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How many books do you read a year? According to Statista, 9% of individuals read up to 3 books each year. Thirteen percent of individuals read up to 5 books per year. Twenty percent of individuals read up to 10 books per year, and 17 percent of individuals read up to 15 books per year. This means that 59% of the population reads books and 41 percent of people either read more than 15 books per year or 0 books per year. The truth of the matter is that everyone should read more fiction books because they will stimulate your brain, improve your creativity and expand your critical thinking skills. You may even be warding off dementia.
1 . You’ll Expand Your Vocabulary
Reading fiction can help you expand your vocabulary faster than reading a dictionary or thesaurus, and it will give you the ability to use the new words. This is because fiction writers often strive to use the most accurate word available to describe a scene, character emotion or action. Some new words I’ve run across while reading fiction include maudlin, abominable, repugnant, unprepossessing and nefarious. If you know what these words mean, that’s fantastic, you can learn even more. If you have never heard of or used these words, you can learn the definitions of these, use them and learn the definitions and uses of even more words.
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Romance and Erotica: How Do They Compare?
The genres of Romance and erotica are similar, but also very different. Romance tends to have a plot that centers around a relationship. Erotica may or may not have a plot, depending on the author. There's a subgenre called romantic erotica, which contains the same plots as a traditional romance book but the sex scenes are explicit as if it were an erotica book.
Read more: The Differences Between Romance and Erotica in Fiction
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About to lose his home to foreclosure and unable to pay mounting bills, unemployed nurse William Wilson applies for a fertility specialist position with Elite Surrogates and Adoption (ESA) that seems too good to be true. Not only is he not expected to explain the reasons he left his previous hospital position after twenty years, he is offered above-average hourly pay and an extravagant sign on bonus. Both are explained during Wilson’s nontraditional employment interview with HR Manager Sadie Jones, where he is asked to prove that his sexual abilities are up to par with ESA's standards. The author's description of Wilson's first encounter with Sadie will leave the reader wanting more. Sadie's apparent experience with testing potential fertility specialists and Wilson's willingness to do anything it takes to secure employment with ESA suggest that their initial chemistry will continue to build as the story unfolds.
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People are always looking to arouse their desires. One of the ways that has become popular is the literary genre paranormal erotica. The genre is filled with magic, cursed people, and romance. This is the genre of someone who wants to see romance happen where science fails to explain what is happening. Another way that people are drawn in is when authors have a new take on old legends. All of this accounts for a popularity that has kept mythology alive and writers still delving into the myriad of possibilities. One simply has to pick up a Laurel K. Hamilton novel to see how far someone can go.
Erotica and Romance
Erotica goes beyond romance in several ways. In a romance, love is what carries the story forward. Yes there can be sex, but that is out of the love between the protagonist and there significant other. In erotica, sexual situations spur the movement. In Laurel K. Hamilton books, her heroines save their world by having sex for various reasons. The characters may fall in love, but the sexual component is what drives the book going forward. Love may get discussion time, but it is not the reason for saving the world.
Romance and the Paranormal Appeal
Mainstream romance has helped many people to become interested in vampires. Magic has been talked about since the dawn of time. Incorporating such topics into sexual desires is not new. Erotica is more than just literature and art helps make it more real. Many people enjoy artwork that incorporates the paranormal. Artists like Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell have had long careers on creating the fantastical. Many of their pictures use examples of when science is not involved with the fun. That is why many books of the genre finds artists that can match the pure titillation of the subject of the book.
Paranormal erotica has many avenues to express itself. Someone can get their first taste when studying mythology from several areas of the world. The continuation is most likely not going to be studied in class, but still has a draw in the modern world.
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If you're anything like me, you enjoy reading a variety of books. From steamy erotic novels to inspirational self-help paperbacks...it's nice to just get alone and lose yourself in a thought-provoking book. And it's interesting that the most popular and best selling book genres are Romance, Crime/Mystery, Inspirational, Horror, and Suspense/ Thrillers Fiction. Lots of pocket change is spent on those kind of books globally and yet there are still quite a few books around that do not see a worldly fanfare and relatively sit on the shelves.
Top Five Worse Genres by Sales (Updated with Stats)
1. Action/Adventure
The Action/Adventure category is the worst for sales, with an estimated .74 million copies sold each year. Action Adventure books feature danger and crazy adventures for their heroes, which differs extremely from their ordinary day-to-day lives. They hit their peak in the 1950s. Today, action-adventure books are most often found in other genres, like crime novels, thrillers, murder mysteries and war novels.
2. Westerns
Westerns sell an estimated .96 million copies each year. This is only slightly better than the Action/Adventure category. Westerns had their heyday during the late 1940s to about 1967. To exemplify this, John Wayne made movies from 1930 to 1962. Clint Eastwood was very popular from 1960 to the early 1980s for his spaghetti westerns. Of course, he's gone on to do more acting and directing in Westerns and other genres. The western soap opera Gunsmoke ran from 1955 to 1975. The slowdown of the genre occurred in the late 1970s with most Western comic books going into reprint rather than new stories being published, and the book genre has seen a slow decline since the late 1970s. What I suspect is that this genre can now be found in other categories, like historical novels and romance novels, where the western theme is more of a subgenre than the main genre and reason for the story.
3. Occult/Horror
Occult and horror books sell roughly 1.05 million books a year. This genre was extremely popular in the 1970s and 80 and has since hit its peak and fallen almost off the charts. However, like action/adventure books and westerns, horrors or horror-like books can be found in other categories. I find them most often in the thriller and paranormal categories, but they can also be found in fantasy and science fiction.
4. Religious Books
Religious books sell roughly 1.33 million copies a year. There's no distinction here between different categories of religious books, such as reference, self-help and fiction. The exception here is the Holy Bible, which last time I checked was the most popular book ever and remains that way. For individuals who read religious fiction and seek out religious books, they are very dedicated to this category, but it's certainly not growing.
5. Science Fiction
Science fiction sells roughly 2.68 million copies a year. These are your space adventures, your weird technology adventures and futuristic-type novels. Like most of these genres, science fiction's heyday was in the 1960s and 70s. Star Trek anyone? Star Wars? While Star Trek and Star Wars and spinoffs are very popular, this category as a whole is not. Could science fiction be showing up in other genres? Certainly, which may be the reason for the dramatic decline of the category but why there are still millions of fans.
Where were the stats found? Statista, but good luck getting this link to work. Most of the time the informtion is behind a $60 pay wall.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/730316/adult-fiction-unit-sales/
Western type genre- These are fictional books set in the Old West or in the historical frontier days of the late 18th to late 19th Century. These kind of books are less interesting to today's more tech-savvy everyday readers and seem to be only favored by a marginalized group of people who enjoy reading about fictionalized Cowboys, Indians, and dusty trails.
Fantasy theme fiction- Although, this type of fiction you'd think would excite reader's imaginations, the opposite is true. In fact, most readers who used to run into bookstores to find those brain-curdling imaginative stories now find them boring and lacking in prose. When it comes to the book charts, fantasy is fourth from the bottom.
Graphic novels- You know these are the kind of books that feature wild at heart stories told with comic-strip imagery. In 2017, this type of fictional genre saw record low sales in compared to mysteries and the ever best-selling Romance novels.
The Classics - This brand of fiction has always been slated for school usage as well as considered to be culturally rich, yet many readers today find this type of fiction stale and lucid. Perhaps the availability of this type of fiction sparks people's disinterest in our more sophisticated culture today.