Which Administrations Have Performed Better with the Economy?

 A Long Introduction. (An Aside)

As readers of this blog know, I like to use primary sources of information to examine important questions. For example, is violent crime increasing along the US-Mexican border? I bring this subject up, before I get to the economy, both as an example of the detail of my work and, because I spent so many hours on it, I wanted it to again see the light of day. 

Violent Crime Rate, US, 1985 through 2014. 
FBI Uniform Crime Reporting statistics

I looked at the question of violence along the US-Mexican border through 2016, the end of the Obama presidency. 

The FBI has maintained a database of crime that began in the days of Bonnie and Clyde and which came in its current form in the 1960s. During the Trump administration this reporting was greatly cut (70% fewer tables) including many of the tables I used in my calculations. During the Biden administration the definitions of crimes were changed leading to a low reporting rate nationwide, and which made comparisons to the past into apples versus oranges. I mention these two recent changes to explain why I haven't updated the analysis since 2016 data.

For the border crime analysis, I took advantage of the fact that, through 2016, the FBI reported in detail crime statistics in all cities with a population of at least 100,000. For the US-Mexican border this meant five cities: Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, El Paso (all Texas) and San Diego (California). I looked at violent crimes overall, along with murders and rapes as separate categories. In nearly every instance violent crimes, murders and rapes were way down (38 to 83% lower in each city) from their peak in the 90s and 00s. The one exception was the rate per population of rapes in Laredo (down 6% from its peak, but up in recent years). El Paso proved to be one of the safest cities in the country for its population.

In contrast, and I have no explanation, the three US cities with over 100,000 that border Canada, Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester, showed an increase in violent crime. In general, across the US, while urban crime has gone way down overall, rural crime has gone way up: likely because of the shifting of the opioid epidemic to rural communities.

I'll admit I have a liberal bias going into these analyses. However, I always let the data say what they say. 

I ask questions that reflect my interests. Growing up near the Mexican border (and I did live a bit of everywhere), I was told in the seventies how the modern evil illegal aliens were criminals, not like the good ones before. My grandfather told me that people said the same thing back in the fifties when they had Operation Wetback (the official US Government name) created to cleanse the nation of Mexicans.

In my first job after graduating college, I worked with immigrants. At that time they came from Cuba, Ethiopia, Haiti and Latin America. When I griped in their presence about the crazies in the US government, they told me how wonderful the United States was. "Try living under Castro, Idi Amin, Baby Doc, etc." Their patriotism was humbling. It is sad that we are so reluctant to let in refugees from Syria, Ukraine, and other locations. These are not like past refugees, I'm told. These are modern evil ones.

Which Administrations Perform Better With the Economy?

Compared to any other analyses I've done, this one is huge. I do these analyses in my spare time and they take months for individual questions. In this case, there are lot of questions to address and I've spent years.

Firstly, there are a lot of measures of economic health. I brainstormed the following: employment/unemployment/job creation (a bundle of related subjects), change in deficit/national debt, inflation, the presence of recessions/depressions, the stock market, median income, poverty rate, tax rates. . .

Once I had the measure, I needed to find and choose a definition. This was not easy. Unemployment rate has several definitions. I am only human and did not want to do an analysis for each definition. With unemployment and other markers, I chose the most commonly used definition. I do talk about the limitations of the particular definition. 

My next task was to find the databases with the information. The US Government has kept a lot of statistics for crime (described above), and the economy. With an issue like the US debt/deficit there are a number of watchdog sites that cite the US government information but also break down the information into more detail: for example, monthly changes rather than just fiscal year or annual.

For my analysis of the stock market figures, quite a few financial investment institutions provide databases. I came across one that had the daily Dow Jones figures going back to the 1800s. Unfortunately, I lost my download and the link is broken, so my overall analyses go back to 1901. 

With this long introduction, I will begin by posting an analysis of administrations versus stock market performance. Why did I begin with stock market? My sister, the only financially successful family member out of the nine of us (siblings and parents), had me fascinated in this topic. She was a senior vice president for Morgan Stanley before her recent retirement. What can I say? She was the only one among us smart enough to drop out of college. I got a PhD.

Measuring the Performance of the Stock Market

There are three major indices (and hundreds of minor ones) that measure stock market performance: the Dow Jones Industrials, Standard & Poor's 500, and NASDAQ. With the exception of my overall analysis, I performed my study using the Dow Jones numbers.

Why the Dow Jones? The first answer is something I lean on again and again. I picked one. I could do the analysis using the Dow Jones and again using the Standard & Poor's but it would double my time. NASDAQ, triple.

Second, the Dow Jones has been around so long that I am able to look at over half the nation's history.

Third, although the Dow Jones is narrow in its focus (30 biggest stocks) and is considered inferior to the Standard & Poor's 500, over time it has maintained a remarkable correspondence with the Standard & Poor's performance.

Yes, the Dow Jones does drop businesses and does add others. So do the other indices. Only General Electric is still around from the Dow Jones' initial group. The National Buggy Whip Company is no longer relevant.*

*This is an old gag from the days of the Beverly Hillbillies. The Clampetts bought stock in the National Buggy Whip Company which suddenly became relevant again because of the mysterious new owner who bought the company at too high a price -- and who turned out to be the Clampetts. Sort of like the Musk-Twitter story. 

Compared to measures of other markers of economic growth, the Dow Jones is daily, the exceptions being weekends and holidays and several months when it was shut down at the start of World War I (and for a brief time after 9/11). Other measures of the economy are limited to once a month reports, quarterly, or even once a year. 

Dow Jones is reported as opening figures, closing figures and peak daily figures. I used opening figures although most days they usually didn't change much from the closing. Interestingly, during Obama's administration the Dow Jones never hit 20,000. It peaked at 19,999.63 on January 6, 2017. I believe I erred a few times and mixed in closing figures and introduced minor discrepancies.

Presidential Performance for Dow Jones.

I chose presidential performance as the marker. This was defined by the date of inauguration to the date of the end of the presidency, usually by stepping down, or sometimes due to death by illness or assassination. I looked at the president and president alone. 

I didn't check other political markers such as who controlled the Senate or House or both. That makes for a complicated analysis. Sometimes when the split was narrow, even a single death or resignation could change the party in charge, once in the fifties, several times within a two year period. There could have been a lot of combinations such as when a single party controlled the White House and Congress or one chamber of Congress or neither chamber. Too many possibilities / analyses.

I followed the creed of "The Buck Stops Here." Sometimes the stock market had a wonky performance due to an outside crisis that was beyond the control of the president. COVID-19, the oil crisis of the 1970s (or 2020s), etc. I didn't grade on a curve for difficulty. I wouldn't know how.

I am reporting percentage changes in the Dow Jones numbers. Absolute changes mean little to nothing. If the Dow Jones was at 200 and increased to 250, that's a 50 point ord 25% increase. That is a much better performance than if the Dow Jones was at 5000 and increased to 5100. The latter example is a 100 point increase but only 2%. Percentage changes are the only way to keep the playing field even between presidencies and different times.

   

First the figures for performances of all presidents who started their presidencies since 1901 beginning with Teddy Roosevelt (in September after McKinley's assassination). This first analysis looked at the whole of their terms in office. Biden's numbers are up to December 2, 2022. This analysis has 13 Republicans and 9 Democrats.

The Entire Term in Office.

The increases are additional. For example, if a number says 100%, that is doubling the number in the index.

Dow Jones

Rank, President, (party), %increased/decreased

1. Calvin Coolidge, (R), +260.6

2. Bill Clinton, (D), +225.2

3. Franklin Roosevelt, (D), +201.6

4. Barack Obama, (D), +138.3

5. Ronald Reagan, (R), +130.6

6. Dwight Eisenhower, (R), +120.4

7. Harry S. Truman, (D), +81.1

8. Donald J. Trump, (R), +56.4

9. William McKinley, (R), +52.2

10. George H.W. Bush, (R), +45.4

11. Theodore Roosevelt, (R), +45.1

12. Lyndon B. Johnson, (D), +31.5

13. Woodrow Wilson, (D), +26.7

14. Gerald Ford, (R), +23.4

15. Warren G. Harding, (R), +17.6

16. John F. Kennedy, (D), +12.5

17. Joseph Biden (as of December 2, 2022), (D), +10.4

18. Jimmy Carter, (D), +0.2

19. William Howard Taft, (R), -0.1

20. Richard Nixon, (R), -16.1

21. George W. Bush, Jr., (R), -21.8

22. Herbert Hoover, (R), -83.5

Calvin Coolidge led the roaring 20s boom and Hoover held the bag for the crash. That is not to say that Coolidge and Hoover were not, in part, masters of their opposing fates. It is generally agreed that Hoover made the depression worse. FDR performed so well in part because he started so low. Still, to give credit to FDR, he not only didn't make it worse, he much improved the situation. The invention of bank insurance restored faith in the banking system. World War II, which brought near complete employment, was not that important in helping FDRs numbers. Almost all of his increases came before the war. (more below)

Clinton was remarkable for making increases when starting from an already strong economy. Having George Bush, Sr. and Reagan as lead ins to Clinton, still did well.

I am not the first person to find that Democrats outperform Republicans in the stock market. With Coolidge, Republicans do have first place, but they also have three very bad performers taking up last place: Hoover (ending in depression), Bush, Jr. (ending in the worst recession since the depression), and Nixon. 

War doesn't appear to be good for the Dow Jones. Non-war presidents: Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Calvin Coolidge, and Theodore Roosevelt were all in the top 11. Two more in the top 10, Eisenhower and Obama inherited wars and had them end (Korea for the former, for the latter one war, Iraq). Trump inherited a war, Afghanistan, which continued through his presidency. Although FDR had a remarkable increase overall (201.6%), most of this took place in his first two terms. From his third term (1941, World War II) to his death, the Dow Jones went up by 22.1%. Wilson during his second term (U.S. involvement in World War I) had a loss of -20.9%. LBJ had a 4.4% increase during his second term, during the escalation of the Vietnam War, much lower than his pre-war performance.

The Whole Term, S & P.

S & P 500

The S & P 500 began its index in 1957, so this list is abbreviated. Here's a ranking of how well the presidents have done in regards to performance.

Standard and Poor's 500

Rank, President, (party), %increased/decreased

1. Bill Clinton, (D), +209.8

2. Barack Obama, (D), +166.4

3. Ronald Reagan, (R), +133.1

4. Donald Trump (R)  +68.1

5. George H.W. Bush, (R), +51.2

6. Lyndon B. Johnson, (D), +42.5

7. Dwight Eisenhower (1957-61), (R), +36.1

8. Jimmy Carter, (D), +29.4

9. Gerald Ford, (R), +25.7

10. John F. Kennedy, (D), +19.4

11. Joseph Biden (D through December 2, 2022) 5.9%

12. Richard Nixon, (R), -19.0

13. George W. Bush, Jr., (R), -36.7

With this more recent period, we've lost the data from FDR, Coolidge, Hoover, and many of the major movers from the Dow Jones list. This has changed the rankings (fewer competition), but with the exception of Carter, who performed much better on the S & P than on the Dow Jones, the general degree of change was maintained.

The First Four Years.

To some extent, whole terms make for an unfair comparison. You may note that the above leaders were those who had been in office for more than one term. Also, such presidents such as JFK had their terms end prematurely. Why should someone who had the opportunity of over 12 years (Franklin D Roosevelt) be compared to someone who had an opportunity of less than three (Harding, Kennedy, Ford, and so far, Biden). Having found not much difference for the S & P, this analysis and the future ones are only for the Dow Jones. 

Here are how how the 17 presidents since 1900 who served for at least four years ranked when compared to each other measured at their four year time points. This list excludes Gerald Ford, John F. Kennedy, Warren Harding, and Biden.

Despite what looks like large total numbers, Trump is in seventh place, the middle being ninth place. Out of the last six presidents from Reagan on, he is ahead of Bush I and II and Reagan, but behind Clinton and Obama. 

1. FD Roosevelt (D) +255.9%

2. Clinton (D) +111.1%

3. Coolidge (R) +110.4%

4. Obama (D) +72.5%

5. Eisenhower (R) +65.8%

6. Wilson (D) +57.0%

7. Trump (R) +56.4%

8. Bush Sr. (R) +45.4%

9. Reagan (R) +32.7%

10. Johnson (D) +22.8% 

11. T. Roosevelt (R) +19.7%

12. Truman (D) +11.7%

13. Nixon (R) +10.2%

14. Carter (D) +0.2%

15. Taft (R) -0.1%

16. Bush Jr. (R) -1.1%

17. Hoover (R) -83.5%

Next time: More on the presidential comparisons looking at how the Dow Jones Index progressed during their terms so as to look at the first six months, one year, etc.

Martin Hill Ortiz is also the author of over 45 short stories, three novels, and one novella. His epic poem, Two Mistakes, won second place in the Margaret Reid/Tom Howard Poetry Competition. He can be contacted at mdhillortiz@gmail.com. His website is mdhillortiz.com.

 

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Don't Count Words; Make Words Count, Part Two

Word Counts of Successful Middle-Grade Novels by Rookie Authors

In my prior post, I looked at the word counts of fifty of the most popular middle-grade novels published between 2001 and 2014 and compared their lengths to guidelines that are given to would-be authors. In general, over 50% of the books were outside the length of the guidelines.

The former post only dealt with part of the issue of word counts, with most of the novels written by established authors. While this does provide a sense of what the audience is willing to read, for the author completing or else trying to sell his or her first middle-grade novel, the length of the sixth installment in the Harry Potter series is of little relevance. A more pressing matter is: what were the lengths of the debut novels of middle-grade authors?

I used very restrictive criteria to assemble a database to analyze this question.

• The book must have been published in the last twenty years.
• The novel was the first book published by the author. I strictly did not allow for authors who had previously published even though there are several prominent authors who began publishing middle-aged fiction immediately after a single young adult or adult fiction book (e.g., Lemony Snicket and Rick Riordan). These authors (probably) already had an agent.
• The book must have been successful. Success was defined in the previous post (New York Times Bestseller, recent Newbery winner, or most recognized in its genre at Goodreads, typically 100,000 or more ratings). Or:
• I did allow for authors who became successful from subsequent books, i.e., the first book was seen as the calling card for talent. In these cases, I traced a bestselling middle-grade author back to that author's first published book and added it to the list if it was a middle-grade book.
• The author did not enter with a big platform.

For this database, I was able to find 22 novels. These were:

In my previous post, I also identified three sets of guidelines that are commonly used to define the proper size of middle-grade novels.

• Writer's Digest: 20,000–55,000.
• Word Count Dracula. Realistic Middle Grade: 25,000-60,000 words. Fantasy Middle Grade: 35,000-75,000 words. 
• Literary Rejections: 25,000 to 40,000.

So, how many of these first-time efforts fit into the guidelines?

Writer's Digest: 45.5%
Word Count Dracula: 59.1%
Literary Rejections: 13.4%

If these guidelines were taken as law, all of them would have rejected Seesaw Girl, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Wonder, The Goose Girl, The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had, The School for Good and Evil, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, and Moon Over Manifest. Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn Dixie, Rump, and A Snicker of Magic, did not fit two out of three of the recommended guidelines.

Conclusions.

For the most part, word count guidelines don't represent what is being published. In the case of the restrictive guidelines from Literary Rejections, they only serve to provoke anxiety. Use common sense. It will be easier for you if work is near to conventional norms because unconventional works are harder to sell, but this is a less important element than having a great work to sell.

To phrase it in another way, as I said when I began this analysis, Don't Count Words: Make Words Count. I cannot say whether word count hindered the acceptance of the above set of books, but the talent they represented was ultimately recognized and they were published. Aim for that level of talent.

Martin Hill Ortiz is the author of three mysteries for adults, each between 55 and 70K words: one published, one due out June 27th, and one to come out at the end of the year. He has a pair of unpublished middle grade novels which fall into accepted guidelines.

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Don't Count Words: Make Words Count

This post deals with the recommended length of middle-grade fiction. As I will attempt to show, for both well-established and first-time authors, the guidelines do not correspond to the length of successful books. Rather than approaching this issue through examples or anecdotes, I systematically assembled a database with the intent to include all of the most successful middle-grade fiction novels from the past 15 years.

Book Length Angst

The pursuit of the proper book length torments would-be authors, an anguish they convey to agents and publishers whom they see as the austere gatekeepers who guard the entrance to the promised land of page and ink. In order to herd the fledgling authors and to salve their troubled souls, internet magi offer word count guidelines.

Foremost, the guidelines are presented to provide a sense of what can and cannot sell. They are said to represent a facile, albeit imperfect, means by which eccentric submissions are winnowed out.

Nearly all of these advice-givers include these two bits of wisdom at the margins: Don't take the guidelines too literally and use common sense.

Don't get caught up in word count to stick to category norms. Then again, don't submit a manuscript that's 150,000 words either. But straying 10k in either direction is totally fine. From: http://www.dystel.com/category/middle-grade/

In spite of these caveats, the most restrictive of guidelines are presented as being authoritative, when all they do is provoke unnecessary anxiety.

Comparing Actual Word Counts to Guidelines

Where do the numbers in word count guidelines come from? Often, no sources are given. I suspect in some cases, the origin is an accumulated wisdom coming from poring over thousands of manuscripts. Other times, it seems to be repeating something someone else has declared as law. In a few instances the guideline author provides word counts from a list of books, drawing on classic and recent examples from a particular genre.

One of the ongoing themes of my website is the question of how long actual novels are and whether they fit into the common guidelines. I have addressed this question already regarding mystery novels and have found that, contrary to what the guidelines recommend, among bestsellers, the short mystery novel is alive and well. I am continuing this analysis to look at a subject close to my heart: middle-grade books. I set out to determine: How long is the modern middle-grade book?

Assembling a Set of Successful Middle-Grade Novels for Analysis (2001 to the Present).

Rather than looking at the length of all-time classics, I decided to focus on recent, successful middle-grade prose fiction. Limited to prose and fiction, I excluded the occasional guide (The Care and Keeping of You) and poetry books. I used three sources. Firstly, since December 2012, the New York Times has run a separate middle-grade bestseller list. I also sampled their Children's Series list for the middle-grade entries. To limit the number of books in my analysis, I selected the most successful: those with at least 25 weeks on one of the two lists.

As a second source, I included the middle grade Newbery winners from 2010 to 2015. While the Newbery Awards have received some notoriety for celebrating virtually unread books, this reputation hasn't been deserved as of late. In the last seven years the primary winners have included the runaway bestsellers: The One and Only Ivan; Flora and Ulysses; The Graveyard Book and When You Reach Me.

My final source was Goodreads. I pored over the fifty books most commonly "shelved" as middle grade fiction. I added to my analysis any of these published since 2000 which had not already been included in my list. These are popular books: even the 50th entry received over 100,000 ratings.

To prevent any one author (e.g., Riordan) from dominating the list and skewing the results, I limited the number of books per author to a maximum of three. For these three I chose the author's two most recent bestsellers and the debut book in the series. I divided the entries up into reality and fantasy. Most often this was an easy call. My reference list totaled a nice round 50 middle-grade novels published between 2001 and 2014 (median year: 2011). I used this database to answer the more general question: what are the lengths of the best-selling books*. A second database, discussed in my next post, will look at the question which is of greater interest to authors still seeking to get published: how long were the successful middle-grade books by recent first-time authors?

The Guidelines Examined.

I compared my database to three sets of guidelines for middle-grade book length.

To summarize the rules put forth by Chuck Sambuchino, Editor of Writers Digest:

"Middle grade is from 20,000–55,000, depending on the subject matter and age range... With upper middle grade, you can aim for 40,000–55,000 words. ... With a simpler middle grade idea (Football Hero, or Jenny Jones and the Cupcake Mystery) ... shoot for 20,000–35,000 words."

A popular entry in this field is from Jennifer Laughlin of Andrea Brown Literary Agency in her post, Word Count Dracula. I applaud her for offering up more generous guidelines and separating out realistic from fantasy.

"Realistic Middle Grade: 25,000-60,000 words. Sweet spot: 30,000-45,000 ...
Fantasy Middle Grade: 35,000-75,000 words. Sweet spot: 45,000-65,000"

The cruelest of corsets comes from the Literary Rejections website:

"Middle Grade: 25,000 to 40,000–Such a tight restraint can be beneficial to a writer because it allows them to demonstrate their ability to edit accordingly. For debut books in this field the average word count tends to be 35K and it has therefore become the marker many industry professionals look for in queries from new writers."

The Results

Since I am addressing the question of whether the guidelines fairly describe the length of middle-grade books, the average is unimportant. A 15,000 word book together with a 120,000 word book average out to be 67,500 words, but neither fall within the guidelines and both could well be considered hard-to-sell. The important metric is to examine how many books fall inside and outside of these guidelines.

Without taking into account extenuating factors (below), 23 out of 50 (46%) of the books were within the Writers' Digest guidelines. This figure increased to 24 (48%) for the Word Count Dracula guidelines even though this offered a broader range and took into account fantasy versus reality. Only 26% of the books fell within the restrictive Literary Rejections guidelines.

Percent of Successful Middle-Grade Novels That Fit the Lengths Offered by Popular Guidelines, 2001-2014.

 Guideline Source      % within guidelines
Literary Rejections          26%     
Writer's Digest              46%    
Word Count Dracula           48%   


One matter which the guidelines did not take into account were graphic heavy books such as those by Jeff Kinney which ring in at 19K words. (Although, equally graphic heavy books by Rachel Renee Russell and the I, Funny series fall within the recommended counts.) Another explanation for these anomalous book lengths comes from the issue of author platform.

Platforms Big and Long.

This first analysis is not directed at the works by newbie authors. Many of the authors on the list had already built an audience among middle-grade readers (a long platform) or else were famous going into the field (a big platform). An argument could be rightly made that these authors could come in with virtually any length manuscript and have it published.

For those not following popular middle grade books, they might be surprised to find the list of the bestselling authors includes John Grisham, James Patterson, Carl Hiaasen and Rush Limbaugh. Another bestseller entered the field with a big platform: the authors of the novelization of Disney's Frozen (Sarah Nathan and Sela Roman). To be fair, their runaway success was not solely due to the popularity of the movie: other Disney novelizations have not fared so well. A final member who entered the field with a big platform is Jeff Kinney, whose Wimpy Kid had an internet following in the millions before he published.

Another set of authors built their platforms based on prior success in the field, often through a series. J.K. Rowling and Rick Riordan have enormous followings. Both of these authors publish well above the range of word count guidelines.

In terms of the 50 books in my database, 17 were by authors with big platforms, 20 were by authors with long platforms, and 13 were by authors with little or no publishing history. The last group will be expanded and dealt with in my next post. The results are presented in the tables below.

                        Platform Size
Guideline Source      big (n=17)  long (n=20)
Literary Rejections      17.6%        30%
Writer's Digest          52.9%        45%
Word Count Dracula       52.9%        50%


One too-facile argument used by those defending the word count guidelines is "don't be blinded by the exceptions." J.K. Rowling, with her fan-base, could write whatever length book she wanted. But it is not just Rowling who has written middle-grade books that run over 100,000 words. So has Cornelia Funke, Rick Riordan, Soman Chainani and Trenton Lee Stewart (among others). Chainani was a first time author and Stewart had one prior, adult novel. The others were established authors, but their detailed world-building helped establish them. Perhaps it is time to rethink what length the middle-grade audience is willing to read.

Conclusions

When I started this analysis, I suspected that the large majority of middle-grade novels would fall into the guidelines and that Rowling would define the outliers. This was not the case. I approached this analysis thinking that word count anxiety was a silly concern of uninformed writers who are waiting to publish their first works. After running into the restrictive Literary Rejections advice, I've come to the conclusion that cruel and unrealistic restrictions are being recommended by some. 

The bottom line of common sense still applies. Write that great novel at the length it needs to be. Make it irresistible because, regardless of word count, you will encounter resistance in getting it published. Don't flout conventions, but don't let them hamstring you.

*To determine word counts for these analyses, I referenced Renaissance.com which maintains a massive database for most all popular children's books. Word count has a good degree of concurrence with unabridged audio book length and a poor correlation to page count. [Note: as of June 1, 2015 access to the Renaissance service has been discontinued.]

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New York Times Bestsellers: Genres, Then and Now

Sorting Out Genre.

I have pored through the 598 novels which made it to the number one position on the New York Times Adult Fiction Bestseller list between 1960 and 2015 sorting them into genres. This was a mind-numbing task with many judgment calls, so take the results with a grain of salt. When is a romance book also a mystery and, if a mystery, is it suspense/thriller? To categorize the novels, I used the publisher's descriptions, the summary descriptions in WorldCat or, occasionally GoodReads summaries along with my own impressions for those novels I had read. Many authors who are known for one genre appear in another, for example, The Black Mesa by Louis L'Amour, is science fiction.

I gave each book at most two classifications or else one classification and a sub-genre. A romance could be a mystery-romance or a suspense-romance, but not mystery-suspense-historical romance. A lot of the decisions came down to word-parsing. I chose the term suspense over thriller, it seemed to be more inclusive and was used more often in descriptions.

Since I allowed two descriptors per book, this means the cumulative classifications total up to be over 100%. 

I chose one or two of the following categories.

• General (high and low literature that is not primarily genre).
• Fantasy
• Horror
• Mystery
• Romance
• Science Fiction
• Suspense (including Thrillers)

Or else one of the above categories and one of the following subgenres.

• Epic
• Erotic
• Historical
• Domestic
• Humorous
• Inspirational
• Political
• Detective
• Legal
• Spy
• Western

I avoided some subgenre terms such as International (usually spy, politics or else just location), Psychological and Adventure (placed under Suspense). 

The Big Picture

Suspense
One lesson I learned while putting this together is that publishers like the word suspense. For the entire set of number one novels between 1960 and 2015, Suspense was the ruling genre with 265 entries (44.3%). This included mystery/suspense, romantic suspense, techno-thrillers, resurrected dinosaurs and invincible spies (although no resurrected invincible spy dinosaurs). Mysteries and Suspense overlapped, sharing 109 entries. Spies accounted for 40 novels and Suspense/Legal for 25.

Mysteries
Mysteries comprised 203 entries (33.9%). As mentioned above, this category greatly overlapped with Suspense (109). After Mystery/Suspense came Mystery-Detective (40) and Mystery-Humorous (21).

General literature.
General literature, often drama, comprised 113 entries (18.9%). Among these, historical literature made up 39, and domestic fiction 25.

Romance
Romance accounted for 100 novels (16.7%). Most commonly these were suspense or else domestic in theme.

Fantasy/Horror/Science Fiction (18.9%)
Fantasy accounted for 64 novels. Many of the 36 horror entries could also be placed in this category. Science fiction accounted for 13.

Recent Times.

Since 2010 there have been 141 novels in the number one position on the NYT Adult Fiction Bestseller List. The top genre is again Suspense, this time just eking out Mystery.

Suspense
There have been 70 novels with Suspense as a primary category. These have totaled 116 weeks in the number one position.

Mystery
Sixty-nine Mystery novels have made it to the number one position. They have stayed on top for 125 weeks with the two top sellers being Girl On A Train and Gone Girl. Mysteries are the shortest of the genres averaging 104,161 words. Twenty two of the mystery novels were under 80,000 words.


Romance
Romance has 25 entries for 67 weeks. Erotic romance is not a subgenre limited to Fifty Shades of Grey. Since Grey's debut another five erotic romance books have topped the list.

Fantasy/Horror/Science Fiction
These categories total 28 books, led by 18 Fantasies. Five epic fantasies (typified by Sanderson and/or Jordan and Martin) and two historical fantasies (Garabaldon) make up the lengthiest subgenre, averaging 393,757 words.

General literature
Thirteen general literature books took the number one spot, remaining in place for 42 weeks. The two most popular subgenres were historical and domestic.

Bottom line. Each category of genre fiction has increased or held its own while General literature has decreased.Mysteries have increased to the greatest degree.

Two categories were allowed for each book, therefore total percentages are greater than 100.

Continued with Ages of Authors.

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