GenresNon-fiction
Personal Development
Skills for a life that is being built on purpose.
Personal development is self-help's more ambitious cousin, aimed at skills and direction rather than at a single wound. Productivity, creativity, leadership, and the stories people tell themselves about what they are capable of all live here. The reader is usually trying to build a life on purpose, and they have already read a few books that told them to want it more.
Be specific about the skill. A book that urges the reader to dream, hustle, and become the CEO of their morning is not a method, it is a mood. Show the practice, the likely obstacles, and the difference between a tool that helps a person with a job and a fantasy that assumes they can redesign the whole economy by Tuesday. Case studies are useful when they include the boring middle, not only the inspiring outcome. Your own authority matters, and so does the point at which you stop and admit you don't know.
The kinds of book inside it
Productivity
Time and attention are the subject, and the advice should respect the fact that most people do not control their entire day.
Mindset
The book looks at habits of thought, and it should be careful not to blame the reader for problems that are also practical.
Creativity
Making things is treated as a practice that can be encouraged, not as a mystery granted to a lucky few.
Leadership
The reader is being asked to take responsibility for other people, so the advice has to work in a real team, not only in a keynote.
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.