Are motivational books literature?

Whenever I think of literature I think of poetry, novels, drama, and some non-fiction like biographies or travel writing. But rarely do I think of motivational books as literature. All of the above genres I mentioned, with the exception of motivational books, involve some sort of narrative or highly stylized grammatical structure in their specific genres. With motivational or self help books I think of strategies or procedures, maybe the occasional inspirational story. But I don't think there are enough stories in most motivational books to consider them to have a narrative structure however. So I decided to look up what defined literature to narrow down my analysis and figure it if motivational books met the criteria. Merriam Webster's Dictionary defines

Literature
1archaic : literary culture

2

: the production of literary work especially as an occupation

3

a (1) : writings in prose or verse; especially : writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest (2) : an example of such writings <what came out, though rarely literature, was always a roaring good story — People>

b : the body of written works produced in a particular language, country, or age

c : the body of writings on a particular subject <scientificliterature>

d : printed matter (as leaflets or circulars) <campaignliterature>

4

: the aggregate of a usually specified type of musical compositions

So looking at this we can see that motivational books don't fit most of these definitions except for one. Definition c allows for motivational books to be considered literature because motivational books are centered on a certain subject. They are devoted to help people in their specific issues. So although motivational books lack many of the traditional conventions of literature they can still be counted as literature according to this definition. For me this might open other categories that I hadn't considered as literature such as self help books, blogs, articles, pamphlets and many more. As we start to consider what whether what we read is literature or not we we will be to analyze those works in a new light because we will be to use the techniques in literary criticism.