26th June 2025 to 26th June 2026
One year ago I was feeling the itch to see what all these romance readers were delighting in. I decided that since my favourite genre is sci-fi, I’d go that route rather than romantasy to pop my romance cherry. I saw on reddit that readers were raving about the absurdity and addiction level commitment to Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon. My choice was made. I got a Kindle Unlimited subscription and I then I devoured 610 other romance books in 364 days.
That’s on top of my normal, quite voracious but still not comparable reading of non romance books in my favourite genres of sci-fi, paranormal and fantasy.
But just for romance, that works out to an average of 1.7 books every day, 11.7 books every week, or 51 books every month.
When I write it out like that, it looks completely ridiculous. But in general I’m a ridiculous person so it’s on-brand.
I rarely buy physical books, so there are just 12 (very special) books on my romance bookshelf. These include gorgeous special editions and signed paperbacks. My reading stats shook out to a huge 557 books borrowed from Kindle Unlimited, and 33 purchased as ebooks.
Since my first month of Kindle Unlimited was free, this was likely what kick-started my pacing. I wanted to read as many books as I could for nothing, so I just read and read and read. Then I started paying for it... and just kept up that pace.
Kindle Unlimited is £9.49 per month, so over the course of the year I paid £104.39 in subscription fees. Across 557 books, that means each borrowed book cost me just 19p.
I got ChatGPT to crunch some numbers for me, and based on the average Kindle Unlimited payout per page, my 557 Kindle Unlimited books likely generated around US$700 in royalties for the authors. The exact amount varies each month, but it's a nice reminder that every completed KU book still puts money into an author's pocket. I love the thought of hundreds of dollars that ended up supporting romance authors instead of remaining in Jeff Bezos' ever-expanding dragon hoard.
While we’re on the topic of economics, I’d like to stress how much non currency value I get out of being a romance reader, and I try to pay it forward where I can. Buying ebooks directly from an authors website rather than via kindle is something I’m doing by default now. When I’m in Florida I visit The New Romantics bookstore in Orlando too, it is such a lovely store. I purchase preorders and special editions from them via the website while I’m in Scotland, then Nick opens them for me and shows me how lovely they are. I also have a paid subscription to two romance authors on Patreon, as well as following along with many others on a free tier. Being a romance reader has cost me money overall - but the value I get is priceless.
Now, lets consider something truly silly.
I had a lot of data thanks to a goodreads library export, and in most cases the books have a page count. 168,952 pages is the total for that column. Around 30 books had no data or were audiobooks, so if we presume a modest 250 pages for each of those, the total is 176,452 pages or 483 pages per day. Hooray math!
But here’s the fun part: visualising the books since I read on an e-reader. If I were to own these books, and put them on a single shelf, it would be 12 meters long. Here’s a handy AI generated visualisation of that:
Crown Me Dead by Liv Zander
The book that best represents everything I discovered I love about romance this year. Liv Zander is a fearless writer of dark romance that features the villain as the romantic lead. This book was a wonderful blend of gore, horror, pain, emotional devastation and of course true love and spice. It was impossible to stop thinking about once I'd finished.