GenresNon-fiction
Journalism & Investigation
Reported fact, structured as a book.
A reported book takes the skills of journalism and gives them the length to do something a feature cannot. Immersion, investigation, oral history: you are offering the reader time inside a subject, and the payment for that time is depth. Documents, interviews, and days spent where the thing is actually happening are the materials. A strong opinion without that labour is an essay, and there is nothing wrong with essays, but they are not this.
Fairness is practical as well as moral. People who spoke to you should be able to recognise their lives, even if they dislike your conclusions. Protect sources you promised to protect, and don't tidy quotes into a cleverness the speaker didn't possess. Structure is the art. A mass of reporting becomes a book when you choose what the story is and let the rest serve it. Scenes, dates, and a clear account of how you know what you claim will do more for the reader than a paragraph insisting the truth is shocking.
The kinds of book inside it
Investigative
A hidden or disputed set of facts is assembled, and the book should show the evidence, not only the outrage it produced.
Immersion
The writer stays long enough to understand a world from the inside, and should be honest about the limits of that access.
Oral history
Other people's voices carry the narrative, which means the interviewing, the selection, and the order are the craft, and the interviewer shouldn't vanish so completely that we can't tell how the story was made.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a contents list in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.