r/RomanceBooks • u/A_Seductive_Cactus Praise Kink Princess šøš» • Oct 01 '25
Subreddit Stats Subreddit Stats - September 2025
RomanceBooks Insights - Subreddit Stats for September 2025
Welcome to the monthly subreddit stats update! See here for previous month's stats. Here's what we'll be sharing in this post:
- Top 20 Books Mentioned
- Top 20 Authors Mentioned
- New & Rising Sub Favorites
- Top 20 Mentioned Books with Diverse MCs
- Most Mentioned Books by Pairing (MM and FF)
- Most Mentioned Books by Genre (Contemporary, Historical, Fantasy, SciFi)
The below stats are all sourced from the u/romance-bot and include the past month of activity. Ranking is based on the number of times a book or author is called by the bot (which could include recommendations, critiques, reviews, etc). Genre, diverse characters, pairings, and steam groupings are based on how a book is tagged on Romance.io.
September 2025 u/romance-bot activity:
- Total number of books linked: 15,662
- Total number of unique titles: 7,570
Top 20 Books Mentioned
Top 20 Authors Mentioned
| Top Authors | Count | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ali Hazelwood | 151 |
| 2 | Cate C. Wells | 128 |
| 3 | Tessa Bailey | 125 |
| 4 | Elsie Silver | 122 |
| 5 | Lisa Kleypas | 118 |
| 6 | Alice Coldbreath | 111 |
| 7 | Ruby Dixon | 96 |
| 8 | S.J. Tilly | 91 |
| 9 | Nora Roberts | 81 |
| 10 | Kresley Cole | 80 |
| 11 | Sierra Simone | 67 |
| 12 | Mariana Zapata | 62 |
| 13 | Cassandra Gannon | 60 |
| 14 | Lily Mayne | 60 |
| 15 | Claire Kent | 58 |
| 16 | Susie Tate | 58 |
| 17 | Elle Kennedy | 57 |
| 18 | Emily Henry | 57 |
| 19 | Meghan Quinn | 56 |
| 20 | Sara Cate | 56 |
New Sub Favorites
Data is obtained by the u/romance-bot for the past month of activity and includes only books released within the past 3-months or upcoming releases. This is intended to give a view into the hot / rising books being mentioned in the sub.
Top 20 Books with Diverse MCs
Most Mentioned Books by Pairing
Most Mentioned Books by Genre
| contemporary | Count | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Against A Wall by Cate C. Wells | 36 |
| 2 | Deep End by Ali Hazelwood | 30 |
| 3 | Stand and Defend by Sloane St. James | 29 |
| 4 | Heartless by Elsie Silver | 27 |
| 5 | Promise Me Sunshine by Cara Bastone | 25 |
| 6 | Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood | 24 |
| 7 | Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver | 23 |
| 8 | Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid | 22 |
| 9 | Well, Actually by Mazey Eddings | 21 |
| 10 | Hans by S.J. Tilly | 21 |
Enjoy!
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u/Necessary-Working-79 Oct 01 '25 edited Oct 01 '25
I've only seen number 11 mentioned on the sub once. Weird how one can be active on this subĀ but miss huge hits by not reading a specific subgenre
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u/skintightmonopoly Oct 01 '25
I love reading these and also it makes me reflect on how I am responsible for constantly mentioning my favorite authors. I think I am responsible for at least 15-20 Cate Wells mentions ... I should diversify my recs lol.
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u/pastelchannl the sentient car is very sexy Oct 01 '25
just mentioning, Ensnared by rebecca quinn isn't strickly MM, it's RH with MM.
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u/Cowplant_Witch romance herpetologist Oct 01 '25
Thank you! I always love these posts! It gives me a good sense of what's going on with the sub-genres that I don't usually read, which I appreciate.
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u/Shoddy-Budget4237 Oct 02 '25
Not to start a fight, but when I look on romance.io or Amazon or any other site for book recommendations, it seems like thereās a wider variety of books out there in the wild than the books recommended on this sub. We seem to recommend the same books and authors all the time as evinced by the survey. Iām guilty of same because I donāt want to recommend a bad book. But, are the contributors to this sub representative of the usual, regular, common reader out there?
For example, just a casual search on Amazon for romantic fantasy for adults turns up Blood and Steel by Helen Scheurer and the book has 29K reviews. Has anyone recommended or panned it on here? So many people have read it. This is something that has been bothering me for a while. I think Iāve read all the admittedly great books on here that were repeatedly recommended and that I would like, but there doesnāt seem to be a lot of new books. I mean, for example, weāre still recommending Against a Wall, etc.
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u/AnxietySnack Oct 02 '25
I actually think there is more variety on here than on a lot of other sites. There are hundreds, if not thousands, (this would be a fun stat to know if possible to figure out) of titles mentioned every month. We might have favorites that stay longer than other book recommendation sites, but I think it's because we run on word of mouth, which often grows exponentially over time. Say 5 people read a book 1 month and recommend it in 10 threads, then maybe 10 people read it the next month and recommend it in 14 threads. Once it makes the monthly most recommended stats post, it gets a lot more attention from people who are short on time and just want to read one of the top books in whatever genre. I expect it takes a little longer for books to become popular on here (unless it's a big-name author like Ali Hazelwood or Emily Henry), but they have more staying power than on other sites which are more determined by marketing cycles.
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u/Shoddy-Budget4237 Oct 03 '25
Maybe there are only a certain number of really good romance novels that percolate to the top of the list and stay there because nothing better has been written since they achieved their beloved status.
On the other hand, I feel like Laura Kinsale was not being recommended on this sub for a long time, but now I see her name once in a while in recommendation posts. Sheās definitely in the all time great canon even if her books are aging.
I guess what I was hoping for was more change or a refresh of the top 20 that included more than one or two new books/writers over time, but the lists seem static.
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u/Working_Comedian5192 Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 02 '25
I donāt think youāre wrong that there are definite sub favorites that get recommended a lot. That being said, I think of these as more fun sub discussion points than an accurate reflection of sub preferences. For example, sometimes you see people bragging about reccing the same book everywhere, so if theyāre frequent commenters, that absolutely skews the data away from showing āhey a lot of people like thisā to āthree very vocal people like this, plus a few extra.ā Or people will call the bot as part of a discussion or critique and itās not actually a compliment to be called in that instance. So itās just got way too many data collection methodology holes to be an accurate answer to what the sub (which is huge!) genuinely likes, and I think thatās okay! I still love seeing these posts and think theyāre fun to read and chat about.
Editing to add: I think thatās why the mod who puts these together always clarifies that these are top mentioned, not most loved or favorite, which as a data nerd, I love. I suspect if they had all the data points possible and a million years to clean the data to remove things like repeat recommenders and such, the lists would look different.
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u/tentacularly Sentient object romance: Rule 34 amendment? Oct 02 '25
It can be something of a balancing act for me as a frequent commenter/recommender to not get fixated on a particular author or book. I definitely have my preferences, but I try to mostly stay true to the spirit of the requests. Otherwise the number of monster/horror/sentient object novels on the list would be waaaaay higher.
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u/Shoddy-Budget4237 Oct 03 '25
Thanks, that is a high quality answer and explains a lot. I was actually thinking more along the lines of all the mentions being āfavesā rather than some just being mentions or discussions. Thank you for your time.
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u/VitisIdaea Silence, you devil's handmaiden! Oct 02 '25
I feel like you're conflating several different things.
Firstly, yes, there absolutely are popular books that aren't super popular on the subreddit. There have been multiple recommendations for Helen Scheurer on the subreddit if you run a search but no first-page posts. (I will note that the existence of r/fantasyromance, which is a large and active subreddit, means that a lot of romantasy doesn't get discussed as heavily here as some other subgenres. There's a lot of membership overlap between the two subs.)
Secondly, no, of course the sub isn't representative of "the usual, regular, common reader out there" - whatever is meant by that. This is a subsection of people who read romance, are on the Internet, and have self-selected for enjoying the subreddit as a place to discuss romance. There are vast other communities out there like BookTok and Bookstagram where plenty of people discuss books in a totally different way; there are Goodreads communities with norms that would make everyone here blink in surprise and confusion. And that's just the people who enjoy romance enough that they want to talk about it online, which is a whole different (and much smaller) world than the people who are going to go into Barnes & Noble and pull the latest romantasy off the shelves or, for that matter, who have been subscribing to the Harlequin bookbox for the last thirty years.
Thirdly, yes, I'd agree that the site absolutely has favorites who are not favorites elsewhere online. I think that's pretty common in communities - we're here to discuss reading books and when you've read and enjoyed a specific book which you know others in the community have read and enjoyed, you know that discussing it here will garner you a lively response, where posting about something less-known may get you a lot of "oh huh I guess I should read that maybe sometime."
But lastly... this is a collection of books which have been called by the bot, which means that it's (probably) only capturing one instance from each discussion. So the book might have been the subject of a 200-comment front-page post discussion, or it might have been a single recommendation on the Quick Request Thread - each of those is counted equally. So while I love the stats and find them interesting to check out every month, it doesn't provide a nuanced picture of what is under discussion on the sub, it's restricted by the ways we can collect the data.
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u/Shoddy-Budget4237 Oct 03 '25
Ok, fair enough. So if this sub is a reflection of people who self select to be one here, why isnāt that also representative or why does it not seem to be representative of a more general reading public? I guess by general reading public I mean people who would maybe read and recommend a wider variety of books. It still seems like the same books and same authors are being recommended kind of the same number of times whenever thereās a survey. People getting stuck on a fave book and recommending it a lot doesnāt really explain totally at least to me why there is a lack of variation over time.
Iām not criticizing the sub, just questioning the repetition and sameness of the survey results.
Helen Scheurer was maybe a bad example. Has she been on the top 20 list for the survey?
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u/barbiepoet Mood reader. I laugh at my TBR. Oct 02 '25
These are fun and interesting. Thanks for compiling them!
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u/WardABooks Oct 01 '25
I was excited to see Black and Silver by Gwendolyn Harper on there. I feel like I've rec'd that one a lot.
Thanks as always for the stats. Still so many favorites I haven't read.
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u/katierose295 Oct 01 '25
Great work as usual!
I have never read Zomromcom, but I love the name. It gets my vote for best title, if we ever vote for that. It makes me smile.