Find your genre

Agents and Publishers have specific guidelines for word count and the genre they're looking for. It's important that your book will meet these guidelines. 

This should be an easy one to start with : 

Fiction- Literature that is not grounded in real-life events, but is made up or created from a writer's imagination. 

Types of Fiction: Fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, romance, mystery.

Nonfiction- Literature that is based on real people, events, or facts. 

Types of Nonfiction: Biographies, memoirs, essays, journalistic works, history, science, self-help.

Commercial is like popular music you’d hear on the radio: designed to entertain. It is catchy, has mass appeal, and follows familiar structures and themes that resonate with a wide audience.

Upmarket is like indie pop music. It blends the accessibility of mainstream concepts with a touch of artistic flair and originality. These appeal to both general listeners and those who appreciate a bit more depth by balancing engaging stories with a higher level of writing quality and thematic complexity or statements.

Literary is like opera or a symphonic orchestra. It prioritizes artistic expression and innovation over broad appeal, often challenging the audience with its complexity and depth. These may not be for everyone, but they are deeply appreciated by those who seek a rich, contemplative experience, profound themes, and connections beyond the book, often involving social commentary.

• Board Book - picture books meant for ages 0-3. These are the books printed on thick cardboard that’s perfect for chewing on! 
• Picture Book - books for ages 4-8, which tell stories through pictures, usually with minimal text
• Easy Readers/Chapter Book - books for ages 5-8, when children are starting to read on their own, but still need shorter books and less complex text 
• Middle Grade - books for ages 8-12, which start to get more complex in terms of character development and theme, and which start to get longer as well 
• Young Adult - books meant for teenage readers (often thought of as 13-18) which deal with complex themes and topics, often in a more mature way 
• New Adult- college-age roughly 18-25 years old
• Adult - books meant for readers 18+

This book genre is characterized by elements of magic, or the supernatural, and is often inspired by mythology or folklore.

High Fantasy- setting is in a made-up world. Subgenres of high-fantasy include the following: 

• Epic Fantasy:This subgenre is characterized by its large scope, often featuring world-threatening conflicts, and a focus on grand quests and destinies. 
• Mythic Fantasy:This subgenre draws inspiration from mythology and folklore, often featuring gods, mythical creatures, and ancient prophecies. 
• Grimdark Fantasy:This subgenre is characterized by a darker, grittier tone, often featuring morally ambiguous characters and a focus on the harsh realities of a fantasy world. 
• Heroic Fantasy:This subgenre focuses on morally good characters facing straightforward challenges, often with a positive atmosphere. 
• Sword and Sorcery:This subgenre is a subset of high fantasy that focuses on sword-wielding heroes and magic, often with a focus on action and adventure. 
• Arthurian Fantasy:This subgenre focuses on the supernatural or legendary aspects of the Arthurian legends, and can fall into more of a high fantasy or pure epic fantasy subgenre. 

Low Fantasy- some real-world aspects with magical realism. Subgenres include the following: 

• Urban Fantasy:Features magic and supernatural elements within a modern, urban setting. 
• Magical Realism:Incorporates fantastical elements into a realistic world, often with characters accepting the magic as normal. 
• Paranormal Romance:Focuses on romantic relationships involving supernatural beings or creatures, often with a focus on the romantic aspect. 
• Superhero Fiction:Deals with characters who possess extraordinary powers, often with a supernatural origin rather than a scientific one. 
• Dark Fantasy:Explores darker, more macabre themes and elements within a fantasy setting. 
• Gothic Fantasy:A subgenre that combines elements of gothic horror with fantasy, often featuring dark, mysterious, and atmospheric settings. 
• Historical Fantasy:Places fantasy elements within historical settings, blending the two genres. 
• Time Slip:Stories where characters travel through time, often encountering magical or fantastical elements in different eras. 
• Sword and Sorcery:A subgenre of low fantasy that emphasizes action and adventure, often featuring strong, often mercenary, protagonists in a world with magic and swords. 

A genre of fiction that explores the potential impacts of science and technology on society, humanity, and the universe. 

Speculative Fiction- An umbrella term encompassing genres like science fiction, fantasy, and horror, which explore possibilities beyond the boundaries of reality. 

• Subgenres of Science Fiction:
  • Hard Sci-Fi: Focuses on scientific accuracy and detail, often exploring the implications of realistic scientific advancements. 
  • Soft Sci-Fi: Prioritizes social and psychological themes, often exploring the impact of science on human behavior and society. 
  • Cyberpunk: Blends advanced technology with societal decay or collapse, often featuring themes of hacking, virtual reality, and corporate power. 
  • Space Opera: Epic stories set in space, often featuring large-scale conflicts, interstellar travel, and vast civilizations. 
  • Steampunk: A subgenre that features the technology and aesthetics of the 19th century's steam-powered machinery. 
  • Dystopian Fiction: Explores societies characterized by oppression, control, and a lack of freedom. 
  • Apocalyptic Fiction: Deals with the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that has destroyed civilization. 
  • Alternative History: Presents stories where historical events unfolded differently. 
  • Afrofuturism: Combines science fiction with Afrocentric themes and aesthetics. 
  • Biopunk: Explores the intersection of biotechnology and society. 

• This book genre is occasionally lumped in with others to indicate that the book takes place in the present day. But in its simplest form, contemporary fiction is better understood as the absence of a genre. Your book doesn’t need tropes and trappings, monsters and mysteries, when its tension, drama, and conflict lies in the quirks and quandaries of your protagonist’s everyday life: work, politics, relationships, and the struggles of the modern era.
  

Historical fiction is a genre where fictional narratives are set in the past, often aiming for historical accuracy, and it encompasses various subgenres like historical romance, historical mystery, historical adventure, and alternate history. 

• Subgenres of Historical Fiction:
• Historical Fiction (General):This is the umbrella term for any fictional story set in a specific historical period. 
• Historical Romance:Focuses on romantic relationships within a historical context, often with attention to the customs and societal norms of the era. 
• Historical Mystery (or Historical Whodunit):Combines historical fiction with the mystery genre, featuring crimes and investigations set in the past. 
• Historical Adventure:Emphasizes thrilling journeys, explorations, and quests set in historical settings. 
• Historical Fantasy:Blends historical fiction with fantasy elements, such as magic or mythical creatures, in a past setting. 
• Alternate History:Explores what might have happened if key historical events had unfolded differently. 
• Family Saga:Chronicles the lives of a family or interconnected families across multiple generations and historical periods. 
• Nautical and Pirate:Focuses on stories of the sea, sailors, explorers, and pirates in a historical context. 
• Biographical Fiction:Tells a fictionalized story based on the life of a real historical figure. 
• Historical Crime Fiction:A subgenre of both crime fiction and historical fiction, focusing on the commission and investigation of crimes in a historical setting. 

The action-adventure-thriller genre encompasses books with fast-paced action, thrilling suspense, and often involves daring exploits and dangerous situations

• Subgenres:
  • Spy Thriller: Focuses on espionage, international intrigue, and covert operations. 
  • Legal Thriller: Centers on legal battles, corruption, and the justice system. 
  • Medical Thriller: Explores the world of medicine, hospitals, and medical ethics, often with a suspenseful plot. 
  • Political Thriller: Deals with political corruption, power struggles, and international conflicts. 
  • Military Thriller: Features military personnel in high-stakes situations, often involving combat and espionage. 
  • High-Tech Thriller: Employs technology as a central element of the plot, often involving cybercrime or advanced weaponry. 

The mystery genre revolves around solving a crime or puzzle, often through detective work or investigation, and features subgenres like classic detective, hardboiled, cozy, and historical mysteries.

 Here's a breakdown of some popular mystery subgenres:

• Cozy Mystery:These stories feature amateur sleuths solving crimes in small, quaint communities, with a focus on the puzzle-solving aspect rather than graphic violence. 
• Police Procedural:These focus on the investigation process of police officers, often delving into forensic procedures and the official steps of crime-solving. 
• Historical Mystery:These mysteries are set in the past, with detectives investigating crimes in different historical periods. 
• Legal Thriller:These stories revolve around the legal system, with protagonists (often lawyers) attempting to find justice. 
• Caper Story:These stories are told from the perspective of the criminals, focusing on their motives, tricks, and heists, often with elements of humor. 
• Noir:This subgenre is characterized by its gritty, dark, and often violent atmosphere, with morally ambiguous characters. 
• Thriller:This genre is characterized by suspense and a focus on the protagonist's struggle to escape danger or uncover a secret. 
• Paranormal Mystery:These stories incorporate supernatural elements, such as ghosts, mythical creatures, or the unknown, into the mystery. 
• Detective Novels:These stories focus on a detective, either professional or amateur, investigating a crime, often murder. 
• Amateur Sleuth:These stories feature a non-professional character who solves crimes, often due to a personal connection to the victim or the crime. 
• Hardboiled Detective:These stories feature a tough, cynical, and often morally ambiguous detective investigating crime in a gritty, realistic setting. 
• Romantic Suspense:These stories blend romance with suspense or mystery elements, such as stalkers, crimes, or kidnapping.
  

The horror genre aims to evoke fear and unease, often exploring themes of the macabre, the supernatural, and the psychological, with subgenres like supernatural, psychological, slasher, and science fiction horror. 

Common Subgenres:

• Psychological Horror:Focuses on the mental, emotional, and psychological states of characters to create fear and unease, often exploring themes of madness, anxiety, guilt, and paranoia. 
• Gothic Horror:Characterized by a hauntingly beautiful and dilapidated setting, suspenseful narratives, and dark themes like oppression, guilt, shame, and insanity. 
• Body Horror:Depicts disturbing changes to the human body, such as disease, decay, destruction, and mutation, aiming to gross out the audience. 
• Paranormal Horror:Explores phenomena or events that cannot be explained by science, often involving spirits, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. 
• Slasher:Typically features a psychopathic killer stalking and murdering a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner, often with a bladed tool. 
• Supernatural Horror:Focuses on phenomena or events that cannot be explained by science, often resulting in uncontrollable danger and the threat of death from a dark force beyond human understanding. 
• Cosmic Horror:Explores existential fears and themes of human insignificance, often featuring malevolent and enigmatic entities from the vastness of space. 
• Dark Fantasy:Blends magical and supernatural elements with darker, often sinister themes, drawing from both fantasy and horror. 
• Lovecraftian Horror:A subgenre of horror that emphasizes cosmic terror and a sense of insignificance, inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. 
• Zombie Horror:Focuses on stories about zombies, undead creatures that are often portrayed as a threat to humanity. 
• Comedy Horror:Combines horror themes and characters with humor, aiming to scare and entertain audiences simultaneously. 
• Vampire Horror:Features vampire characters, often exploring themes of the supernatural, power, and morality. 
• Monster Horror:Features classic monsters like werewolves, vampires, and zombies, often focusing on the visual and physical aspects of these creatures. 
• Religious Horror:Explores themes based on religion, often featuring supernatural beings, demons, and other religious entities as antagonists.
  

The romance fiction genre focuses on romantic relationships and typically ends with a positive, emotionally satisfying resolution, while subgenres like contemporary, historical, paranormal, and fantasy romance offer diverse settings and themes. 

Romance Subgenres:

• Contemporary Romance:Set in modern times, reflecting current themes, challenges, and society. 
• Historical Romance:Set in a specific period of history, often with a focus on the culture and customs of that era. 
• Regency Romance: A popular subgenre of historical romance, often set in the Regency period of England. 
• Paranormal Romance:Features romantic love between a human and a supernatural being, or includes supernatural elements. 
• Fantasy Romance:Combines romance with fantastical elements like magic, mythical creatures, and other worlds. 
• Erotic Romance:Emphasizes strong, often explicit, sexual interaction as an inherent part of the love story. 
• Young Adult Romance:Romance novels targeted towards a young adult audience, often featuring teenage protagonists. 
• Sci-Fi Romance:Science fiction elements, such as futuristic settings, robots, and other worlds, are incorporated into the romance plot. 
• Gothic Romance:Blends romance with elements of horror, mystery, and suspense, often featuring dark or macabre settings. 
• Inspirational Romance:Focuses on the development of a romantic relationship through themes of faith, forgiveness, and personal growth. 
• Sports Romance:Features characters who meet and fall in love through their involvement in sports. 
• Western Romance:Set in the American West, often featuring cowboys and frontier life. 
• Dark Romance:Explores the darker aspects of love and relationships, including morally gray characters and potentially disturbing themes. 
• Billionaire Romance:Features a romance between a wealthy character and a person of average means.
  

Any fiction with authentic LGBTQ+ representation falls into this book genre. It’s important to note that while your book’s queer characters should feature in the main plot, the centerpiece of your plot doesn’t have to be a romance. In fact, there doesn’t need to be any romance at all! This means that your fantasy, thriller, or historical novel could fall under the LGBTQ+ umbrella.

Women’s fiction is an umbrella term for books written to target a female audience, generally reflecting on the shared experience of being a woman or the growth of a female protagonist. Because of this rather broad definition, authors will quite often write a romance novel or mystery, for example, that could also be labeled women’s fiction. Despite the connotations of one alternative name for this genre (“chick-lit”), many critically acclaimed bestsellers, including Jaqueline Woodson’s Red at The Bone, fall under its purview. 

Some book genres aren’t defined by their content at all, but by their form. Graphic novels are presented to the reader through narrative art(illustrations and typography) either in the traditional panel layout you’ll be familiar with from comic books, or in the artist’s own style. Once considered cheap entertainment for children, graphic novels are increasingly read and respected these days for their rich blend of visuals and writing. This powerful method of storytelling now portrays everything from memoirs, to manga, to adaptations of classic literature.

Though they can belong to any of the other book genres on this list, short stories are frequently grouped together in their own genre because they’re, well, so much shorter than novels. Often the author will compile a collection linked together by a narrative thread or, more commonly, a shared theme. The stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, for example, follow a series of women in different occupations — from cleaning women to ER nurses — all struggling to survive.

Both memoirs and autobiographies provide a true account of the author’s life. They differ in that an autobiography provides a chronological account of your life’s events and accomplishments, whereas a memoir puts the emphasis on only the most defining, emotional moments. Generally, these moments are drawn together by a single theme — or a significant time, place, or relationship — to communicate a message you wish to share with readers. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is a popular example of a memoir.

Like autobiographies, biographies provide readers with a person’s life story; but they’re written in the third person by someone other than the subject. Generally, the subject of a biography is (or was) well-known — somebody whose life can teach readers an interesting lesson worth learning. Biographies, memoirs, and autobiographies differ from the rest of the nonfiction on this list, in that they weave a narrative in almost the same way a novel does. A great biography, like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, isn’t a laundry list of events, but a life-giving tribute. 

Food and drink is one of nonfiction’s hottest book genres, making it a crowded and highly competitive market. As a result, today’s cookbooks tend to cater to specific cuisines, dietary, and/or lifestyle needs. If you’re writing a cookbook, you might consider pairing recipes with nutritional information, short autobiographical narratives, or even workouts. Jo Wicks’s 30 Day Kickstart Plan and Less Fuss No Waste Kitchen by Lindsay Miles are excellent examples of modern cookbooks. 

This genre is home to a few different kinds of books, all united by their love of art. Your book could find its way into this vibrant and stylish genre if it discusses an artist’s work or an artistic style in detail; if it teaches a specific art method; if it explores a facet of art history; or if it showcases your own art in that chic, coffee-table book way.

Some of the bestselling books in nonfiction, self-help books encourage personal improvement and confidence. Whether the focus is on relationships, emotional well-being, or finances, if you’re writing a book that aims to uplift and empower the reader, then you’re probably writing self-help.

The books in this genre lay down the known facts about a historical era, event, or figure. And since this is nonfiction, all the facts have to be accurate (though that doesn’t mean there’s no room for inference or opinion). The goal of these books is to educate and inform the reader, so this genre doesinclude all those textbooks you used in school. But many history books ditch the play-by-play format to chronicle the past in a way more akin to storytelling. One of our favorite history books is Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari. 

Crime-fiction writers have put some pretty twisted plots to paper, but if you prefer to chronicle real crimes in all their haunting and fascinating detail, then the true crime genre is where your book belongs. From infamous murders to domestic disappearances, works in this genre pen true stories, about all things fearful and forbidden, that read as smoothly as well-crafted fiction.

Travel memoirs and travelogues, like Jonathan Glancey’s The Journey Matters, take us all over the world, giving even the most devoted homebodies a tantalizing taste of adventure, wildlife, and the great outdoors. These pocket-sized books — featuring destination reviews, lists of where to eat and what to see, and tips for traveling on a budget — are without a doubt some of the most useful titles on the shelves.

Laugh-out-loud memoirs by the funniest celebs, satirical essays from the likes of David Sedaris, or gag gifts like How to Adult — all the books in this rib-tickling genre are written with one thing in mind: making readers laugh! So if you’ve compiled a collection of all your favorite dad jokes or penned a cathartic brain-dump of your most cringe-worthy memories, then your book may also belong in the humor genre. 

An essay may sound like a boring assignment from your school years, but the books in this genre are among some of the most moving and inspirational works of literature there are. Many powerful voices — like James Baldwin and Roxane Gay — have used these short works to reflect on their own personal experiences and views, combining them into a collection that serves as an eye-opening social commentary on a particular theme or subject. 

Readers turn to this book genre to develop a skill, hobby, or craft. So if you’re an expert in a particular field and you’ve written a book showing hobbyists how to achieve something specific (like “how to master chess openings” or “a guide to floristry”), then this is its home! Of course, one dead giveaway might be your book’s title.

From histories of the Catholic Church to spiritual guidebooks and memoirs of the Eat, Pray, Love variety, this genre has a place for anything and everything related to the topics of religion and spirituality.

Got something wise to say? Then your book might just belong among the books of this eclectic genre — as long as it discusses a topic related to (deep breath): philosophy, history, literature, language, art, religion, music, or the human condition. This might seem like a pretty wide net to fall into, but keep in mind that books in this genre are typically quite academic; if you’ve written more of a free-flowing spiritual guide, it probably belongs in the previous genre. 

Parents and families struggling with discipline, education, bonding, the care of a newborn baby, or a child with special needs, can turn to this well-stocked genre of books when they need to bring in the reinforcements. If you’ve written a memoir that’ll have families whole-heartedly nodding in agreement, or a guide brimming with advice for frazzled parents, then you can find a place for your book in the parenting and families section. 

The job of science nonfiction is not to predict the future, but to make sense of the world we’re currently living in — which, quite honestly, can feel like science fiction to some of us! Readers of this genre range from complete beginners trying to understand the things around them to technophiles whose brains are whirring to keep up with the pace of change, so there’s bound to be a niche for your book, however advanced it is. 

As much as kids love fairytales and talking animals, they’re often just as happy to pick up a nonfiction book at storytime. Whether it’s an activity book to keep them busy, a powerful true story like Malala’s Magic Pencil, or a children’s encyclopedia to feed their brains, children’s nonfiction is all about making learning fun. And the wildly popular Horrible Histories series has proven that this genre can compete with wizards and superheroes at every age!

** Information sourced through AI and https://blog.reedsy.com/book-genres/