Love. Data
Love. Stories + Love. Data! A place to talk about my favorite topics.
OMGOMGOMGOMG...is this happening!?!? Querying agents, by the numbers (unmute for audio)
Everyone says there’s no one path to querying success. There are no established “stats”. No promises. No guaranteed secrets. But all I wanted were the numbers, and those were hard to find when I started looking for my perfect agent. So here are my numbers, and maybe when you read these along with other people’s, you’ll have a sense of the ends of the spectrum. (Highly recommend: Play with audio on and enjoy a one-minute dance party :))
I have a lot more detail and data on my personal experience with querying agents, which I’m happy to share.
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WHAT EXACTLY IS ROMANTASY? THE BENNIFER OF THE LITERARY WORLD, YOU SAY? PLS CONTINUE...
My sleuthing around the interwebs has taught me that Romantasy is the sexy, re-branded Bennifer of the romance/literary world.
Definitionally, it is a genre combining romance and fantasy – with both plots taking equal weight (unlike fantasy romance which refers to romance set in a fantasy world).
I’m not sure where the term romantasy originated, but Google searches for it seemed to start popping up in 2023. Some of the big names in the space these days are Rebecca Yarros and Sarah Maas. But I suppose the OG Diana Gabaldon (Outlander) would be in this space too? Goodreads added a Romantasy voting category in 2023.
The point is, like Ben and JLo, the tantalizing alchemy has been around for a long time, but the new-ish news is that someone finally decided to put a ring on it.
SERIES ROMANCES - EVEN BOOK 1S - TEND TO BE WAY LONGER THAN STANDALONE...BUT WHY?
I can understand why Book 3 in a series would be longer than Book 1 (people are bought in, there is more world building, cross over characters might show up etc.) but why should standalones be so much shorter. ‘Tis a mystery.
It’s not even that standalones are by unproven authors (you’ve got Ali Hazelwood and Emily Henry on that list in the data set I used which were top books in 2022 and 2033). And it’s not even the mean was being dragged by heavy outliers… so I guess, the thought must be that even Book 1 of a series book has significantly more in the way of world building and additional characters.
Enough to take up almost 25% more space in terms of page count than stand alones.
Whatever the reasons though, this effect seems to persist across years earlier than the 2022/23 data I’ve presented here.
FIRST PERSON, DUAL POV & (MOSTLY) PRESENT TENSE RULES SUPREME
Source: Goodreads Choice Award Top 20 Romance 2023
I mapped POV (Single vs. Dual), against the tense the book was written in. I was going to make the dots represent whether a book was First or Third-Person, but that ended up being moot because 19 out of the 20 books were written in… yep, you guessed it, FIRST PERSON.
How to read this chart:
- Rank: Dots towards the right of horizontal line for each quadrant, are higher ranked than the dots clustered to the left
- Star ratings: Dots clustered towards the top of the vertical line for each quadrant, are higher rated by GR avg star ratings
- Pink Box: Present Tense, Single POV
- Green Box: Past Tense, Single POV
- Blue Box: Dual POV, Past Tense
- Yellow Box: MOST POPULAR! Dual POV, Present Tense
- Dot: Black dots represent First Person, and dot with circle around it (one data point) is Third Person
What this chart tells me: Dots are mostly crowded in the bottom two quadrants — Dual POV, but comparing the two, we see that the yellow box dots are clustered towards the right (higher GR rank) of the box than the dots in the blue box. In terms of ratings through, they both are clustered around the 4-4.2 level for both present and past tense books. And of course, everyone is going for first person.
So, Dual POV is clearly the more voted on – but between the tenses, present tense seems to rank higher even when their average ratings are similar to past tense novels.
Unscientific aside: Do you think first person is so popular now because we’re all self-involved/media and video-game obsessed people who are used to seeing the world as a simulation where we’re in the driver’s seat??
THE UNOFFICIAL BEAT SHEET FOR A LOT LIKE LOVE BY JULIE JAMES
Since I read Gwen Hayes’ Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels (How to Write Kissing Books), my brain keeps dissecting my favorite books to see how they map.
Here’s one I categorized for A Lot Like Love by Julie James, against Hayes’ “beats”, scene by scene and counting each word in each scene to get what % of the book that section represented. The colors don’t mean anything – they just looked nice.
AVERAGE RATINGS AREN'T THE WHOLE STORY WHEN LOOKING AT HOW BELOVED A BOOK WAS. LOOK AT NOW MUCH OF A FANDOM* IT HAS TOO! *PROXY: NET PROMOTER SCORE
Average ratings tend to hide how many lovers and haters a book has. Books with relatively more “mild” reactions (3 and 4 stars), can have high average ratings but low NPS scores (implying less organic promotion of those books). The books that tend to gain “viral” word of mouth are the ones that elicit hotter and icier reaction (usually those will be books with themes younger audiences tend to read) — In the GR 2023 sample the highest NPS score was for THE RIGHT MOVE by Liz Tomforde (Fake dating, Opposites attract) — ZERO 1 star ratings as of Jan-24 when the data was collected.
RECIPE FOR THE PERFECT ROMANCE NOVEL (PER 2023 PREFERENCES)
DUAL POV RULED SUPREMO IN 2023 (EVEN THOUGH WE THOUGHT IT COULDN'T GET ANY MORE EXTREME AFTER 2022)...NOW WHEN WILL THE BACKLASH COME?
In 2022 the top Goodreads Choice awards romance books were split 60/40 Dual to Single POV. The 2023 top picks were split 70/30! We continue to heart Dual POV, clearly.
For 2022 picks, there was no statistically significant difference in mean and median book rating for Dual and Single POV titles. Same deal for 2023 titles – the mean and median rating were almost precisely the same. I wonder if the effect is visible deeper into the rankings. I could see that the top ranked books tend to be better loved and by more popular authors who would ostensibly write either POV style well (e.g. Colleen Hoover writes both).
Analysis for the future: Look at a random sample of 100 books in Dual and 100 in Single, published in the last 24 months and compare mean and median ratings, distribution of ratings (as well as my invented “NPS” metric”).
Now, there’s also the question of taste. Is there a natural split 60/40? 50/50? etc of readers who systemically rate their preferred POV flavor higher.
More future analysis: That analysis would need to look at a sample of 100ish readers and compare their ratings for Single POV vs. Dual POV books, and cross reference is against their general average ratings for romance books to see if they notch either flavor more highly.
Now, the question is, will I get around to calculating all this before the POV backlash comes and we start seeing a complete rejection of Dual in favor of what… multiple? Back to Single?
REVIEWS SNAPSHOT FOR THE WALL OF WINNIPEG AND ME
I revisited an oldie and goody and went through the reviews to remind myself of what the fuss was all about!
Is it possible that I agree with reviewer sentiment in ALL the star categories???
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ROMANCE NOVEL LENGTH AND HOW MUCH PEOPLE LOVE IT
There’s this generally accepted “principle” about the length of romance genre fiction – that books are between 80-100,000 words. My review of 220 Goodreads Choice Award Top 20 books shows this is pretty accurate.*
*my estimate looking at page lengths provided by the publisher shows a range of 75-120,000, but close enough!
I wanted to find out if people reacted to longer books differently than shorter books (ratings, number of ratings etc.). A simple graph looking at the distribution of page lengths of the top 20 books in each year from 2012 to 2022 showed what LOOKED LIKE a trend towards shorter books over the last decade. Both the average number of pages from each sample of 20 winning books and the distribution of shortest to longest book lengths also seemed to have “tightened”.
So, people have shorter attention spans and tend to like shorter books now relative to years past? Nah. As every smartass nerd in every meeting discussing metrics has probably said, “correlation does not mean causality.”
I looked the the actual titles and the story became clearer. Recent trends in the top 20s have more rom-coms and single title contemporary romances, which tend to have straightforward storylines that are reflected by their sub 100K lengths. The books that got top reader votes in past years (prior to 2018) were erotica, paranormal and historical – sub-genres of romance that are longer in length on average. Probably because of all the world building that needs to go on! Also the samples esp. in 2014-2015 were heavily skewed by the releases of Outlander, and books by established authors like Nora Roberts, where authors with huge reader bases could probably get away with massive 200K+ word novels!
So, all this trend actually shows is that rom-com and contemporary romance are the flavors of the day, especially since COVID (which as I showed in a prior post, is indicative of us all just needing a hug.)
In other correlation-does-not-mean-causality news…
Longer books SEEM to have statistically significantly higher ratings on Goodreads! Does this mean we should all write (and read) longer books?
Well, yes to the reading. But not because the books are longer. But because the authors that get away with writing longer novels are the big kahunas who’ve proven themselves to be great writers. We can’t get enough of their words!
One interesting thing that came out from looking at the shortest vs. longest novels is the position in the series – shorter novels were usually the first in the series (even when the author is an established one). Even popular authors want to make sure their story is effectively hooking the audience before investing heavily in producing longer, more involved books.
And so all these lovely graphs only make sense when you look at the stories behind them. Like novels themselves, I suppose…
MY FAVORITE OF THE 7 SACRED VOWS OF A HINDU WEDDING IS ABOUT FRIENDSHIP
I wrote a book that I’ve always wanted to read. About best friends who are creative soul mates.
I’ve been looking for a book about Indian Americans that doesn’t have to do with an arranged marriage or Bollywood (although those are perfectly awesome topics, which I’ve obviously binged on!)
There’s something terribly romantic about the 7 sacred vows a couple makes during an Indian wedding ceremony – particularly the last one:
We promise to be best friends, standing by each other and caring for each other for the rest of our lives.
That’s the spirit I wanted for The Love Code.
Let’s see what happens as I submit the story to agents (heart in mouth)!
LOOK AT THE DISTRIBUTION OF RATINGS (NOT THE AVERAGE RATING) WHEN YOU WANT TO GET AN IDEA OF WHETHER YOU'LL PERSONALLY LIKE A BOOK
So many books, so little time…I had the sad realization that even if I lived to be a 100, I would NEVER finish the books I have in my TBR pile on my Kindle and Audible. And that’s not even counting the books that haven’t been released yet.
So, as you can see, optimization is key. To decide what to read, I crawl through ratings on Goodreads and Amazon.
My strategy is to ignore the 5s and 1s – the lovers and the haters can never explain WHY they love/hate something, because love/hate are not things of logic. The people who really go deep are the 2s and the 3s – they’re defending a position, they’re making arguments, they’re trying to be balanced.
As I suspected, the numbers seem to indicate that the DISTRIBUTION of ratings, not the average rating, can give you a picture of how much of a fandom a book has.
The graphs below show the distribution (below, left) and a single metric, a Book NPS (below, right), which also captures the level of LOVE/HATE a book elicits.
WHAT PEOPLE LIKE ON WATTPAD...SURPRISE, SURPRISE IT'S BILLIONAIRE ALPHA BADBOYS
These poor kids are in for a rude awakening when they figure out what they’re like IRL…
Source: Top 20 Wattpad reads as of 22-Aug-23; Wordcloud: http://wordcloud.cs.arizona.edu/cloud.html?id=27746
GOOGLE SEARCHES FOR AUTHORS DO SPIKE AFTER A TV SHOW IS RELEASED -BUT THE EFFECT DOESN'T LAST ALL THAT LONG
Source: Google Trends, 10 years of monthly search data Jul-13 to Jul-23
A ROMANCE NOVEL NET PROMOTER SCORE*
Caveat: This is obviously not an official metric for books! I wanted a way of visualizing the “spread” of 1-5 star ratings, because averages don’t always do the job for the books that people either LOVE or LOVE to HATE.
Net Promoter Score is something brands use to determine how likely it is customers would recommend your brand (or product or service) to someone else. It’s usually computed off of survey results asking customers to rate from 0 – 10 how likely they would be to recommend the brand/product/service.
9s and 10s = “promoters” (my analog for the book world is that 5s are the promoters), 0-6s = “detractors” (I used 1 + 2 star ratings – these were the people who actively de-recommended a book), the rest are passives and not included in the score.
BROTHERS IN ROMANCE VS. IRL
RATINGS DON'T NECESSARILY CORRELATE WITH RANKING (ON GOODREADS)
PEOPLE SEARCHED FOR ROM COMS A BUNCH MORE POST-COVID
BARD, WRITE ME A SONG ABOUT STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
Admittedly, I know nothing about writing a song and I can never seem to remember lyrics, so I’m not the best judge… But these feel as though they are on-brand for a song – albeit a schmaltzy piece of nonsense. But aren’t most songs kind of like that?
Here was my actual query to Bard, Google’s gen AI:
Write me a hip hop song about star-crossed lovers who can’t be together because they live in different time periods.
SO MANY DUAL POVS!
What I’m mostly getting from this trend is that we just wanna know what the hell is going on in the other person’s brain! In my case, men’s. We have finally figured out that we may as well write it ourselves, because asking is useless.
Of 60 Romance bestsellers I reviewed, (published in 2021 or 2023), 60% were dual POV and the remaining were single POV.
I wanted to see if dual POVs tended to have higher reviewer ratings (on the hypothesis that we feel “closer” to both characters), but there was no statistically significant relation between rating and POV (the mean and median for ratings for both was 4.0). There was also no correlation between ranking in the Goodreads Choice Awards and POV.
THE MAGIC NUMBER IS 3
I thought I sensed a trend towards longer book title lengths (Things We Never Got Over and the like), but no… the mean and median for Romance titles, nay titles across multiple genres that I picked, was THREE.
This was the case looking back at the Goodreads Choice Award winners going back four years — always three. In some genres, the number three seems more pronounced (Mystery & Thriller).
I think what’s happening is that longer titles are more unusual so maybe more memorable?
250,000 PEOPLE THOUGHT PRIDE AND PREJUDICE WAS "NO GOOD"
30 million copies of P&P sold (per this source), and over 4 million reviews on Goodreads. 6% of those reviews were 1 and 2 stars. Which just goes to show, you can’t win ’em all.
The graph shows the relative proportion of 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 stars the book received on Goodreads.
If I could, I would have fed all those 4 million comments into an AI LLM model and gotten the blended/representative review for each of those star ratings, but I had to use my puny human brain/judgement to do it.
TOP ROMANCE TROPES
Looked at the top tropes represented by the Goodreads Choice Awards 2022 Winners and it’s all the usual suspects! Friends-to-lovers, Enemies-to-lovers… I recall when marriage of convenience was more of a thing. Not anymore, clearly. And I continue to be amazed that in this day and age there could be such a scarcity of beds.
Romance Cover Trends (1980s to 2023)
