The 1910 Book Behind a 2006 Bestseller

The Science of Getting Rich sold modestly on its 1910 release from the Elizabeth Towne Company, a publisher specializing in New Thought and mind cure literature, and Wattles himself died the following year, in 1911, having written several shorter companion works along the same lines. The book stayed in print within New Thought circles across the twentieth century without ever becoming a mainstream bestseller in its own right.

Its wider fame arrived nearly a century later. Rhonda Byrne has said in interviews that reading The Science of Getting Rich, discovered through her daughter, was the direct spark for The Secret, the 2006 book and companion film that popularized the law of attraction to a mass audience and became one of the best selling self help works of the twenty first century. Byrne credited Wattles by name in promotional interviews around The Secret's release, and the earlier book's public domain status, its American copyright had lapsed decades before, meant it circulated freely online through the same surge of interest, introducing Wattles' original prose to readers who had come to the idea through Byrne's newer, more commercially packaged version rather than the reverse.