Statistics of books Tsana read in 2014

With pie charts!

I was planning to write a post like this anyway but then something unexpected cropped up which has changed the shape of my January (and some of February). Due to drop-outs I've been asked to fill in as an Aurealis judge for the Anthologies and Collections panel. What this means is that I'm going to spend the start of 2015 madly catching up on reading and not writing reviews.

I'm one book in and I'm already having review withdrawals. Tweeting a sentiment to that effect, the lovely Gillian suggested I do a series of posts reflecting on my reading habits, changes since starting to review, etc. So consider this the first of a few posts on the general topic. Also I'm going to include the goodreads challenge progress widget thingy in these posts, at least until I forget about it. It's the only way (other than my spreadsheet) I have of marking books read, if I can't review them.

2015 Reading Challenge

Tsana has read 1 book toward her goal of 100 books.

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1 of 100 (1%)

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I've been keeping track of my reading in a spreadsheet since I started blogging and I thought I'd share some of my statistics with you. I missed doing this last year, but if you're interested, you can see my pie charts from 2012 here.

Let's start with nationalities of authors. The largest chunk of authors I read were Australian (46%). No surprise given I go out of my way to read books by Australians. The second largest demographic was US authors (34%, down from 40% in 2013), again not surprising given US cultural saturation.  The NZ slice is probably an underestimation at 3% (up from 0% in 2013 and 2% in 2012) since if something was mixed ANZ it tended to be counted as Australian. In the interest of cultural balance I'd like to see the UK slice consume more of the US slice in the future, but I'm not pinning my hopes on it.

On a completely different note, what formats was I doing my reading in? To my absolute lack of surprise, most (76%) of my reading was of ebooks. This is down ever so slightly from 80% in 2013, which I put down to finally setting up digital audiobook library loans (I've been using the BorrowBox app, which strikes me as less irritating to set up than Overdrive, and there's a slightly different spread of available books, even within a library, between the two). Prior to that, the audiobooks I read were either Kickstarters (two of them) or a Doctor Who licensed fiction of my mum's. My print book reading has remained pretty constant since 2013 (17%) although it was much higher in 2012 (33%) when I was still adjusting to the whole living overseas thing. I imagine this distribution will stay relatively constant in the future, barring any weird audio-binges I may go on.

The next big thing is author gender. Anyone who's been paying any attention to by blog will not be surprised to see that the majority of my reviews (two thirds) were of books authored by women. What might be surprising is to learn that this is actually quite a drop from 2013 (82%) and 2012 (83%). This wasn't a conscious shift and I'm not entirely sure what caused it. More male-authored books grabbed my attention? The way the review copy distribution happened to fall? A product of my trying to branch out into new author land? Probably contributions from all of those factors and others I haven't thought of. It will be interesting to see how this shifts in 2015.

The genre distribution of my reading is not something that has changed significantly since 2013. Comparing 2014 to 2012, however, there is significant growth in the Horror and Other wedges. The first seems pretty obviously due to my starting an Aus Horror Reading Challenge and the latter I would put down to being exposed to more books, mainly through the AWW Challenge, but also through just existing as a blogger.

The distribution of publication years of books read is a bit heavily skewed towards books published in 2014. This is absolutely a direct consequence of book blogging and receiving new books for review, usually before they come out. The number on the y-axis of the bar graph is number of books, by the way, which is almost the percentage since I read 102 books. I would like to catch up on older books more than I have been in the future. On the one hand, there does come a point where one catches up with favourite authors' backlists... on the other hand I'm not there yet for a lot of authors (but I am for others, which actually means some of my favourite authors haven't been reviewed very much on my blog). I don't have 2013 or 2012 data to compare with this (and can't be bothered creating it), but let's see how this changes in 2015.

Next up is ratings, as in, the star ratings I allocate books. I give the majority of books 4 of 4.5 stars, which shouldn't be surprising. I am more likely to read books I expect to enjoy. This is pretty similar to the distribution in 2012. 2013 seems to have been aberrant with my 4.5 star ratings expanding to 44% of all books read and more 3 star ratings as well (11%). Not sure what happened there. The lack of unfinished books in 2014 is more a case of my not writing them down than their non-existence. I kept thinking I would get around to finishing them even as the year drew to a close. Oops?

Last thing is the number of books I read per month. Interesting that 3 out of the 4 the lowest months were months during which I travelled recreationally. And in the fourth month I had builders impinging strongly on my sanity. It would seem that work trips limit my reading less than holiday trips (not surprising since I tend to sit alone in my hotel room reading when I'm on a work trip, so...). The elevated number in July is from reading 3 volumes of Saga that month. This is another thing I don't have older data for, but it will be interesting to see how it changes.

Aurealis Statistics

Last night, hubby and I were talking about the Aurealis Awards shortlist and the topic of there being more fantasy books published by Australian authors than science fiction or horror came up. In the course of events, I went to have a look at the entries for this year's awards and before I knew it I had a spreadsheet and graphs and things. It just happened.

So since I have these graphs, I thought I might as well share them with the world. I don't think they reveal anything ground-breaking or terribly exciting, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

The abbreviations I use in the charts below are the same as from the Aurealis entries page:

• SFN = Science Fiction novel
• SFSS = Science Fiction short story
• FN = Fantasy novel
• FSS = Fantasy short story
• HN = Horror novel
• HSS = Horror short story
• YAN = Young adult novel
• YASS = Young adult short story
• CN = Children's fiction (EDIT: told primarily through words includes short stories and novels!)
• CPB = Children's picture book
• AC = Anthology/Collection
• IW = Illustrated Work

EDIT AGAIN: And then someone pointed out another error I made in counting fantasy categories, so I've fixed it and updated all the graphs. Sorry folks!

First up, the number of entries in each category:

So among the short stories, no surprises that fantasy are the most numerous. Perhaps slightly surprising that there were 1.5x as many horror as science fiction. Keep in mind, however, this counts works submitted to multiple categories as one entry per category, so many of the horror and science fiction short stories could also have been submitted as fantasy and so forth. Also no surprises in the novel categories, except perhaps that there were more children's novels than YA (well, I find that surprising at least, but other probably won't). EDIT: Since CN includes children's novels and short stories, this is suddenly less surprising.

If we turn the above data into a pie chart to show the proportion of all the reading that was done for each category... we get something that probably shouldn't really be represented as a pie chart, especially given the multi-category entries I already mentioned, but eh, pie charts are fun. For these purposes, I'm counting children's picture books as short stories (EDIT: but remember that CN also includes actual short stories).

Then we come to entries which were submitted in multiple categories. The next chart shows the percentage of entries in each category that were submitted to one or more other categories as well.

Children's picture books, as well as graphic novels and collected works which I omitted from the chart, do not have any crossover. Not surprising.

Making equivalent pie charts but only looking at entries into one category each... we don't get anything terribly different to the first set of pie charts except that most YA short stories are also entered into other categories. Given that they short stories have to be spec fic due to the nature of the awards, perhaps what we should be surprised about is that not all the YA entries also made it into other genres.

So do these results surprise you? Alarm you? Make you go "hmm"? Let me know in the comments!

EDIT: Upon request from Alisa Krasnostein on Twitter, I crunched a few more numbers and I give you the break down for self-published entries only. I should point out, these are entries I flagged as self-published myself. It's possible I missed some, especially if they're listed as <author's self-pub company name> or if it's through a vanity press I've never heard of. But I think I caught most of them.

First we have the number of self-published entries per category by themselves and as a fraction of the rest of the category.

There was one self-published short story entered and all the novel categories and the collected works had some self-published entries.

And the multi-category self-published entries:

Next, because my like of pie charts hasn't suddenly evaporated, the pie-charty genre breakdown for self published entries. Aside from the inclusion of collected works (which I skipped in the earlier pie charts) and the removal of the horror novel category, there isn't an awful lot of difference in the distribution of SF, fantasy, YA and children's. So to a first approximation, the distribution of self-published genres is similar to the distribution of the entire sample.

Reflections and Resolutions 2012/2013

I generally like to do a reflection post with resolutions for the coming year. Since this is my main blog at the moment, I figured I might as well do it here.

Reflections

First up, I had three short stories come out in minor markets. Which is a record for me within one year.

• “Chosen”, The Lorelai Signal, July-Sept 2012 Issue
• “Addiction”, Comets and Criminals, Issue #3, June 2012
• “Red Rover”, Infinitas Newsletter, January 2012 edition

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Next up, reading progress. I like pie charts and statistics. I've been keeping track of all the books I've read, made easier by having reviewed all of them here. In 2012 I read a nice round 120 books, not counting 4 which I didn't finish. One of those was a collection from which I read the one story I bought it for then moved on and forgot about it. I might get back to it later. The other three were novels I got about half way through before putting them down in frustration. I want to get back to one of them (...eventually), but I can't see myself bothering with the other two.

For my statistical calculations, I included the books I didn't finish, since I did spend a significant amount of time reading them.

What countries were the authors I read from? Overwhelmingly from the US and Australia, with a few British, New Zealish and misc (Canadian, South African, Norwegian) authors thrown in. I'm glad I managed to read so many Australian authors, and I don't have plans to read fewer Aussies, but I'd like to read more widely outside of the US. I think I'm starting to run up against my limit of slightly generic US YA (not that all US YA is generic, but I've definitely read some that is), so that might be a place to start.

 What format (dead-tree, ebook, audiobook) were most of my books read in? Almost two thirds of the books I read were ebooks, which isn't entirely surprising given my current geographical location (much cheaper to buy Aussie ebooks than to pay postage), impending lack of space and aquisition of eARCs. Comparing this with my 2011 formats, the second biggest change is the dearth of audiobooks. This is primarily thanks to my finally unsubscribing from Audible (it was an ordeal, let me tell you), and a little bit due to getting sick of Ben Bova who makes up the majority of my backlog.

What ratings did I assign the books I read in 2012? I'm fairly good at choosing books to read that I know I'll enjoy, so I'm not surprised that 4.5 and 4 star ratings are the most common.

What were the genres of the books I read? I surprisingly, mostly fantasy and almost a third science fiction. Not a bad ratio. In future I'd like more of those science fiction books to be, well, not YA dystopias. Variety is good.

Finally, the gender breakdown. 83% of the books I read were by women, with 40% overall being by Australian women. Not an entirely surprising result. The genre distribution of Aussie woman-authored books followed the overall genre distribution fairly closely.

Resolutions

One of my standard New Year's resolutions is to write more and finish whatever novel I'm currently working on. However, right now I am not in the right mental place to do that, and I'm OK with that. Writing (especially novels) requires obsession, which means a lot of brain time spent thinking about it, even while doing other things. The other things I'm doing right now include a PhD in astrophysics, which itself requires periods of obsession. And it has to come first. It's the think with progress deadlines that will lead to bad things if I ignore them. Writing isn't.

2012 ended with a very busy period for me, work-wise, which isn't over. I'm not sure when it will be over, maybe mid-year, maybe when I hand in my thesis (though hopefully there'll be a break sooner than that). In the mean time, I'm travelling a lot and having all sorts of experiences which will prove to be good story fodder later on.

I would like to write/finish/submit more short stories, though. I started a few in 2012 that I didn't finish for various reasons and there are some I'm part way through editing or rewriting. I would definitely like to do more of that. And obviously, more acceptances would be nice (can I top 3 stories out in 2012? Can I place one in my mental list of goal markets?), but that's not the kind of thing one can plan for.

I'm still going to try to work on the current novel, I just don't anticipate finishing the draft I'm currently on. But maybe? The main thing is, I'm going to try to feel less guilty about not writing when I can't.

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Reading resolutions are a bit easier, since I've already set myself some challenges. To summarise: read more Australian science fiction and read more Australian horror. Continue reading books by Australian women (more a default than a challenge).

And I'd like to read more of my existent paper books because that shelf isn't getting any larger to accommodate them. I have a tendency to prefer ebooks because they're easier (less RSI*) and more suited to more situations. I should also make at least a bit of an effort to get through my backlog of audiobooks, though I admit I'm not giving that a very high priority; it's good to have a few up my sleeve for sudden long drives or perhaps glasses fails.

*Yes, I get RSI from reading. Not from typing like a normal person.

Book-buying resolutions

This year, I stuck fairly well to a read-three-buy-one scheme (inspired by Tansy). It backfired a bit, though, with all the eARCs I read, which I counted as books read but which didn't count as books bought. My TBR shelf is more overflowing now than it was at the start of the year. Whoops. So in 2013, I'm going to not count eARCs as books read towards unlocking purchases. It's going to be read-three-paper-or-purchased-ebooks-buy-one. But I'm going to allow myself to buy books when they're on sale (which I already did, but felt guilty over), within reason. That last point might need a bit of fine tuning; I can see it backfiring. I'm also going to try to save up achievement unlocked books and spend them only when I'm intending to read the bought book immediately, so as to reduce TBR clutter.

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On a non-bookish note, I'd like to do something interesting with some of the copious amounts of photos I've been taking. I'm not sure what, though (other than making banners and other decorations for the blog, which I've already been doing and doesn't really count anyway).

On an academic note, my goal is to have two papers written by mid-year. Hopefully nothing goes terribly wrong and upsets that.

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What resolutions have you made? Have you perhaps also conducted an analysis of your reading habits? Let me know in the comments.

More Gender-centred Statistics on Australian-Authored SFFH Novels in 2011

After my earlier post about broad gender distributions in Australian novels last year, Tansy valiantly volunteered to add target age groups and genres to the mighty list of SFFH novels published in 2011. She sent the spreadsheet back to me and I poked Numbers into generating statistics and made some pie charts. Yay, pie charts!

Gender distribution in SFFH Australian authors published in 2011

Tansy put out a request on Twitter for someone to compile states on gender breakdown of Aussie SFF novelists and for some reason I volunteered. Because apparently I was bored this morning (actually, it did take my mind off feeling sick, so yay).