millionaire by 40 seems a reasonable enough title, but it isn't type-A enough for the authors of Millionaire by 26: Secrets to Becoming a Young, Rich Entrepreneur. For you Alex P. Keaton wannabes, there's How to Be a Teenage Millionaire. (Never mind werewolf!) And if you really want a leg up, forget about playing Bartok for your baby. Instead pick up Discovering the Millionaire in Every Child.

For sheer gimmickry, however, nothing in the genre surpasses Cracking the Millionaire Code by Mark Hansen and Robert Allen. The authors are experts at getting rich by writing self-help books. Hansen's Chicken Soup for the Soul alone has sold more than 100 million copies. And Allen made a mint with Nothing Down. Together they've already produced one "millionaire" book (The One Minute Millionaire in 2002). Now, with no apologies to Dan Brown, they've written a 280-page tome filled with hidden ciphers, incomprehensible formulas, and motivational quotations running around the margins in green type. If they expected anyone to finish something so mind-numbing, they should have promised at least a billion.

ANDY SERWER, EDITOR AT LARGE OF FORTUNE, CAN BE REACHED AT ASERWER@FORTUNEMAIL.COM. READ HIM ONLINE IN STREET LIFE ON FORTUNE.COM AND WATCH HIM ON CNN'S AMERICAN MORNING AND IN THE MONEY.