2021 in Books

Welcome to my second annual year of books review! I had all intentions of doing this in 2019 as well, but oops. So 2020 was the first year I did, and now we’re in 2021. In 2021 we continued to work from home, but to stir things up a little, the husband and I decided to pack up and move to Vermont. So as you can imagine, selling and buying a house, and driving 2,300 miles does take away a lot of one’s reading time. And yet… living in hotels and airbnbs without any of my usual stuff and a TV to watch Netflix mindlessly for hours… I still read a fair amount in 2021. So let’s get to the fun part (to me): numbers!

And I did not’t finish 5 books I’ve started. For reasons of: they either offended me or they were just too boring. Those five books are not counted among any other stats in this post.

Pages read: 37409 (up 7 percent from 2020)

Funny how I read less books but saw a 7% page increase? I wonder if it’s because I listened to less audio books? Let’s find out. I listened to 261 hours of audio books in 2021 (down 27% from 2020), the equivalent to 8,548 pages. So this is why there is a discrepancy. I read a lot more books (eBooks and hard copies) than I listened to books this year. Probably because I don’t have an audible membership anymore, and I did listen to quite a few more podcasts this year than I did the year before.

Money spent on books: $462 (up 29 percent from 2020)

For this stat I do need to some clarifying: this is not the actual amount I spent in 2021 in books, that’s just the amount I spent on the books I’ve read in 2021. Doesn’t make sense? Okay, further clarification. I buy books every year and I don’t necessarily read them that same year (it’s why my to-be-read pile is what it is–I’ll talk about it later). For this stat, I am mostly comparing how many of the books I read that year cost me versus what they would have cost if I had personally bought all of them at Amazon prices. But I also read a lot of books from the library ($0 dollars) and I also get books as gifts or trade with friends. So if I HAD bought every single book I read this year, at Amazon prices, I would have spent $1,295 dollars on books—that’s almost three times the cost I actually spent. Libraries are the BEST.

Shortest books read: The Demon in the Wood by Leigh Bardugo, 30 pages and The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, 6 hours
Longest books read: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (1248 pages) and Rhythm of War (57 hours)

After those interesting numbers, the next thing I’m going to look at is how the books I’ve read compare to each other. So it’s time for… graphics!

Format: 64 ebooks, 24 paperbacks, 20 audio books, and 12 hardcovers

Yes, as this graph shows, I do prefer reading eBooks. I LOVE that I can adjust the font size to suit my end-of-day tired eyes, or read in something that is super light I don’t tire my hands and neck. I also love that I can always have a book at my fingertips with phone apps. You will never find me upset about waiting anywhere, because waiting means I’ll be reading a book. Also, 100% of the books I borrow from the library are digital: eBooks and audio books.

I’ve slowly across time been reading more non fiction. In 2020, 26 out of my 136 books read were non fiction. This year, I read pretty much the same amount of non fiction, which means my fiction reading is the one to decrease! I used to read exclusively fiction, so it’s been interesting to see how my interests change and evolve every year. I read so many different kind of books now, and it is intentional.

Earlier, when I talked about how much I spend on books a year, here’s another graphic that can shed some light on it as well. Out of all the books I’ve read, 58 were either library books or borrowed (granted, one was borrowed, so 57 were from the library!), and 62 I own. But out of the 62, 14 were gifts. Another conclusion comparing this graphic to the money graphic earlier: I buy books on sale as much as possible. That’s true mostly for eBooks though. Physical books I’ve been buying full price from indie bookstores, usually at a steeper cost than Amazon’s. It’s okay, it’s still money well spent.

This image shows a breakdown of books read by genre. Romance and Fantasy being the most popular.

I’ve read books fitting within 47 different genres this year. This is by no means ALL the genres there are out there, there’s plenty. But it’s a pretty good mix. Romance and Fantasy are the top two, and I am not shocked as they are my favorites. I don’t read a lot of Fantasy Romance though (like A Court of Thorns and Roses style of book) because I just haven’t enjoyed the few of them I’ve read—nothing wrong with them, just not my cup of tea. A couple of other things to note from this list: the math might add up to 1more than 120 because a few books will fit within more than one category. For example, Romance are usually split between Contemporary or Historical. Some of the History books I’ve read were also about Politics or Science. And so on.

TBR pile in jan 1, 2021: 101 books. TBR pile on dec 31, 2021: 97 books
Books read from TBR: 55, Books added to TBR: 46

And last, but not least… Let’s address my ever increasing piles of books to read, the famous TBR (to-be-read). One of my 2021 goals was to read 50% of my TBR (as it stood on January 1st). That meant my goal was roughly 50 and a half books. I managed to read 55 of them. But… I also added 46 new ones to it, virtually canceling any progress towards owning less books. In 2022, I am upping my goal to try and read 50 to 70% of books from my TBR, and this time, try to add LESS. I’m not going to quantify “less” for now, because 2022 will be a long year, and because I like to read, I do also get gifts of books and trades. So those 46 above are not all “my” fault.

I don’t usually do book reviews here, but I figured you’d at least wonder… “Okay Anita, after all those numbers, what did you actually enjoy reading this year?” And the answer is, I read a LOT of good books! I rated 46/120 books with 4 stars or more. The ones I absolutely loved were:

Book covers

  • A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate, books 1 and 2 of the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik (A school of magic, but with monsters trying to actively kill you)

  • The Road Trip, by Beth O’Leary (Lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers, with a chaotic road trip, quirky secondary characters, and lots of traveling)

  • Six of Crows, by Leigh Bardugo (A group of misfits plans a daring heist… and there’s also some people with magic powers)

Book covers

Anyway, thanks for reading! And cheers to a 2022 with MORE books!

Using visual design principles to write a press release

Spoiler alert: it’s not rocket science.

I'm a veteran graphic designer. My job is to create epic stories through visual design—be it in print or digital media. I'm really good at what I do. But writing? Not so much. That doesn't mean I am bad at it: I've been an avid reader my whole life, a blogger, a zine writer, a Twitter warrior, a manual creator, a closet novel-starter (rarely finisher), and even turned my “pen” used to some magazine articles. But there's one thing I had never written before: a press release.

So, how did I do it? I went back to my tried-and-true visual design process and followed the same steps to write the press release: 

1: Research

After two thirds of my life spent mostly in front of Adobe products, I started a project I knew nothing about the way I start all my design projects: with research. When designing, a lot of my research time is spent looking at visuals, but for writing, a lot of my research time was spent reading press releases. I probably read about 40-50 with similar themes in one sitting. It IS very much a templated art, and reading them all, i got an idea of what that template should look like. Stephen King’s first writing tip on his On Writing memoir is to read. It’s as relevant in writing horror fiction as it is to write a press release. So that’s what I did, I read. A lot.

2: Sketch your ideas

When designing, my second order of business is to grab a piece of paper and sketch ideas. No software, just old fashioned paper and pens, and some time thinking things through—it doesn’t even have to be good, my sketches are stick figures and crazy lines and you’d NEVER guess I design for a living from them. The important thing about the sketching step is that you put ideas down on paper so you can start shaping your project outside of your head. For the press release, I did it somewhat similarly, but instead of drawing, I opened a notebook and wrote down an outline, people I wanted to talk to, sections of other press releases I found interesting, and so on.

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3: Talk to other people

My third step when designing is to talk to people. Usually the client, to have an idea what they are looking for, who their audience is, what their goals are with the project. Sometimes that conversation leads to reiterating steps one and two. When writing that first press release, I booked some time with people that knew more about the subject matter than I did, and were also stakeholders on this release, and interviewed them, so I could hear it in their own words what their thoughts and goals were with this specific project I was writing about.

4: Dump your ideas on the page

Now it’s when the design/writing actually starts. This part is NOT glamorous at all. While designing, I call this phase the “brain dump,” I just open my Adobe software of choice and dump all the copy I have, my ideas, inspiration images, resources I need, color palettes, logos, etc. The same thing happened when writing, I opened Google Docs and dumped my outline, my favorite quotes from my stakeholders, jotted down some of the things I had thought about while doing all the research/interview portion. Not pretty, and not any semblance of an actual press release, but hey, it works for me.

5: Draft and iterate

From that brain dump, I make a draft. Be it a designed first version (or versions) of things, that I then send to the stakeholders to review with a lot of explanations and notes attached to explain what they are looking at; or be it my first press release, with a ton of added comments in the margins about words I was unsure of, sections we could cut for brevity, and placeholders for things I still needed to add and wanted help from the stakeholders to get. It’s also at this stage that I share my work with my peers: either other designers that I trust and value their opinion—working with them makes me a better designer—or in this case, to other writers I’ve worked with in my life that I know will be great sources of unbiased feedback and critique, especially because I am new at this.

6: Refine and edit

The next part of the design/writing process is probably the one I spend the longest at: refining. I use the feedback I gathered from others and spend some quality time with my work. No distractions, doors closed, phone on silent mode—that kind of quality time. I re-read my work several times, move things around, edit words out, refine my thoughts, have a despairing moment where I think everything is absolute trash, take a tea break, get back to it with a clear head and keep chiseling away till a masterpiece emerges. Or at least something functional that does the job, this is just my first press release after all, I didn’t expect an award from it, just a thumbs up from the boss and to publish it on Newswire.

7: Press play

Outlining my design—and writing—processes like this seems very linear, but a lot of it happens at the same time and/or we return to the beginning and reiterate and so on. But really, what I wanted to get at with this article is that maybe there is a right process to write a press release I could have learned at school, but here I am, almost two decades after college and I can use tried-and-true principles from my own craft to do something in a completely different medium. And guess what? It works. So feel free to replace “writing press release” with other creative endeavors and use my design process for your benefit.