Image created via Canva

Most Popular Books of 2023

What were readers most interested in consuming?

Happy New Year!

The HubPages editing team is excited to have the opportunity to publish your work all throughout 2024. We hope your holidays were relaxing and you were able to catch up with family and friends as well as on any books and films you'd hoped to get through before the new year.

And on that note, have you wondered if you read any of the most popular books from last year?

Memoirs from popular actors and singers and the burgeoning genre of new adult fiction certainly captured audiences' attention all year long; here are some of the most popular books of 2023.

Colleen Hoover had another stellar year in terms of sales with her works It Ends With Us, It Starts With Us, and Verity, all placing within the ten best-selling books. Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series which saw the first two books of a planned five-part series published this year, both placed among the best-selling; Fourth Wing and Iron Flame saw immense popularity after taking off on BookTok. 

Spare by Prince Harry was the best-selling memoir of the year after its release in January, while Britney Spears' The Woman in Me also saw significant success. Matthew Perry's memoir from 2022 saw an uptick in popularity after the Friends actor passed away in October. 

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus also placed high on best-selling and most-popular lists (and saw a miniseries of the same name air on AppleTV+), as did Taylor Jenkins Reid's 2018 novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. 

How many of these popular picks have you found yourself wrapped up in?

Image created via Canva

Avoiding Hyperlinking in Welcome Mats

Interlinking your articles with pieces published on HubPages sites is a great way of showing off your other articles to readers. Still, we advise our writers not to interlink in the opening few paragraphs of their articles, as it tends to lead readers off the page. 

The first few paragraphs are where you are able to establish your expertise on the topic and where you have the opportunity to convince readers that your piece is going to be compelling and informative. If they are immediately presented with links to sources or other articles, the time spent on the page will remain low. 

Chances are that what you mention in the opening paragraph or two will be talked about in more depth later on. When the topic is brought up again, then take the opportunity to interlink with your other article(s). If there isn't a great opportunity later on, you can mention the topic again as an aside in parentheses or create a link capsule at the bottom of the article and place it there. 

These are all suggestions as to how best to keep readers on the article for as long as possible while also showing off your other work. Remember that it's different for every piece, so playing around with placement is the best way to go about interlinking. 

Image created via Canva

Featured Articles of the Week

From what education will look like as AI makes its way further into our lives to the historic and oversized American penny, these are our featured articles of the week. Thank you to our writers!

• HobbyLark: Collector’s Guide to the Flying Eagle Cent 1856 to 1858 by Doug West
• The CrimeWire:  The Puzzling Disappearance of Jacob Cabinaw by  Michelle Short
• Soapboxie:  The Dark Side of AI in Education: Risks, Drawbacks, and Opposition by Phil Hobbs
• AxleAddict:  How Many Miles Can I Go Between Oil Changes With Synthetic Oil? by  Dan Ferrell