Especially paperback novels, romance novels account for 48.8% of North American paperback best-selling novels and 33.8% of global paperback best-selling novels. The purchase of paper books is five times that of science fiction, and its popularity is half that of mystery novels.
In a large number of vulgar love novels, nearly half of the stories happened in the last century, so they meet the standards of historical novels. Please note that these books are mass-produced for consumption at such a fast speed, and they are not necessarily studied in detail, nor are they necessarily in line with historical facts-but this is because, compared with the fantasy of satisfying the wishes of female readers, the accuracy of history ranks second. Surprisingly, some famous romantic novelists write a book every four months.
The same is true of audio books. When we pay attention to the top ten types of audio books sold or downloaded from the author's "Overview of Book Publishing Market-Statistics and Facts", we notice the following points:
Romance novels rank fifth in the annual sales volume of 1.33 million CD/ download, which is lower than "classic literature"; Thriller suspense; Science fiction, including comic books. The sixth is business/money, the seventh is children's books, the eighth is biographies and memoirs, the ninth is mystery novels, and 10 is fantasy novel.
Historical novels other than romance novels have not even entered the top ten of audio books, so even if a quarter of them are based on history, they are likely to completely compete with other historical novels and even surpass them in number.
This is consistent with the anecdote I observed. In MacKay's second-hand bookstore in Knoxville, the paperback shelf area of romance novels (including their version history) is almost twice as large as that of military history, world history, mythology and literary criticism combined.
Closer to home, apart from the university bookstore, the only local bookstore is the second-hand bookstore, which, like many other bookstores, specializes in selling romance novels. I have never seen a bookstore specializing in historical novels.
Another factor to remember is that American women read and write more frequently than men-at least according to the survey on your website. Most Americans don't read books: about 66% of Americans say they never read books for entertainment. Among those who read several books a year, 34% of men said they read 1-5 books a year, while the proportion of women was 29%.
The proportion of men and women who read 16-20 books a year is 5% and 8% respectively. Among those who read 50 books or more a year, the proportion of men is 2% and that of women is 9%.
Therefore, the number of female readers of historical novels-at least in the form of love novels-dwarfs the number of male readers of historical novels. Male readers are often surprised by this-but this may be because they seldom spend time reading or paying attention to the romantic section of bookstores, or patronize romantic bookstores frequently. Therefore, they won't notice how backward they are in numbers.
Notable exceptions come to mind, such as colleen mccullough adding very profound background materials to her Roman series. I'm not implying a general rule, but there is a trend among the cheapest and best publishers.