Play 2026 Book Bingo
2026 Reader Survey Results and a Look Behind the Scenes
We can’t thank you enough for taking the time to complete the survey and share your thoughts, opinions, and preferences with us. We’ve spent this week poring over the results of our 2026 Reader Survey, and we thought you might also be interested in seeing some of the data.
We value the time you spend taking our survey each year, and your input absolutely informs our decision-making. There are also many other factors at play as we plan for the future of The Book Girls’ Guide, including how AI is changing the landscape for websites like ours, and we’re sharing some behind-the-scenes details on those issues right below the survey data.
Reader Survey Results
Reader Demographics
A total of 1,010 of our subscribers filled out the 2026 Reader Survey. While 96% of you live in the United States, readers from 12 other countries also participated in the survey.
Our community has readers spanning generations, from twenty-somethings to nonagenarians, with a pretty even mix in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Reading Habits
It can feel like everyone else has more time to read than you do, especially when you see those end-of-month collages with tons of book covers in the Facebook group. But the truth is that reading habits vary widely, and no matter where you fall, you’re in good company.
Genres Our Readers Enjoy
We love seeing that our readers enjoy a very wide range of genres! This is a breakdown of the responses when we asked what genres you enjoy reading regularly:
We then asked you to narrow it down to your top three – the genres that you are most drawn to and read most frequently. When forced to play favorites, historical fiction is the clear winner, with 52% of our readers listing historical fiction set after 1900 as one of their favorite genres, and another 22% listing pre-1900s HF in their top three.
Reading Formats
We asked you to tell us all of the book formats that you use regularly. We’re glad to see that printed books still get so much love! Eighty percent of you say you hold a physical book in your hands on a regular basis. But of course, you can’t beat the convenience of ebooks, and audiobooks allow many of us to multitask and enjoy far more titles than we could otherwise.
We learned that most of you continue to utilize more than one book format in your reading. While the percentage of readers who say they regularly read print and ebooks has remained very consistent across our annual surveys, over the past four years, we have seen a 10% increase in the number of readers who say they enjoy listening to audiobooks.
Accessing Books
When curating our book recommendation lists, especially those related to our reading challenges, we always take into account the availability of titles across various formats and whether the books are readily available in libraries.
We’ve always had the impression that a large percentage of our readers rely on their local libraries to access books, but this was the first year we specifically asked about it in the survey. Of course, it’s no surprise that among a group of voracious readers, you’ve accessed books from a wide range of sources over the past year:
When we asked you to tell us which method of accessing books you use most often, the results confirm that libraries remain an absolutely vital part of our communities! Sixty-five percent of you told us that the library is your number one source of books, with 37% preferring to use apps like Libby and Hoopla to borrow digital or audio copies and 28% preferring to pick up print copies from your local branch.
Reading Challenges
Our yearlong and mini reading challenges remain as popular as ever, with a whopping 79% of survey respondents participating in at least one of our challenges this year. Nearly half of all respondents are participating in our new 2026 Book Bingo, and 49% are participating in more than one challenge.
Ninety-four percent of survey respondents say they plan to participate in at least one of our yearlong reading challenges next year. Additionally, more than 40% of you say you plan to participate in at least one mini-challenge next year. We’ll continue to update our seasonal mini-challenges, and we have some other fun mini-challenges in mind that we think you’d enjoy!
What’s Next for The Book Girls’ Guide and How Do We Keep Things Afloat in the World of AI?
We’re excited to use all of your comments from the 2026 Reader Survey to keep improving over the next year. But we also have to face some tough realities about running a website amid the rise of AI.
It’s been a dream come true to turn our passion for books from a fun little side project into a robust community of like-minded readers. But that growth has come with strains on both our time and our resources. In addition to analyzing all of the Reader Survey data this week, we’ve also been digging into our website analytics and taking a hard look at income and expense trends.
Over the years, you’ve expressed interest in learning more about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into running The Book Girls’ Guide, so we want to be transparent about what it takes to keep things going.
Income Sources & the Impacts of AI
Until 2025, our income came mostly from the ads you see on the site, funded by new readers finding us through Google and Pinterest. On average, we’ve made $57 per 1,000 website visits (just under 6 cents per person who visits to read a book list). We also earn a small percentage on books purchased through Amazon or Bookshop.org when you click through from our site.
Before the major technology shift to AI, we were on a sustainable path. Even though we needed a large number of monthly readers to make the site financially viable, our traffic was growing in the right direction. The more helpful book lists and challenges we created, the more readers would find us, and the more we’d be able to replace the salaries we earned in our previous careers.
Then, Google started recommending books directly in search results instead of pointing readers to sites like ours, often using recommendations pulled from our own lists. Visits to our site (and our income) started to drop. And then AI exploded. Readers now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others for book recommendations instead of searching for them and finding us. Those tools often draw on our work, too, without compensating us in any way.
The traffic to our website has now dropped year over year, even though we are working more than ever. Ad income is down 38% since 2024, and Amazon/Bookshop.org income is down 49%. We’re barely breaking even at the modest salary we reached in 2024. Thankfully, we’ve kept a business emergency fund, so we haven’t had to cut our pay, but it’s getting harder to justify the hours we’re spending given the decreased return.
We’ve faced a similar dilemma with the printable book club kits we created for sale on Etsy. We were among the first sellers of printable discussion guides, and it created a nice supplemental revenue stream. Soon, however, numerous other sellers started making them modeled exactly on ours, but using AI to generate all the discussion questions and other content instead of reading the book themselves. Sometimes they even buy our guides and then relist them as their own. We’ve worked with other legitimate sellers to report the thieves, but it’s an ongoing battle.
The Support of Our Members Keeps Us Going
The one thing that’s kept us afloat through all these challenges is our Buy Me a Coffee membership program. As ad revenue and Etsy income fell, membership grew to fill the gap, and memberships now make up 54% of our income, which has kept us going.
We’ve had to acknowledge that our business model has changed and become more like PBS. The Book Girls’ Guide is a resource many people enjoy for free, kept alive by the members who choose to support it. So consider this our version of a PBS telethon.
That said, we want to pause to emphasize that it’s very important to us that people can see our lists and participate in our challenges at no cost. Reading is a comfort in hard times, and finances shouldn’t be a barrier to it. We are more than happy to have you participate even if you are not a member. We still benefit from you reading our book lists, and we value you.
To our BFF and Inner Circle members: THANK YOU. You are, quite literally, the reason Book Girls’ Guide is still here. Every list, every challenge, and every recommendation keeps happening because of you.
If you’ve been on the fence about joining, we want you to know that each member truly makes a difference.
BFF members pay either $5/month or $50/year and, as a thank you, receive monthly printable book lists for our challenges, a monthly book giveaway entry, and printable trackers for our Author Guides and Favorite Books of the Year.
Inner Circle members pay either $10/month or $100/year and get all the BFF-level perks plus early access to new challenges, printable lists for every new book list, live Book Chats as part of an exclusive genre reading challenge, and a bonus giveaway entry.
You can also make a one-time donation as a Buy Me a Coffee supporter, in any amount.
However you choose to support us, whether by reading our posts, sharing our challenges with friends, or supporting us financially, we thank you for being part of this special community.
What Do We Do With Your Feedback?
The feedback you provide during our annual reader survey helps us decide how to improve everything we do, from the design of our website and the content of our book lists to the format of our newsletters and the benefits of our membership program.
We’re already brainstorming new ideas based on your 2026 Reader Survey responses, but in the meantime, we wanted to highlight some of the improvements we made to The Book Girls’ Guide based on your feedback in our last survey.
We Expanded Our Read Around the USA Challenge
When we first launched the Read Around the USA Challenge, we wanted it to be a challenge you could complete by reading one book a month over the course of a single year. In the first year of the challenge, we broke the USA into 10 regions (plus a month for the inhabited territories and another month for books about traveling through multiple states). For each U.S. region, we initially provided 5-6 book recommendations per state.
Many of you told us that you wanted to continue reading your way around the U.S. with the goal of eventually reading a book from each and every state. Based on that feedback, we spent all of last year creating expanded book recommendation lists for every state, releasing one per week throughout the year, in addition to all our other new content.
We’re Giving You More of the Genres You Love
Each year, the survey has reiterated our readers’ love of historical fiction. While the HF-focused Decades Reading Challenge is now in its 7th year, we want to do something new for our historical fiction fans this year.
In honor of America’s Semiquincentennial, we launched a mini challenge called “Read Through 250 Years of US History.” This reading challenge has six reading prompts (plus two bonus prompts) focused on pivotal time periods in American history. While each book recommendation list for this challenge includes both fiction and non-fiction titles, it was designed with our historical fiction fans in mind!
In the first years of our survey, we asked broadly about whether you enjoyed reading mysteries and thrillers. Once we started breaking the question down further, we began to learn more about your preferences for various subgenres. For example, we now know that half of you enjoy reading cozy mysteries.
With that in mind, we’ve made an effort to add at least one cozy mystery title to each of our themed book lists. With the help of one of our wonderful readers who is passionate about this genre, we were even able to ensure that the book list for each US state contains a cozy mystery (with some featuring 3 or 4).
We’ve Improved Our Email Newsletter Format and Added New Challenge-Specific Emails
Since the beginning, we’ve tried to make our Friday email newsletter a useful tool for finding links to all of our new content and following along with the challenges. But over time, as we expanded our content and offered more challenges, we struggled with how to get everything in without making the newsletter feel overwhelming. Your feedback confirmed how we were feeling, so we decided it was time to shake things up.
In October of 2025, Angela flew to Melissa’s house in Tulsa, and we spent a full week figuring out how to make the emails both more helpful and enjoyable. We upgraded to a more robust email platform that not only allows prettier and more streamlined formatting but also allows for customization.
In order to keep the Friday emails from getting too overwhelming, we now share the info for all of our monthly challenge prompts in a separate email that goes out on the third Monday of each month. Thanks to the magic of our new email system, we are able to customize that email so that it’s tailored just for you! Now you only receive info about the challenges you have signed up for.
For those participating in one or more of the challenges, we also added a new email on the first day of each month with quick challenge reminders – again, customized just to those you are registered for.
We Now Offer Printable Versions of Every Book List to Our Inner Circle Members
One of the things you were consistently asking for in our reader surveys was more printable book lists. While every one of the book recommendation lists (complete with book summaries and other details) is always available free on our website, many of you also wanted one-page printable versions.
A few years ago, we created a membership program and offered printable versions of all the challenge book lists to our BFFs—members who pay $5/month or $50/year to support our work.
Based on your continued feedback, we added a second membership tier. Now our Inner Circle Members (those who pay $10/month or $100/year) receive printable versions of every newly published or newly updated book list, as well as other fun perks.
We Now Release the Book List for the Newest Challenge a Week Sooner for Our Inner Circle Members
The creation of the Inner Circle membership also allowed us to provide other perks that you’d been asking for in the Reader Survey. IC members now receive the book recommendation list for the new 2026 challenge one week before it is released to everyone else. This lets IC members plan further ahead and get a jump-start on library waitlists.
We Host Regular Live Book Chats With Our Inner Circle Members
This is an especially fun one! Over the years, readers had made a range of suggestions via the annual survey, ranging from a Book Girls podcast to in-person meet-ups. While neither of those is currently feasible, we started hosting live book chats (via Google Meet). Our Inner Circle members have the option to join live or watch the recorded replay.
For 2026, we expanded the live book chat concept even further to create a Genre Book Club. We selected five distinct genres, and our Inner Circle members are voting on one book pick for each. We all read the same book, and then we gather online for a live book-club-style discussion of that book. We’ve had a great turnout for these book conversations this year, and those who aren’t able to join in person report really enjoying watching the replays.
This summary just scratches the surface, but we share all this to illustrate that we really do value your feedback and take into consideration all of your suggestions when planning for the future of The Book Girls’ Guide.
Whether you visit the website regularly to enjoy all of our free reading resources, open our email newsletter each Friday morning, or are a member of one of our two paid membership levels, we love having you as part of this community, and we look forward to reading with you for many more years to come!
