Types of Books Defined - Exactly What Is a Book Type?

Posted on by Carol Abrahamson

There are well over 1,000 types of books when you count both fiction and nonfiction. A book’s type affects how your topic appears. It’s a conceptual version of how a background color or painting style influences the overall look of a picture. The type determines a book’s tone and distinctive qualities. And it makes your content memorable.

A type typically shapes a book in three ways

• Structural framework (such as narrative, individual ideas, case studies or lists).

• Point of view (think storyteller, challenger of common wisdom or cheerleader).

• Voice (this might be cautionary, educational or laudatory).

Consider the differences between several popular nonfiction types that could all be about the same topic. A pocket reference. Mistakes to avoid. A comprehensive guide. An interpretive history of events. A cautionary tale. Implications of developing trends. A how-to book. To be more specific, if your topic is making successful hiring decisions, a book of revealing interview questions would be completely different from one that describes the best companies to work for. Or the new skillsets required by your industry’s emerging trends. Hence, you can see the defining influence your type has on the nature of your book.

However, a book type decision cannot be made in a vacuum

Your selection of a type — or a fusion of several — must be made in tandem with your choice of a topic. That’s because your message, by definition, is the integration of the two. You can’t have one without the other. And neither should be finalized as your choice without considering possibilities for the other.

But to make the right topic choice, you must know in detail the issues, opportunities and dynamics of your target audiences’ worlds. For business-building books, that requires a clear definition of each audience who is either directly or indirectly related to achieving the business results you seek from your book. We’ve created a multi-award-winning, ground-breaking family of workbooks to guide you through that research and those decisions — and keep you focused on all the essentials.