Fitting Your Book Into a New Genre

For the ninth day of the 28-Day Blog Challenge for Authors, we have been asked:

If your book is fiction, how could you change it to make it a nonfiction book? If your book is nonfiction, what could you do to turn it into a story? Hollywood has done it, so how could you do the same thing?


This question is inspired by the string of movies that have been linked to non-fiction bestsellers such as What to Expect When You're Expecting and He's Just Not That Into You. To be honest, this trend seems sort of strange to me. What the hell did either of these movies really have to do with the books? Couldn't the movies just simply be about relationships and pregnancy respectively without having to hitch its wagon to the bestselling books. Even if the movies shared some of the principles found in the books, couldn't that be said about a lot of other movies? For instance, should they make a movie about a couple who are exact opposites and try to name it Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus?

Anyway, I guess it would be possible to turn my book into a sort of first person look at psychics. I could have them share their stories and how being psychic has affected their lives. Another possibility would be to write a true crime novel and discuss a case where a psychic helped the police solve an abduction case. My book also has coming of age aspects which could be explored through a non-fiction work about finding your footing as you enter early adulthood.

I'm sure writers with a lot of writers with fantasy concepts in their novels will certainly have a tough time with this question. The fictional aspects are a lot of times what transcends a story into something great.