Tackling the Bestsellers: This Weekend's Reading Plan

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Before leaving work today, I spent some time looking at Amazon's current bestsellers on the Kindle store. This was prompted by this article that my boss posted on Facebook.

Ever since I started working in trade publishing and ebook selling a year and a half ago, it's become difficult for me to separate what I do for fun (reading) from what I do for a living (publishing and selling books). And so when I read books now, even if I just want to lose myself in the story (which I sometimes accomplish if it's a writer I love or trust), I often find my mind drifting to things like, "I wonder what went into the acquisition decision." or "Man, this sucks, but they had a good marketing plan for this." or "I wonder what the publishing history of this book is." and so on.

This also works vice-versa: my reading is increasingly influenced by my job. And not in the sense that I read marketing and psychology books (which I do, actually), but in the sense that I read books I wouldn't normally pick up, simply to find out why a lot of people love them.

So, I've been exposed to the wonderful world of every shade of erotica (BDSM, gay, paranormal, rubenesque, erotic non-consent, etc.), to find out what's in it that makes it sell like it does. (My most simplistic answer: sex and fantasy-fulfillment.) And though I probably wouldn't have been adventurous enough to pick up a BDSM erotica book or two prior to this job, I can't say that I didn't enjoy the ride when I sampled the genre and its subgenres.

Now, I've looked at the Amazon bestsellers before, because yes, you have to do your research if you're in ebook publishing. Admittedly, though, I never actually read many of the top 20 Kindle bestsellers (unless you're talking about The Hunger Games trilogy and Gone Girl), preferring to take note of the popular genres and reading other books of that genre.

But after reading that article, I thought--why not? And the part about reading the reviews--that's good advice. I can't say I've done a systematic comparison of reviews of these bestsellers. And if there's something that catches my imagination, it's research.

So, before I spend too long on this post and lose valuable reading time, I've decided that my reading plan for this weekend is to read as much as I can from the Amazon list of Kindle bestsellers, to have better context for reading the reviews. I'm calling it market research. Though, really, I'm merging with it my need to actually finish a book, and I find that the only book I've been able to finish in a span of four weeks is a new adult title called Wait for You by Jennifer Armentrout, writing as J. Lynn. (I gotta say, that's a kickass name--Armentrout.)

If I'm lucky, I'll finish 2-3 books by Sunday evening. If I'm luckier, I'll even get to post about it here. Barring that, I can always update my Shelfari bookshelf. 

So, any of these Amazon Kindle bestsellers you're willing to try out?

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