HAPPY NEW YEAR bookworms! It’s that time again, where all the geeky book bloggers present you the exiting reading statistics! I have recently changed jobs and have found that data analysing is bloody interesting, geek alert!, and I just cannot help it! I love seeing what everyone else have got up to throughout the year and it inspired me to look back onto my own reading year. It’s fair to say that backdating my books to June 2018 was something I will never want to do again, but now it’s up to date I am so excited to be able to have Mid Year Stats and End of Year Stats going forward!
I managed to completely smash the original target of 35 books by reading a whopping 26044 pages across 69 books! It truly isn’t an exaggeration if I say this is more than I’ve ever read. EVER!
It transpires that I tend to read more in the summer. The best reading month in 2019 was June when I finished 9 books. I cannot think of a specific reason, but I suspect that we had beautiful weather and I spent a lot of time in the garden sunbathing and not mindlessly scrolling through NetFlix or YouTube. (I do that a lot..)
Generally, looking at my TBR shelf I see mostly women authors, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that my reading is more diverse than I thought it was. Not quite equal, but still very close. I do seem to buy (and read) audio books written by men more than those written by women. This of course is not intentional, and I am surprised to see this trend.
Unsurprisingly Thrillers and Suspense/Phycological books were the ones I reached for the most; making up nearly half of all the books I read with 49%. Which I why I’m mixing things up with 2020 Reading Challenge (click here for more info).
Horror books were also in the sub-genre Top 3. This is most likely due to having read 4 Stephen King books – which makes him my most read author of 2019.
Think it’s also fair to say that whilst I bought a hell of an amount of new books over 2019, I also managed to read 26 of them! NetGalley ARC request came second by 13 read books and surprisingly second hand books took the third place. I feel like I was living in charity shops so I thought the books from there would be on top of the list!
Out of the 69 books, 62.32% were new authors for me. Which means I’ve done a fair bit of author discovery this year.
One of the things that stood out to me when looking at the data is that there are SO MANY publishers! I had no idea.. Here’s my TOP 3 most read publishers in 2019 were Harper Collins, Orion and Simon & Schuster.
It’s no secret that I love me a physical paperback copy. Paperback books are still my favourite, no surprise there. I am, however, shocked to find that Kindle, eARCs and Audio books make nearly 35% of the read books this year, which has doubled from 2018.
I also borrowed, AND RETURNED!, one book. Proud moment!
A friend of mine said that I tend to rate books mostly 4 and 5 stars, and she was right. Looks as if my most used rating in 2019 was 4 stars out of 5. Over a whopping 40% to be more precise. One of my resolutions for next year is to be a bit less nice and more critical of the books I read and DNF more if I’m not feeling the narrative. I have learnt in the last few months that it is not the end of the world if you do not like a book.
Despite having a 6 month hiatus (totally unplanned!) there was an enormous increase of EVERYTHING here over on my blog. I am honestly shook!
An increase of nearly a 1000% for both views and comments is insane. I cannot wait to celebrate further success next year! Thank you all so much!! I’m not saying I have crazy amount of traffic, and do recognize I am still just one small fish in the ocean, but I am immensely proud of what I’ve achieved.
2019 was the year I learned more about SEO and it’s importance in making my blog more visible to others. Seeing that there was an 2440% increase in Google traffic it further confirms the importance of making the most of the SEO tools.
Looks like the most visited pages were my About Me page and Home Page. I am hoping to draw more attention to my book reviews and discussion posts in 2020.
Hey, if you aren’t already following me on Instagram, what is that you are waiting for?? https://www.instagram.com/bookskatlikes/
I started my bookstagram page in August 2018, and set my goad for 2019 to reach 1000 followers. I am glad to report that I managed my goal, and some! Thank you all!
Audience
1119 Followers
5% of followers are from London, UK
3% of follwers are from Tallinn, Estonia
43% of followers are aged 25-34 years old
89% of followers are women (do we read more, or do we follow social media accounts more? hmm)
Saturdays tend to be the best days for interactions
Plans for 2020
I am hoping to further grow my blog and bookstagram. I will also try to use my Goodreads (follow me here too!) account a lot more, and the main challenge is to get through my unread shelf before buying new books!
I saw an instagram story by Jen (@diaryofabookmum) where she said she put £2 aside for each book she read and used the money at the end of the year to treat herself for something nice. I love this idea, and I think like many of you I want to try save some money this year.
I’ve already mentioned one way to do that by reading the books I already own, and put myself on a book buying ban. I will also pick 5 books each month and put £1 aside for each book I pick. (January TBR will be going live very shortly!)
Further to the £1 for every picked book, I will also put money aside for each book I finish: £10 for a hardback, £5 for a paperback and £2 for every audio/ebook I complete. DNFs will cost me £2 too.
I cannot wait to see how much I am able to save this year and maybe I will be able to treat myself to a nice Christmas present at the end of the year! 🙂
Guys, if you managed to make it this far, I am a) SURPRISED and b) PROUD OF YOU! Thank you so much for your continued support and I look forward to sharing with you all the books I read in 2020. I am planning a discussion post end of each month for the 2020 Challenge (join in here), so make sure you subscribe to my blog to make sure you do not miss the posts! 🙂
