On the weekend I attended the second Australian Romance Readers Convention. At the awards dinner, I won the prize—chocolates from San Churro and some books—for the Readers Challenge. Books and chocolate—can there be a better combination?
This was an article I wrote for the Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA) newsletter last year. It’s Get Reading! month again, so I thought it would be appropriate to repost it.
If youve been book shopping recently, you may have noticed signs promoting the Books Alive campaign. Visit a participating bookshop before September 30 and you can pick up a free reading guide called 50 Books You Cant Put Down.
Ill be honest. I find it difficult to get excited about most of the books in the guide. Were not likely to find Stephanie Laurens or Anna Campbell on the list, let alone the many Australian romance authors who write category novels or who are primarily e-published.
So whats a romance reader to do? The good news is that there are romances listedeven if its not easy to spot them!
This article is an analysis of the 2009 reader survey conducted by the Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA). I tried to inject a bit of humour, but I’m not sure how well I did.
Source: ARRA
I spend a lot of time online, and most of my romance-reading friendships were made through blogs, Twitter and forums. Over the years, Ive got the impression that the average romance bookworm reads around 10 books a month and pre-orders the newest releases, collecting hundreds and hundreds of books in their vast libraries or ebook readers. So when I read the results of the Australian Romance Readers Survey that ARRA conducted in September, I was glad to know that Im closer to average than I thought.
… Almost half of us take up to 2 days to finish a romance novel. Around 10% take 6 or more days to finish. I envy their self-control. Probably so does my husband.
Read this article at the ARRA blog.
This article was first published in the December 2009 issue of the ARRA newsletter.
