A few months ago, I was chatting with our esteemed publisher here at AAR, Dabney, about how the books topping the best seller lists for romance at Amazon weren’t the one we were covering on the site nor were they the ones we saw being talked about on Twitter.
We bandied about some ideas as to why this was, never really coming to a conclusion, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the bestseller list ever since. As I write this, of the Top Ten best sellers in the general Romance category – I recognize the name of three authors. While I’m certainly not the arbiter of what is known in Romance, I do spend a lot of time in Romancelandia – or, at least, the version that exists on our site and on Twitter. What I’m wondering, more and more, is if that’s a representative view at all.
Now, before you cry foul, I know that Amazon’s algorithms are abused beyond reason, that Kindle Unlimited is a dumpster fire, and that best seller doesn’t equal quality. But when I combine this wondering with the fact that whenever Goodreads releases its Best Of polls, our staff scratches our head at at least a few of them… well, I’m starting to see patterns and I wanted to open it up to you brilliant AAR readers for your input.
Best seller lists are influential in part because readers frequently buy books they perceive as important because their peers deem it so. How many books are on the New York Times Bestseller list simply because of the loop of their being on the list so people buy them so they stay on the list? I’d bet many.
We’re a voracious bunch, us romance readers, and every statistic on the planet will tell you so. To my mind, that means the Best Seller lists warrant even more anthropological attention, since people turn to it for recommendations when they’re looking for new reads. This holds true for both Amazon and in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Like me, Dabney talks with romance readers all the time who have never heard of AAR (sad face), but can tell us the books they’ve tried because their library featured them, or because they were on the Best Sellers table at Barnes & Noble, etc. And, given Amazon’s dominance in book sales – numbers are hard to come by but most say the company sells at least 65% of all books sold – I feel sure that their lists are strong influencers on romance shoppers.
So, according to the Amazon list, what are people reading?
Suspense with romantic elements, paranormal (which I keep hearing on Twitter is dying, so that’s interesting), and Alpha heroes in tales dripping with so much angst that my adolescent self told them to calm down.
A brief scan of a few tags on Twitter tells me that the books getting focus over there are ones that have cinnamon roll heroes, diverse heroines, and covers with adirondack chairs.
I’m not saying one is wrong and one is right – I’m simply saying they’re pretty different and I think that’s interesting. Am I the only one? Thoughts?
But sometimes when AAR and goodreads align than it is a sure hit for me 😉
I have noticed that GR grades are, in general, lower than Amazon’s. Which is interesting because Amazon owns Goodreads. When Amazon bought it, I worried that they would influence the grading system at GR but, thus far, the two sites appear not to share grades. But I don’t know that for sure.
That’s my impression too!
Interesting and thought-provoking post – many thanks! It made me think about what I prefer in my reading matter and where I find it. Years ago, in the Amazon Dark Ages, they used to have a means whereby you could request updates of new books in certain categories, IIRC, and I found it useful but it has long been discontinued. I have withdrawn from all social media. I cancelled out of facebook about 3 years ago because I felt it was a deluge of rubbish and have never been tempted by #45’s favourite outlet either. So, where do I get my reading recommendations from?
I check out AAR every day or two and have done for about 20 years. I read the reviews and, if the book interests me, I check it out on amazon, SBTB, Dear Author and a few other sites on the internet. I will then decide if the book is really for me after I have sampled what are often completely at-odds reviews. That’s my “bedtime trash reading”. Sometimes when I discover it’s a “best seller”, particularly when the NY Times list is mentioned, I find that it’s mainly hype or a long term reputation of an author that’s got their book on the list, say someone like Nora Roberts. And, of course, romance best sellers are pretty much pooh-poohed by the urban “intelligentsia, woke, very left leaning, smart alecks” who seem to dominate so much opinion in all of the arts. Certainly that’s true in the UK. And, though I have a kindle, I have only once tried one of their kindle deals for a free book and it turned out to be complete crap. I left a review on amazon about it I was so irritated to have been taken in. The freebies really seem to be from the dustbin of romance rubbish although I accept it may be the “way in” for aspiring writers. I have definite tastes in romance and stick pretty much to certain genres although I was caught completely off guard by the Outlander series which had always seemed to be on my “cat in hell’s chance” list of genres. Wrong!
Next, literary fiction. I read 2 national newspapers in the UK and look at websites for one or two more including US papers. That’s where I get my info on this genre – certainly not Oprah or the UK equivalents, Richard & Judy. Usually, after reading the review I find I am totally uninterested and, when I do venture into it, trying hard to keep up with at least a few of the international best sellers, I find myself scratching my head and wondering why my mindset is so out of kilter with everyone else. For example, the much eulogised books and consistently “#1 on the best seller list” by Hilary Mantel left me cold as I found them pretentious and dense to the point that, even as the holder of an MA in European History, I wanted to throw them down the deepest well I could find. At least the BBC TV production was outstanding – far better entertainment than the books. But at least I read them.
And finally, I read a fair bit of social and cultural history, biographies and some books taking in current affairs, politics, etc. I have found that newspaper reviews by reviewers I am familiar with are the best source of reading along these lines – rather like the fact that I particularly like some of the reviewers at AAR although all of them are truly good. To my surprise, last year 3 of the books I read on some of these topics turned out to appear in the Christmas book reviews as “the best of 2018”.
To conclude – I think I pretty much stick to what I know, what is mentioned and reviewed at AAR, followed by looking at amazon reviews and a few other sites and the printed media and NEVER rely on any best seller lists. I am sometimes surprised that the books I read never get a mention in the best seller lists and other times I really wonder how in hell they got on the lists. I think the lists are biased, favour certain genres, authors and the reviewers are not drawn from a wide enough spectrum. Apologies for the length of this post but this was a fascinating topic – I wonder if those who despise us for reading romance really understand that we are not stupid but pretty articulate, thoughtful, educated and intelligent.
Best-seller lists for literary fiction are based on such low sales numbers compared to genre fiction–I also find them useless. And, over the years, my beloved NYT book reviews have moved away from reviewing books with an eye to pleasure and seem to be reviewing books with an eye to different and instructive. I rarely ever read a book they rave about–it, like the Booker Prize, is almost a guarantee for me that I’ll hate it. I am having better luck with the reviews by Ron Charles at the Washington Post. He reads for joy and it shows in his reviews.
Thanks for your text! You expressed my own feelings and experiences so much better than I ever could with my bad english. It mirrors my own thoughts.
I’m always baffled by how many romance novel covers tout their writers as “New York Times Bestselling Author” or “USA Today Bestseller” and I’m like, “No, you’re not.” Although, as you point out, charts and algorithms can be manipulated. As for me, I usually stick to Romancelandia for recommendations. AAR, SBTB, Dear Author, Smexy, Book Riot’s Romance section, and a few other blogs. I’m not on any other social media—don’t do Twitter, Instagram, even Facebook, so don’t follow any writers, etc.
I’m kind of a free spirit when it comes to deciding what to read. I have never done social media and I use Goodreads only to record my reading challenge numbers and then check out other people’s opinion of a book out of curiosity AFTER I’ve read it. Although I skim a lot of reviews here and on Dear Author and SBTB, I end up reading a tiny number of the reviewed books. And I do actually find things worth reading in KU, although there are a lot of guilt-free rejects too.
It would never occur to me to turn to romance bestseller lists for book recommendations since there’s now such vast diversity in the genre, which makes those lists pretty meaningless. That’s the great thing about the rise of digital publishing; there’s something for everyone and the mass market publishers no longer have the power to dictate our tastes. Thankfully I no longer have to put up with knowing I want to read romance but never being really satisfied by any of the books I read.
Here is the question I have about the Kindle Best Seller lists at Amazon:
Is it really true that many of the most popular (# of high star reviews) books are love stories with men who–if one is to believe the blurbs–dominate women in sexual and emotional ways? The number of very dark storylines routinely startles me. And if this is true, why?
That’s interesting but not surprising to me. I’ve been reading romance since I was a wee pre-teen girl and that dominant male story line has been a strong thread in the genre for decades. I no longer read them but I am not surprised to hear many people still do.
It surprises me that there are so many books targeted at younger readers with that motif. I would have thought that the #MeToo generation would have gravitated to less traditional bodice-rippery.
I wonder, Dabney, if the #MeToo brigade simply shout louder and thus either drown out others or make them simply refuse to divulge their personal likes for fear of the usual social media retribution. Who knows what goes on in the secret fantasy life of anyone, including younger readers who gobbled up Game of Thrones which, as an older reader, I found quite OTT and even a bit shocking. It was full of stuff that was definitely NOT on the #MeToo agenda. Maybe an interesting topic for discussion here sometime would be to consider whether women are hard-wired in some way to prefer the dominant male even in these so-called liberated times.
The popularity of that trope, across the mediums, certainly reflects the desires of many IMHO.
This is fascinating, Kristen, thank you! I don’t have an answer either, and as Elaine has pointed out, romance fiction is a different kettle of fish here in the UK. I’m definitely reading more romantic suspense – m/m romantic suspense writers are producing some incredibly good books and series at the moment – but all the other categories you list as being tops at Amz and Twitter are nopes (although I do pick up the odd paranormal).
Speaking as a reviewer here, I suspect part of the reason we’re not reviewing the Amz best sellers is that we’re not offered them for review. We’ve had behind the scenes discussions about the fact that so many of these authors use publicists whose job seems to be to prevent sites like ours from reviewing their books more often than not. Well, not actively prevent maybe, but make it very difficult for us to obtain them. They stipulate “no negative reviews” or tell us which day we must run a review, or give us a week’s notice, or something equally incompatible with AAR’s ethos and the way we run. This isn’t true of all of them of course – I’m sure some of those top sellers are there simply because they’re cheap so there are other factors involved.
Good grief! Having checked out a few Amazon samples of books with enormous numbers of five star reviews and found them pretty dire, I can understand why the authors don’t want them reviewed! I don’t know if you’d get sued or something but it would be tempting to name and shame those books whose creators aren’t willing to risk a negative review. Readers would run a mile…..
To preface my comments, I am an AAR reviewer. I think also reviewing books that are not on bestseller lists is a strength of this site because it means we bring lesser lights to our readers—those that would’ve otherwise languished in obscurity. Everyone is talking about the bestseller lists, but not about some of the books we review.
As far as all the hype on the lists and Twitter go, when I see the same names over and over again and for all their books, not a judicious few, I simply roll my eyes. It’s not that the books that are good, just that Romancelandia on Twitter there has decided to champion those few. And these days, all the reviewers for, say, WaPo, NPR, NYTBR, etc. are either authors themselves or reviewers who hang out in Romancelandia and are completely influenced by the few loud voices there, thereby rendering their Best Books lists useless.
It’s interesting to think about that disconnect. I suspect that romance, like most of the world, is siloed into echo chambers and there is no greater echo chamber than Twitter.
Someone recently commented that Romance Writers of America–the industry’s main trade association–is dying because it’s too white, too slow to respond to controversy, and facing too much competition from other groups. I’ve been thinking about that and wondering what that means for authors and readers. I think romance is sorting itself out into political groups just like the nation (USA) and that the conversations around romance will become more and more divorced from what most readers are actually doing.
Dabney, I will be sad if RWA goes. RWA is crucial in holding the genre’s standards together, otherwise we would be left with the loud voices on Twitter who would become arbiters of the tenets of the genre. As a matter of fact, I do believe that it is the few loud voices who are predicting the demise of RWA, whereas the vast majority of non-Twitter authors are in support of it. The annual conference is so important for the careers of new and midlist authors, I can’t imagine the genre would survive without the organization.
I hope you are right!
I’d like to see the mainly traditional, American and conservative influence of RWA on romance gone, and that for good. Most if not all of the romances they champion are perfectly unreadable for me and many other young readers, and the chokehold this organisation has had on this genre, on a worldwide basis, has been stifling it and kept it one of the most hidebound and reactionary fiction genres of them all. It is high time a fresh breath moves through it.
I also do not consider politically established, undemocratic and culturally unilateral organisations representing a literary genre written all over the planet in any way appropriate for this day and age. It’s high time that a much, much more diverse body of people gets to have their say and influence there.
What are you talking about? What are the “politically established, undemocratic and culturally unilateral organisations” you’re upset at? RWA? AAR? Amazon?
I follow the “buyers we aware” policy when comes to romance novel purchases. There is no auto buy authors, books are bought after much consideration by reading many reviews by trusted reviewers such as AAR, SBTB, GR reviewers that are like minded and few bloggers.
I am glad for the diversity of types of books reviewed on this site, it exposes me to literature and authors that I may not readily seek.
I use GR user feed for new to me authors/books. Also this notion that people want to read what they believe is not true in my case. I read or watch TV for pure entertainment. I am not looking for validation of my believes in my entertainment just good stories and great characters, and a connection.
Yes.
I want fun, when all by myself with a romance book.
I am super responsible when it comes to learning, adapting, respecting, and listening to other different people and views in my life, I am constantly in environments that are slightly or a lot different from where I come from, culturally, ethnically ( I dislike that word, we are all human, we are all a mix, and our ancestors all originally came from East Africa) or otherwise. And I get asked again, which means that people feel a connection and my attitude towards them.
In my reading, I want to be whatever unreconstructed, teenager in the 70-ies, regrettable white European bourgeois glob I may be.
Preaching at me, or selling me people I should like, does not work.
That said, I will try many new things, and will stay if they entertain me.
I read reviews mostly for their descriptions, not their ratings. People who tell me why the book was horrible sometimes encourage me more to read a book than those who gush about “wonderful, great, moving, ….”
Like Usha, I read reviews and put a fair amount of effort into my reading decisions. Sometimes I wish I could lighten up and randomly pick up a book, but then I remind myself that I tend to regret those decisions. I’m a slow reader and so when I decide to read a book, it’s a considerable investment of my time.
I see the #MeToo Movement as a very positive event in our society, and one that is impacting readers and generating lots of provoking conversations on sites like Goodreads. I see it though in a push-pull relationship with dominant male alpha stories — two steps forward – one step back. We’re in a transitional moment, and so I don’t expect dominant alpha male stories to simply evaporate, just like I don’t expect patriarchy to throw up its hands and allow gender equality to take hold. Same with white privilege, as many were dismayed to find out; electing an African American president did not render racism obsolete. Dominant alpha stories are deeply rooted in our culture but they have some serious competition now in the stories emerging from authors influenced by the #MeToo Movement, and I see that only as a positive thing. Interesting, my teen niece reads romances and gets angry when she reads dominant male stories. She and her friends seem more progressive on these ideas than my generation (Gen X). At the same time, she and her friends were all victims of sexual harassment at her high school this past year that resulted in the suspension of a number of boys. It took months before the first girl came forward to complain, which is troubling.
Finally, I read AAR reviews daily but I also read other sites and I thought it was interesting that authors like Mariana Zapata came out of nowhere and claimed two of the top positions on the TOP 100 AAR reading list just recently, despite the fact that AAR had not ever reviewed her books here prior to that poll. She’s a fan favorite on Goodreads though. It’s good to expand beyond one site to find authors, especially given the prevalence of indy and self-published writers today, like Zapata.
As I’m sure our readers know, sites like ours are struggling mightily to stay alive and Amazon doesn’t make it easy. We make our bread and butter by the click-thru purchases on our site (It doesn’t have to just be a book–if you click through to Amazon from our site and buy anything while you are there, we get a tiny cut.) We used to make money from all the sites–Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Apple Books–but nowadays just about all our clickthrough income comes from Amazon. As people rely less on review sites like ours and more on Amazon and Goodreads, our revenues drop. (The other huge piece of this is the plummeting prices of books themselves.)
Increasingly, the Amazon Best-Seller lists are filled with books published by Amazon as well. I think we are zooming towards a world where the only way to find out about whether a book is good or not or for you or not is to go through Amazon. It is certainly true that without the money we get from them, we’d be unable to stay online. I fully expect, at some point, Amazon to stop giving money to outside sites who send business their way. When I came on as Publisher, we got 9% of books sales and the average sales price for ebooks was 10.00. Now affiliate sites like ours get 4% and the vast majority of books we sell are for 5.00 or less. And don’t even get me started on the pernicious impact of KU which is great for readers but terrible for authors and review sites.
I am deeply grateful for all the readers we have who do come to our site and who have made it clear you value the work we do. Thank you!
I would like to buy through you, but I am on amazon.de
How can I make you profit?
Amazon is supposed to credit us from all sites now so as long as you’ve clicked through from our page, it should work. And thank you!
Glad to hear that as I use amazon.co.uk a lot but didn’t know you could benefit from it. I will try to ensure I go via AAR in future.
Thanks–we need all the help we can get.
As it is about money:, I will ask precisely:
If I click, I go to amazon.com
I then change the address on top, deleting “.com” and putting “.de”
I am afraid this cuts the link to you.
Does it?
Is there a better way?
If this is not the place for these details, mail me.
Thx
I think that would probably cut it off. Is there a reason–I’m just curious–why you don’t just login with with .de site?
I click on your buying link, it goes to amazon.com.
If I try to buy kindle books there, I cannot ( wrong country).
If I click „change country“ your redirect is gone.
So, I do not know how to let you profit.
Are you clicking on the link at the top of the site or links in individual reviews? Clicking links in reviews takes me to Amazon UK, so that redirect should be working.
Weird. It takes me to .com
Try starting here:
https://amzn.to/2YJW21P
works 🙂
so if I use this link, whatever I buy, you get sth?
excellent, will do my best!
It should.
I think this is all very interesting. I’m not on social media at all. And I don’t really use goodreads for reviews anymore, too many over the top reviews filled with GIFs. I do use GRs for lists, like I’ll search “best groveling heroes” and then peruse the list of books tagged. And honestly, I think Amazon reviews and lists are SO compromised! I just don’t trust them. If I do check reviews on Amazon, I usually skip the 4-5 stars and go straight to the 3s.
I do read blogs for recs. And author blogs are a good resource. Ilona Andrews has a tagged blog post with reader comments full of recs.
I’ve got to be honest, I’m one of the few people who mostly purchases Nook Books from B&N and I never go to Amazon for book reviews. I actually don’t read the reviews on B&N either. I rely on this website, Smart Bitches, the OSRBC, Wicked Wallflowers, Heaving Bosoms, Rose are Blue, Fated Mates, Book Riot Romance for book reviews and recommendations. OSRBC, Wicked Wallflowers and Heaving Bosoms have great Facebook groups where we can ask for and get book recommendations from like minded readers. I aslo go to Sarah Maclean’s website about once a month to see if she’s updated her list of favorite books. I usually try to go to at least two sources before I decide on a book unless it’s one of my go to favorite authors. I definitely appreciate AAR because you have the most comprehensive list of book reviews.
Books that sell in large numbers are certainly not always the books that are most touted on the internet. The majority of romance readership is not on Twitter, and I suspect, their taste varies widely from the woke readers. I think that is why every time the RWA RITA awards are announced, we have an uproar on Twitter, because that is when woke readers realize what the rest of the country is reading.
I think you’re right about that, Keira. It’s easy to forget, when you’re as involved with and invested in Romlandia as we are, that Romance Twitter is a very small drop in a large ocean of readers who aren’t connected in the same way. The results of our Top 100 poll showed this very clearly. Readers read what they want to read – which is as it should be – and they voted for the books they like regardless of what the Twitterati was getting worked up about at the time.
Not only that. I see a huge gulf between readers who are just readers (not part of the publishing or marketing industry) and those who are plowing through 200 or 300+ books per year. The casual reader may enjoy romance, but doesn’t have the luxury of time, money or easy access for that kind of consumption (which gets pushed to unrealistic levels because everyone involved on the commercial side wants to make money). Even the best libraries can’t keep up with the sheer quantity of romances that are being hyped. And book talk skews heavily toward new releases rather than older books even though topics about nostalgic reads are often popular.
Also, I think reading for many people is a solitary activity that is enjoyable or edifying because it is solitary. Sometimes we need a room of our own to think without social pressures and distractions of a noisy crowd. I think reading or sharing with a group has many benefits, but so does solitary reading, and it should not be undervalued just because it is not expressed. I also don’t want to share about my guilty pleasures (unless someone brings it up and we can commiserate). . I think everyone has guilty pleasures. If not in books, then something else.
I come to the internet to find out about what others are reading and thinking about what they’ve read because it is educational and does help me find new books and authors I never would have found on my own. I’m not on Twitter or Instagram and have no desire to go there. I mainly use this site and a few others like it that have already been mentioned (and similarly some sites for other genres I like). I prefer personal blogs that share what they’ve been reading because they feel more genuine and less axe-grinding political, but they are harder to find these days. I’ve discovered a few through WordPress Reader, though. I also follow some trusted reviewers on GoodReads and record what I read at LibraryThing so I can keep track (otherwise, I would forget whether I’ve read or owned it). I don’t review books myself because I’m not good at it, and I find it exhausting to write down an opinion on everything I read. I haven’t tried Youtube book reviews because I already have too much to read/keep up with. And if I’m going to listen, I’d rather listen to a book than to a review of it.
Another thought:
Owning my guilty pleasures ….
Occasionally, I read BDSM or erotica, and I like it.
Do I admit that? Generally not.
Same for Harlequin Presents.
This is only a small part of my reading. But one I nearly never review, recommend or mention.
So, my question would be:
Beyond flawed review processes as you write about – are we buying and reading stuff we do not discuss, and thereby leaving a gap, too?
100% yes. I can see every day what was purchased through our site–not who purchased it however!–and while very little of the alpha male contemp romance that defines the romance ebook best seller list is bought through us, our readers read a ton of conventional romance. Erotica sells some as well.
I think one problem with the current state of discussion about romance on-line is that there is so much shaming on the net that unless you are willing to take a lot of heat, stating what you read/believe is often a risk. Why take that risk? The vast majority of us opt not to.
This is a really good point—there’s probably an under-reporting of a lot books, and not only because we don’t own our guilty pleasures. Many of us do not document online (whether through blogs, GR/Amazon reader reviews, etc.) every book we read. Back in the pre-ebook days, I remember reading a statistic that said the average number of readers for a romance novel (a single, physical book) was six: the original purchaser and the “secondary market” (passed on to friends, donated to the library, exchanged at a UBS, etc.). That number was higher for romance than for any other genre. I’m sure in the world of ebook world, that figure has changed, but there’s no real way of knowing who is reading/buying what when it comes to post-purchaser readers. For example, at a recent Friend’s of the Library book sale, I purchased three bags full of Harlequin Presents books for a dollar a bag, and I now have 125 HPs stacked under an end table in my den. I tend to read HPs as “palate cleansers” between other books. I like HPs, but because about the only place I regularly write about the books I’ve read is SBTB’s WHAT ARE YOU READING? (which used to be monthly, but is now the second and fourth Saturdays of the month), and even then I don’t list everything I’ve read, it’s unlikely that anyone but me will know that I’ve recently read (and enjoyed!) Dani Collins’s BOUGHT BY HER ITALIAN BOSS or Caitlin Crews’s THE RETURN OF THE DI SIONE WIFE. The fact is, despite our best efforts to computerize/cyberize/share our reading experiences, many of the books we read will remain unsung.
Good to know that amazon purchase from Germany count.
One question, what site is SBTB. I could not find it.
It’s Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.
I do not participate on any social media platforms and find they distorts the discussion whatever they are reviewing books life style or politics! I read author newsletters and purchase books from my favorite go to authors and check out books from the local library for many that are reviewed on AAR and Good Reads. I do check Amazon and Good Reads for what books are coming soon. It is shameful that so much of the book world is consolidated in the hands of the few.
Reading is many things..entertainment, indulgence, and an educational and learning experience.
Who really cares what the Twitter world and its cousins say? I vote for and read the books I like disregarding what the “know it alls” have to say.
I had never heard the term cinnamon roll hero before so I looked it up and the article I found said they are sweet and lovely. I wonder who you are following on Twitter. I use Goodreads to see what friends are reading to get new book ideas, I read the blogs and reviews here at AAR and also like Romantic Book Lovers for their Weekend Reading posts.