GenresNon-fiction
Music
Listening with a spine of history and craft.
Music books have a famous difficulty, which is that the subject is a sound and the medium is a page. You get past it by being specific. Name the moment in the song, the player, the room, the tradition, the money. A reader who loves music can hear a great deal from a good description, and a reader who doesn't can still follow an argument about a life, a scene, or a craft. What neither of them can do is enjoy a paragraph that only says a record is transcendent and then moves on.
Criticism, history, and biography are the usual shapes. Criticism needs ears and a willingness to say why, not only whether. History needs the business and the technology as well as the geniuses, because songs don't reach anyone by magic. An artist study needs the work at the centre, or it becomes gossip with a soundtrack. You can write with love. Musicians and fans can tell when the love has replaced the listening, and they would rather you argued with the music than worshipped it.
The kinds of book inside it
History
A scene, a form, or a century of sound, told with enough social detail that the music doesn't float free of the people who made it and heard it.
Artist study
One career is the lens, and the songs or performances have to be attended to, not only the legend around them.
Criticism
The writing makes a case for how to listen, with examples precise enough that the reader could go and test the claim.
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.