Books and Numbers and CHARTS!

I’m a super nerd when it comes to statistics (I basically wonder about statistics for freaking everything), so when I saw Kelly’s post at Radiant Shadows, inspired by Christina’s post at Reader of Fictions, I really just could not help myself. I mean, why didn’t I think about this before?! Actually, fragments of this idea have probably been floating around in my brain for ages, but finally someone has been awesome enough to do it.

So, what IS this amazing idea? Well, basically, you chart out all of the ratings, for all of the books you’ve read, broken down by publisher. Then you can see which publishers whose books to you’ve consistently rated higher and lower.

Collecting My Statistics

First, I need to say that I only collected statistics from the books I have tagged was YA on my goodreads shelves, which amounts to 115 books. I went through and checked the publisher on each book, tagging each one with its respective publisher (so I don’t have to do as much work again later). Then, I built spreadsheets with all kinds of numbers in them!

My Rating Trends for YA Books

First I wanted to get an overall picture of how I rate books. I already had a pretty good idea, but seeing it in chart form is so much more fun! I’ve never given a book one star.

This is how I generally rate books:

• 1 star: Doesn’t happen. If it’s THAT bad, I probably won’t finish reading it, thus 0 stars instead of 1 star.
• 2 stars: I give a book two stars if it disappointed me or was just not well written, but still had some things I liked about it.
• 3 stars: This is default, neutral rating. I choose this if I liked a book but didn’t find anything spectacular about it (but didn’t have many complaints, either).
• 4 stars: This means I really liked the book, and would recommend it to others more highly than the 3-star books.
• 5 stars: This means I absolutely LOVED the book. Something about it just pushed me over the edge. The writing, the story, whatever. I adore these books and they’re probably the only ones I would read more than once.

As we can see from this pie chart, a good portion of the YA books I’ve read have gotten 3 or 4 stars.

My Books Read By Publisher

Again, going with the 115 YA books I’ve read since mid-January 2013, I broke it down by publisher. I wanted to see what percentage of books I’ve read from each publisher. I lumped all imprints from a big publisher together, because there were too many small numbers otherwise.

Naturally, most of these are from the BIG publishers: Harper Collins, Macmillan, Scholastic, and Random House. It’s nice to see that I’ve got a pretty good spread, though, overall. I’m not really heavy on one publisher over another.

My YA Book Ratings by Publisher

So then it was time to see how I rated the books from each publisher. This was the most fun to chart, but probably not the most exciting to look at.

Naturally, because I don’t tend to rate on the highest and lowest ends of the scale all too often, most of my ratings are toward the middle. This makes for less interesting statistics, but oh well. Looks like the publisher I like the most, however, is Harper Collins.(I’m not counting Lerner, Abrams, or Penguin, since together they only make up 6% of my total books read.)

It’s also interesting to see that I liked Simon & Schuster and Disney Hyperion books the least, although I haven’t read meany of them either.

In Conclusion

I had a lot of fun making these spreadsheets and charts! I am definitely going to do this again in the future. Nexy up I’m going to look at trends based on either genre or “category” (and by category I mean vampire/werewolf/zombie/faerie/etc.).

Okay, your turn! I want to see your statistics now!