The 2016 Australian Women Writers Challenge has now ended. So how did we go? Throughout January, we’ll be posting our yearly wrap-ups in each category, but for now, an overview.
During 2016, a total of 1400 reviews were linked to the AWW challenge, encompassing 864 books by 648 authors. Reviews of adult titles comprised 88% of the total, with 8% for young adults and 4% for children and younger readers. (You can find the entire list of books reviewed in 2016 here.)
The breakdown per category for adult titles was as follows.*
As you can see, participants reviewing for adult readers chose overwhelmingly to review fiction (88%) over nonfiction titles (12%). General fiction was the largest category (34%), then crime fiction (18%), romance (14%), historical fiction (13%) and speculative fiction (9%). The History, Memoir and Biography category accounted for 8% of the total, while 4% was categorised as “Nonfiction – other”. This latter category until recently included poetry.
What was your breakdown of audience and categories for 2016? I’d be interested to know.
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The 2017 challenge is now open and you can sign up any time through the year until November 30, if you haven’t done so already. So far, we have 84 participants – not bad for the first day of the year. I hope others will join us as they set their new year’s resolutions.
Many of you have already found our new Facebook group where challenge participants and other interested readers can share what they’re reading and reviewing. It already has over 140 members. The group is proving to be a great way for readers and reviewers to stay in touch. If you’re an author or publicist, we invite you to add news of upcoming book releases and author events in a separate Facebook group here.
Yesterday I posted a list of books to look out for in 2017 and included a form for authors or publicists to add their upcoming books. If you have a book coming out this year which wasn’t mentioned in the post, please let us know via the form here.
Wishing you great reading and reviewing for 2017!
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About me: In 2012 I instigated the Australian Women Writers challenge with the aim of helping to overcome the problem of gender bias in the reviewing of books by Australian women in mainstream media. Since then, I’ve had two books published under my pen-name, Lizzy Chandler, a rural romance, Snowy River Man and a romantic suspense, By Her Side. You can find out what books I’ve reviewed for the AWW challenge on my book blog and more about my books on my author website.
*Note: the total number of reviews depicted in this breakdown is greater than the number of reviews submitted (by 258 titles) as some books were listed under more than one category (e.g. both general fiction and crime or romance).
Great wrap up Elizabeth. I like the visual with the chart. It’s interesting to see the trends. Do you think that some books are listed as general fiction but should be identified as another classification?
Thanks, Theresa. It’s an interesting question. I’m pretty sure some of the books I think of as belonging to “crime, suspense, thriller”, others categorise as general fiction. We’ve debated what to do about this and decided to leave it up to the individual reviewer – thus the overlap.
I think I might be guilty of that also Elizabeth, particularly with sub-genres like diversity. I’ll have to be more specific this year.
Don’t worry too much, Theresa. With the way the database is set up, it’s barely avoidable. It does, however, create statistical anomalies!!
I love the graph! I did one of my own as well, which I can’t copy here.
My categories, in order of the number of books read in each are:
General Fiction (27)
Crime Fiction (17)
History, Memoir or Biography (17)
Historical Fiction (14)
Speculative Fiction (10)
Non Fiction (Other) 9
Mixed/don’t know (4)
Romance/Erotica (2)
Classic(2)
As I have 80 reviews noted on the AWW website for 2016, and this breakdown totals 102, there are clearly a number of books with more than one category.
And now, on to 2017!
You’re bucking the trend with so few romances, Jennifer. 🙂
What a good idea to break down your own! I might sit and have a look at that myself.
My breakdown of the 45 books I read are:
Literary (7)
General fiction (3)
HMB (5)
Non fiction (3)
Crime (5)
Childrens (16)
YA (4)
Indigenous (1)
Classic (1)
I haven’t sorted for historical fiction but all my crime, about a third of the kids & half of the fiction are historical.
Trying to read the shortlist for the CBCA certainly boosts my stats!
Happy New Year !
What a great spread, Brona. Congratulations!
Inspired by Brona and Jennifer, here’s my breakdown by genre.
General Fiction (9)
Literary Fiction (11)
Crime Fiction (7)
Mystery / thriller (3)
History, Memoir or Biography (3)
Historical Fiction (13)
Speculative Fiction / fantasy (3)
Non Fiction (Other) (1)
Romance/Erotica (2)
Short story anthology (1)
YA (2)
Another eclectic reader, thanks for the list, Kali!
I like the breakout non-fiction pie chart Elizabeth! I don’t log the books that I read aside from those I read for work and to review, so I can’t contribute to that discussion.
I wonder how we many authors of diverse backgrounds were reviewed this year compared to last year? Jessica has been doing a great job of encouraging us to read more diversely, so I hope that translated into more reviews of diverse authors.
Hi Yvonne. Jess has done a great job, hasn’t she? Maybe she’ll do a comparison in her diversity roundup.