Frequestly Asked Questions

The purpose of the Best of Romance Books directory is to help romance readers find their next 5-star read by providing a curated list of top romance books that can be easily searched and filtered by many different parameters like genre, spice level, representation, Kindle Unlimited eligibility and more.

The book rankings are based on meta-analysis of published best-of lists in different categories. I analyze a variety of best-of lists to see which books appeared on the most lists and can be called the "best of the best". Learn more about the methodology .

A meta-analysis is the combination of results from two or more separate datasets. In this case, I'm combining the results of multiple best-of lists.

Not very! 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 the best" 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.

To date, I've create four (you can see them in the filters). I going to continue creatings new ones for each year, plus lists for other subgenres and categories.

Romancing the Data is my main blog (on Substack) where I talk about all things romance and data, sharing charts, graphs, lists, rankings and more. I created the Best of Romance Books directory, so that readers could more easily search and filter the results of all my Best of the Best lists (which I will continue to add to!).

Because I'm Canadian, eh! 🇨🇦