This is a *totally unscientific* observation, but… Cowboys kick pirates and knights butts. I was bored yesterday so I started playing around on Amazon looking up books—I do this often to pass the time, have even found a couple of auto-buys this way. After a few minutes of perusing my normal books I simply typed in “Cowboys” under the romance genre and to my wondering delight a list of 2600+ came up. I started reading through the sub-subgenres and it got me curious as to how it stacked up against other books. (Hence the chart below. )

Naturally, I had to plug in Knights and Pirates—aren’t knights and pirates the very first thing you think of after Cowboys. Kind of like peanut butter and dill pickles (don’t knock it—it’s pretty good! )

The only one that really surprised me out of it all was the low romantic suspense list. I would have thought there were a lot more—and none of mine were listed and I have two or three that would/should fall under that so some of the numbers are skewed by how the books were uploaded/categorized in Amazon.

It was fun to see a few different sub-genres too, like the vampires (it’s cool when a book crosses over so many boundaries). I did look up a few others too but didn’t go down the line with them: Cops & Police = 1990; Sheriffs = 1008; FBI = 412; Black Ops & Military = 1468. Still, the cowboys have the strong lead there—not that any of us are surprised, right!?! We know the men in their tight jeans and hats hung low get our blood going.

I will say, going through everything, my TBR grew substantially! I love reading just about anything (though I will always gravitate reading and writing back to my cowboys—but truth be told, I tend to picture most men with at least a little cowboy in them, just like I look for the romance in just about every book I read!). Have you read any of the subgenres listed above with a cowboy in it? What’s the most interesting subgenre/crossover you ever came across? What subgenre/crossover do you want to see that hasn’t come out yet?