For the second year in a row, Delhi/NCR topped the list of India’s most romantic cities, placed well ahead of Bengaluru and Mumbai, in Amazon.in’s second annual report on the country’s most romantic cities. The report is based on the orders placed on Amazon.in for books in the Romance genre during January – December 2014.
In an interesting development, Ahmedabad and Bhubaneswar have joined their Tier-2 counterpart, Jaipur for the first time on the list. The top 10 cities with the highest readership of romance books are Delhi/NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Bhubaneswar.
Indian authors topped the list of romance bestsellers. Chetan Bhagat’s ‘Half Girlfriend’ was the most read romance book across all the top 10 cities. Ravinder Singh, Sudeep Nagarkar and Preeti Shenoy were the other hot favourites of readers in 2014. Two of Ravinder Singh’s and three of Sudeep Nagarkar’s titles appear in the top 10 list and eight of the top 10 slots were grabbed by Indian authors.
John Green’s ‘The Fault in our Stars’ which was made into a movie and Paulo Coelho’s ‘Adultery’ were the only two books by non-Indian authors to feature in the top 10 list of romance titles of the year in the third and eighth spots respectively.
The preferences of readers across all the top 10 cities were remarkably similar. Seven of the top 10 titles countrywide also figure among the top 10 titles in every one of the top 10 cities. John Green’s ‘The Fault in our Stars’ was the most popular romance book by a non-Indian author in 2014. Interest in this title was boosted by the release of a movie based on the book in June 2014.