The following words are defined for use in AAR’s annual awards:

Luscious (Love Story), Erotic Romance, Buried Treasure, Glomming, Frontier Romance, Series Romance, Alternate Reality Romance, Purple Prose

Luscious love stories are mainstream romances featuring the sexiest of love scenes (Lisa Kleypas writes mainstream romance, Lora Leigh writes Erotic Romance).

Erotic Romances are hybrids between Romance and Erotica (sometimes called “Romantica”).

A Buried Treasure book is the book the reader believes was most overlooked during the year.

Glomming occurs when you discover an author and set about buying up her backlist.

A Frontier Romance may be an American Western, or set in Canada or even the historical Australian frontier.

A Series Book, aka a Category Book, as published by Harlequin/Silhouette. We don’t mean J.D. Robb’s In Death series of connected books. We do mean a book from Harlequin’s Intrigue line or a Silhouette Special Edition, or titles from any of the other series lines, including non-romance lines such as Next.

An Alternate Reality Romance includes but is not limited to these romance types: fantasy, time travel, futuristic, vampire, shapeshifter, paranormal. This is not applicable to the 2007/2008 annual reader poll, which has one category for SF, Fantasy, & Futuristic Romance and another for Paranormal & Time Travel Romance. Fantasy Romance, for our purposes, includes traditional fantasy novel elements, as well as the fae, gods and goddesses, angels, and demons. Paranormal Romance features “monsters” such as vampires and shapeshifters, as well as psychics and witches.

Purple Prose is defined as writing full of ornate or flowery language. Instead of “she had beautiful blue eyes,” the purple prose version might read, “the blue of her oblong-shaped orbs outshone the most magnificent of sapphires, and were tinged with a teal more vibrant than a peacock’s plumage.” Purple prose in romance is often synonymous with flowery love scenes, but purple is purple, in whatever form of writing.