Results: Goodreads Choice Awards 2016

Early November, I talked about the Goodreads Choice Awards in an earlier post. I showed you where to vote, who you could vote for and who I voted for. Over the course of the month of November, no less than 3.562.283 votes were cast. Now the results have come in and it’s time to look at the winners!

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Of course I was also really curious to find out which of the books I helped reach the first place. I got three of them right:

• Mystery & Thriller: End of Watch by Stephen King
• Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by John Tiffany & Jack Thorne (my review here)
• Graphic Novels & Comics: Adulthood Is a Myth by Sarah Andersen

Strangely, only Fantasy is a genre that I read regularly and here my vote for Harry Potter was obvious. I don’t read a lot of graphic novels or comic books at all, yet I got that category right purely based on the cover. Same goes for mystery & thriller, I voted for Stephen King because he was the only author who I had already read something from.

Next, I went to check if my picks ended up anywhere near the top 3. Here are those results:

• Fiction: All the Ugly and Wonderful Things in 2nd place with 27.917 votes
• Mystery & Thriller: End of Watch in 1st place with 42.382 votes
• Historical Fiction: Three Sisters, Three Queens in 7th place with 13.209 votes
• Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 1st place with 128.543 votes
• Romance: Because of Miss Bridgerton in 6th place with 18.617 votes
• Science Fiction: The Long Cosmos in 4th place with 14.139 votes
• Horror: Ink and Bone in 4th place with 17.421 votes
• Humour: Scrappy Little Nobody in 2nd place with 23.353 votes
• Nonfiction: The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction in 2nd place with 15.324 votes
• Memoir & Autobiography: The Only Pirate at the Party in 2nd place with 18.412 votes
• History & Biography: Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars in 4th place with 12.995 votes
• Science & Technology: Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To in 7th place with 6.957 votes
• Food & Cookbooks: Layered: Baking, Building, and Styling Spectacular Cakes in 5th place with 10.387 votes
• Graphic Novels & Comics: Adulthood Is a Myth in 1st place with 32.937
• Poetry: Beautiful and Damned in 8th place with 5.888 votes
• Debut Goodreads Author: The Star-Touched Queen in 3rd place with 71.345 votes
• Young Adult Fiction: The Unexpected Everything in 5th place with 16.209 votes
• Young Adult Fantasy: Heartless in 9th place with 14.138 votes
• Middle Grade & Children’s: Pax in 2nd place with 17.372 votes
• Picture Books: A Child of Books in 6th place with 9.541 votes

In most categories, the votes were evenly spread out (at least in the top 3 books) but there were also some categories where there was a very obvious winner. Most notably in the Fantasy category: the second book had only 38.615 votes while the winner got 128.543 votes. The difference was less big but still obvious in the categories of Humour, Nonfiction, Graphic Novels & Comics and Middle Grade & Children’s.

And finally I took a look at the total number of votes each category got to figure out which genre is read most and least on Goodreads.

Now I must say these results didn’t really surprise me. The top three was very much expected since these genres are really booming lately and since these target groups are arguably also online the most. The bottom four were no surprise either, however I did expect much more voting for cookbooks as they are quite successful commercially. But when I thought about it a little more I understood why: cookbooks are bought a lot by people who don’t really read books. Obviously, these people wouldn’t be on Goodreads since it’s a website specifically for readers. And I can understand that it is also quite difficult to rate cookbooks (I voted purely based on the title for example).

So, did you vote? And did your top picks end up with a lot of votes? I’d be happy to read about it in the comment section!

Happy reading,

Loes M.