As I was setting up my reading and blogging plans for this year, I was reviewing what I read last year and my overall satisfaction of those books and I realized a few things.

---

1. I HAVE to read more books by diverse authors. I thought I was doing well and I was not. I went through my spreadsheet and was ashamed at how Straight White Female it is.
2. I enjoyed adult books more than YA. Overall they had higher ratings and were the first to come to my mind when recommending things.
3. I need to read more debut and indie authors. Especially in this new world of publishing chaos and consolidation.

Goal 1 – 45% of reads are by diverse authors

There is no excuse this year. I know that my downfall is romance. I binge regency romance and shifter stuff and it is almost always written by straight white females. I started a spreadsheet tab where I can categorize recommendations and use that for my next reads. I also have a pie chart going so that I can see my proportions at a glance. This may seem a little extra, but I live off of tracking statistics. It’s what motivates me.

Please drop any recommendations you have in the comments!

Goal 2 – Read less YA

I spend too much time reading books that I don’t love. In 2020, 53% of the books I read were YA. Why would I read 66 books in a genre that I am falling out of love with? I don’t have a real statistic for this category, but I would like to have a higher proportion of New Adult and Adult reads next year.

Goal 3 – Pump up debut and indie authors

I want to read more debuts and indie books. This year the publishing industry took a hit and it hit new authors and indie authors really hard. We can’t afford to lose these vital voices and new perspectives. Otherwise we will be stuck with the same stuff over and over again. I love the stand-bys, but we need debuts and indie authors. Without them, we are just letting old publishing houses tell us what we like.

Never-Ending Buddy Read

Some friends and I have started a year-long buddy read to finish out the series that we need to finish. We just started with An Ember in the Ashes and will read together through A Sky Beyond the Storm. Then we are going to vote on the next series and so on. We do 50 pages a day to keep it manageable and hopefully can finish off some awesome series together!

---

How was your year? Let me know in the comments!

Follow me! 

Twitter || Goodreads || Instagram