My New Romance Book Directory
Find your next five-star read with my curated list of top romance books.
UPDATE: I originally launched my directory under the name/URL Best of Romance Books (mainly for SEO reasons), but I have since decided to keep all my work under the name/URL Romancing the Data instead. I’ve updated the names and links below to reflect this!
I’m excited to introduce a new project I’ve been working on!
Now that I’ve published four Best of the Best romance book lists, I wanted to find a way to make the data more accessible and useful for readers.
The solution I came up with is an online directory that is highly searchable and filterable.
The purpose of the Best Romance Books Directory is to help romance readers find their next five-star read by providing a curated list of top romance books that can easily be searched and filtered by many different criteria like subgenre, spice level, representation, Kindle Unlimited eligibility and more.
Check out this video where I do a walkthrough of the site:
Filters
For me, the best feature of the directory is all the custom filters I’ve created, including things like representation, Kindle Unlimited eligibility, subgenre, spice level and decade published. You can also use multiple filters at once to narrow down your search!
Lists
The directory currently houses the four lists I’ve published so far, which translates to a total of 158 books:
If you’re unfamiliar with my Best of the Best lists, they are book rankings based on meta-analysis of published best-of lists in different categories. I analyze numerous best-of lists to see which books appear on the most lists and can be called the “best of the best”. Learn more about my methodology.
I’m planning to publish more lists (I currently have two in the works!) and they will be added to the directory as well.
Research
Best-of lists are generally based on personal opinions and/or vague methodologies, so there's no way to ensure consistency (i.e., criteria used, pool of books considered, length of lists).
However, I still think best-of lists are an interesting data source worthy of analysis. By combining many sources of recommendations in a category, my goal is to create a slightly less biased best-of list that identifies the consistent favourites.
At the end of the day, this is all for fun! Another way to help readers discover new romance books.
Let me know what you think! 💜
Love the concept! A similar list for indie romance books would also be cool🤩
I think this is a great idea. I would suggest you let people have someplace they can submit books they’ve read too so you can expand your library faster and capture books you wouldn’t have had otherwise. It’s an easy way to get more books into your system with efficiency.