What Are We Reading?

On one of the writing sites I frequent there was a discussion recently about whether book sales said anything about the quality of the writing in those books. This particular discussion centered on the success of the Fifty Shades trilogy. I got to wondering just what were the genres of the books we are reading.

Here is the list of the top 100 on Amazon.com by genre. Classification interpreted by me with some assist from the Amazon categories. Totals are at the bottom.

1.   business
2.   science & religion
3.   self-help
4.   diet
5.   self-help
6.   self-help
7.   novel
8.   diet
9.   self-help
10. children's book 
.
.
.
28. erotica
29. health
30. self-help
31. children's book
32. comic
33. diet
34. romance
35. self-help
.
.
.
46. erotica
47. diet
48. diet
49. erotica
50. diet
51. children's book
52. self-help
53. fantasy
54. diet
55. children's book
56. novel
57. self-help
58. erotica
.
.
.
99. novel
100. diet

Children's Books - there are 15 children's titles on the list. I am told that holiday purchasing inflates these numbers by nearly 50% in the weeks leading up to Easter when I took my little survey.

Diet Books - 14 titles in the Top 100 is fairly average year in and year out.

Self-Help - a total of 16 offerings is also about average for this category.

Novel - 22 novels plus 7 in the "fantasy" category are just below the steady average of 1/3 of all best-sellers being novels.

Erotica - the 4 such titles on the list all come from the Fifty Shades series.