GenresNon-fiction
Religion & Spirituality
Belief, practice, and the questions underneath.
Books on religion and spirituality are read by believers, doubters, and people looking for a practice that will make their days more inhabitable. Those are different readers, and a book can welcome more than one of them if it is honest about its own position. You don't have to pretend to a neutrality you don't feel. You do have to be accurate about traditions that are not yours, and careful with traditions that are, because familiarity is not the same as fairness.
Practice makes a good spine. Prayer, study, ritual, attention, service: show what people actually do, and what it costs them, rather than only what the doctrine says they believe. Comparative books need enough knowledge to avoid the tourist version of every faith except the author's favourite. Theology can be demanding and still be written in sentences. If the book is offering comfort, let the comfort be adult. Readers in this category have usually met trouble already, and they can hear the difference between hope and a slogan.
The kinds of book inside it
Practice
What people do, regularly, is the centre, and the writing should be concrete enough that a reader understands the shape of the practice.
Theology
Ideas about God, ultimate reality, or the good are argued carefully, in language that doesn't hide the difficulty and doesn't worship it either.
Mindfulness
Attention and stillness are being taught, so the instructions should be usable, and the claims should stay in proportion to the evidence.
Comparative
More than one tradition is in the conversation, which requires real knowledge and a refusal to flatten them into one comforting moral.
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.