Blog — All About Romance

It’s Round Two of the Top 100 Romances Poll!

Below you’ll find the top 250 books from all the write-ins from Round One. Choose AS MANY of these as you’d like.

Please pick your personal favorites, as well as any you feel should be on the list on principle.This round will be open until May 7th at 8pm EST and you will only have the opportunity to vote once in this round. So please be sure of your choices before you hit “done”!

In the next round, we’ll combine the top vote getters from this round and the top ones from our original 50 list. You’ll have 150 books to choose from in that round, before we narrow it down to the top 100! The final round will be the Top Ten Shootout, where we’ll give you the top ten from round 3 and you choose your overall winner.

Please note: each book is using its proper title, so check the “A” “The”, etc. options […]

By Dabney Grinnan| 2018-04-24T17:46:26+00:00 April 24th, 2018|Categories: Best of Romance, Polls, Top 100 Romance|16 Comments

Coming soon…. Round Two of the 2018 Top 100 Romances Poll

Round One of the 2018 Top 100 Romances poll is now closed! Thank you to the many many of you who participated! We had nearly 6,500 write-in votes, with 2400 unique books listed, and nearly 900 of those have multiple write-ins. Romancelandia has a lot of unique favorites! As you can imagine, that’s a lot to sort through to make sure every single one of those is counted correctly.

Later this week, we’ll open Round Two. You’ll be provided with the 250 books that received the most write-ins to vote on. You can choose however many you wish that you think belong in the Top 100.

Again, thanks for all your votes 🙂 We’ve smashed the record from five years ago! You guys (and our hardworking staff) rock!

By Dabney Grinnan| 2018-04-23T10:48:10+00:00 April 22nd, 2018|Categories: Polls|Tags: Top 100 Romance|8 Comments

Erica Taylor: “You’re a Duke, Andrew,” and How Regency is my Fan Fiction

When I was in college, I wrote Harry Potter fan fiction. It’s still posted online, but please don’t try and find it. And if you do, don’t tell me you read it.

Writing fan fiction was the best way for me to figure out how to tell a story. With a set group of characters to build from, rules of the world, a predetermined setting and style, I didn’t have to do any of that work myself. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, I just got to take it for a spin. It was like playing with someone else’s toys and not having to do the work of cleaning them up afterwards. I could make up the story, intertwine the characters, and focus on their struggles without having to make up the parameters of the world while I did it. […]

By Dabney Grinnan| 2018-04-22T08:26:17+00:00 April 22nd, 2018|Categories: Authors, Guest Posts|Tags: Erica Taylor, The Macalisters series|0 Comments

Last Chance to Vote!

Hundreds of you have voted and we are slowly sorting through thousands of write-ins. (Big thanks to our staff!)

Round One will close on Sunday at midnight EST. If you’ve not yet voted, please do. Remember to do the whole poll including the write-in section.

Here again are the rules:

Round 1: Select as many books as you want from the list provided. It is meant to just be a starting point. There are fifty books on it–the list will ultimately have 100 books. Then, in the write-in section, enter up to ten books that are NOT on the current list you think must be. All book choices will be given one vote so a write-in has just as much weight as one on the list.

Round 2: The nominations from you, our faithful community, will be provided to be voted on.

Round 3: The ranking begins…

Round 4: Once the Top 100 is established, we’ll give you a final chance to rank the Top […]

By Dabney Grinnan| 2018-04-20T09:29:49+00:00 April 20th, 2018|Categories: Best of List, Best of Romance, Polls|Tags: AAR Top 100 Romances|0 Comments

Making the world a better place: A guest post by Laurie Winter

One of the things I love most about reading and writing is the power of words to invoke change. Stories can inspire and move people to action. Not that every book has to be deep and soul changing. Even a funny, fluffy book can leave a positive message. I just finished a light-hearted Christmas themed romance that made me think about the importance of family and living for the moment.

When I began writing After All, I had no idea the main plot would lead to a secondary story about a pregnant teenager, Whitney, who came from an abusive home. The first two books in my Warriors of the Heart series are emotionally driven, and I wanted After All to deliver the same deep feelings. After I finished writing the story, I was left with a longing to help children […]

By Dabney Grinnan| 2018-04-19T08:43:12+00:00 April 19th, 2018|Categories: Authors, Guest Posts|2 Comments

April TBR Challenge – Kickin’ it Old-Skool

This month for the TBR Challenge, we were challenged to read a book at least 10 years ago. We both went further than that, with each of us choosing a Harlequin Historical from the 1990s. Our picks had different settings and tones to them, but we each enjoyed our reading, with Caz reading a Regency from a popular author for the line and Lynn picking a somewhat unusual historical set in the early Georgian period.

The Vicar’s Daughter by Deborah Simmons

For my ‘old-skool’ read, I chose a Harlequin Historical from 1995, the first in Deborah Simmons’ Regency Quartet. The Vicar’s Daughter is one of those ‘stuffed-shirt meets wild-child’ romances (although the heroine isn’t really a wild-child as such), and while it’s fairly predictable, it’s a light-hearted, fun read and the two central characters are well-drawn and endearing. Maximillian […]

By Caz Owens| 2018-04-18T08:23:55+00:00 April 18th, 2018|Categories: Caz AAR, Historicals, Lynn Spencer, Reading, Romance reading, TBR Challenge|Tags: Deborah Simmons, Harlequin Historical, Julie Tetel Andresen, TBR Challenge|2 Comments

Wanting to Run Away with the Circus

According to my Goodreads account I have read the book Kiss an Angel by Susan Elizabeth Phillips four times. By my estimate, it might actually be more like six. There is something about this book that I love.

Daisy finds herself in an arranged marriage with Alex Markov, though neither of them wants to be married to the other. Alex drags her away to work in the circus, live in a travel trailer, and be his neglected wife until they can go their separate ways. So to tick off what it has that I adore in a book, it’s a contemporary, yet it is a marriage of convenience (or inconvenience in this case) story, they’re in forced proximity, traveling on the road, and best of all, it has a circus.

I love everything about the circus (except animal abuse, more on that […]

By Haley Kral| 2018-04-17T08:56:20+00:00 April 17th, 2018|Categories: Books, Haley AAR, Reading, Romance reading|3 Comments

It’s the new and improved 2018 AAR Top 100 Romance Poll

Thanks for your patience. Our original poll didn’t, as was strongly pointed out to us on Twitter, include any books by black authors. And, once that was pointed out to us, we knew THAT poll didn’t reflect the values of AAR.

So, using reader feedback and information from Goodreads and Amazon, we’ve expanded the poll to be more representative of all of romance. And, we’ve doubled the number of write-in choices allowed so that everyone can make sure their top ten has a shot.

Here’s how this will work.

This is a new poll. So, if you filled out the poll before, you’ll need to do so again.

There will be four rounds and each will only be open for two weeks. You can vote once in each round.

Round 1: Select as many books as you want from the list provided. It is meant to just be a starting point. There are fifty books on it–the list will ultimately have 100 books. Then, […]

By Dabney Grinnan| 2018-04-13T14:00:15+00:00 April 8th, 2018|Categories: Polls|Tags: AAR polls, Top 100 Romance|33 Comments

The Feminist Hero: A Guest Post by Landra Graf AND a fabulous giveaway

Thank you to All About Romance for hosting me today.

Today I want to discuss something near and dear to my heart, the feminist hero. How often we’ve read the alpha male, the alpha-hole, the beta and several other male character archetypes— I can say I’m drawn to alpha’s (swoon). As I started on this writing journey I believed my future was in writing alpha males, typical to the ones I’d read in the past. The problem is my heroes were never going to be true to their contemporaries.

They aren’t always beta or alpha, and it appeared they fell somewhere in between. Rough and tough when they needed to be, sensitive to their feelings, defenders of those bullied or under attack, and often found themselves doing the opposite of what other males in their life tell them they should do.

I essentially […]

By Dabney Grinnan| 2018-04-06T17:24:58+00:00 April 6th, 2018|Categories: Authors, giveaways, Guest Posts|9 Comments

The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen by Lori Leachman

It is amazing how revealing and enlightening funeral celebrations can be. Long-held secrets may finally be shared. The truth of a particular situation is told. Long-simmering resentments are aired, or forgotten. Memories are resurrected. The nature of love is revealed.

I experienced all of these things at my father’s funeral in 2012. These revelations brought new context to my entire life. The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen is my effort to synthesize what I thought was true about my life and what I learned was true about my life, my parents, and their love story.

My father was the typical small town football star whose ticket out of Cartersville, Georgia was a football scholarship. My mother was a debutant wanna-be with captivating looks and a sense of herself. They met in the fall of 1956 at the Fall Football Banquet […]