All About Romance Archives : All About Romance

It’s hard out here for a blog….

It’s time for my depressing reminder that AAR needs your help to survive. Lately, things have been a bit grim.

By many measures, we’re doing OK. In 2021, our users were up 5% and those users had almost 1.5 million sessions. We’re still, via Amazon, selling thousands of books a year. We’re publishing new, smart content every day. Our reviewers are THE BEST. Our readers are engaging in robust conversation on the site.

And, like newspapers and blog sites (HEA USA, the Romance Reader, and others) everywhere, we are struggling.

AAR supports itself one of three ways.

We sell ads – this makes up about 20% of our revenue these days.

We make money as an Amazon affiliate. Amazon used to give us 9% of sales–five years ago that number dropped to 4% or less. So many of our readers have switched to KU–not only do we not get any money from KU memberships or books read via […]

By Dabney Grinnan|2022-09-28T07:50:06-04:00September 28th, 2022|Categories: All About Romance|32 Comments

Something’s coming….

As AAR has aged, the way our readers interact with us has changed. Over the past five years, those who read AAR on their mobile devices have now surpassed those who do so on a computer. When we rebooted the site ten years ago, we didn’t focus on making it phone friendly. That’s about to change.

For the past several months, I’ve been working with a team to overhaul the AAR interface, especially on devices. Yesterday they showed me the first screenshots and I am EXCITED. Not only will AAR be easier and more intuitive to use, we’re adding several features we don’t currently have.

Here are just a few of the features you have to look forward to!

A personalized bookshelf where you can keep track of books you’ve read or would like to read.

A dedicated blog archive with a powersearch feature.

By Dabney Grinnan|2022-04-12T06:20:49-04:00April 12th, 2022|Categories: All About Romance|Tags: interface, mobile use|9 Comments

AAR loves you… let us give you a gift!

As you know, because I constantly bring it up, AAR is financially dependent on the funds our readers so kindly donate to us. This year, donations will make up almost half of our budget. We literally wouldn’t be here without you. And we’d like to say thanks. […]

By Dabney Grinnan|2021-11-29T07:25:05-05:00November 29th, 2021|Categories: All About Romance|Tags: Donation, PayPal|3 Comments

The seemingly endless technical problems at AAR

On Sunday, after two of the plugins we use for comments and the forums were updated, five months of forums vanished and the forums themselves wouldn’t function properly. I spent all day Sunday trying to fix it but it was beyond my expertise. Finally, on Monday morning, our tech guy answered his email and was able to fix it although it meant losing everything on the site that had been entered in the prior 24 hours. Welcome to my world! […]

By Dabney Grinnan|2021-09-20T16:18:18-04:00September 20th, 2021|Categories: All About Romance|15 Comments

Reviews Parody Contest 1999 (from December, 1999)

Merry Christmas, everyone, and a joyous holiday season to all! Today we announce the winner in our first ever Reviews Parody Contest! First we’d like to thank all those brave and talented readers who participated in the contest. Every entry was incredibly creative and laugh-out-loudable! […]

By Dabney Grinnan|2020-04-08T14:45:13-04:00March 4th, 2020|Categories: All About Romance|Tags: blast from the past, parody, Wayback on Wednesday|6 Comments

Dear reader… I’m worried.

What is AAR? It’s not a business–we don’t make any money and no one gets paid. It truly is a labor of love for all of us. (I do give the staff gift certificates at the end of the year to say thanks for all their hard work. The rest of the money we earn goes to keeping the site online.) […]

By Dabney Grinnan|2021-02-11T08:47:26-05:00February 23rd, 2020|Categories: All About Romance, Community, Dabney AAR, Publishing, Romancelandia|72 Comments

It’s time to pick the Top 100 Romances! Round Three of the Poll is up!

We had well over 3,000 votes in the first two rounds of this poll – wow! We knew you all were passionate about romance, but wow! We’ve now taken the top 150 books from both rounds and presented them here. […]

By Dabney Grinnan|2018-05-19T10:13:27-04:00May 10th, 2018|Categories: All About Romance, Polls, Top 100 Romance|Tags: AAR Top 100 Romances, AAR Top 100 Romances Poll|110 Comments

All We Want for Christmas Is….

OK, OK, It’s not just you we love. (Although we do love you.) But AAR staffers have other things on their holiday list and we thought we’d share them! (This would also be a great time to remind our readers that we are able to stay online by the money we make on our affiliate links and we are beyond grateful when you use them!) Happy holidays!

Dabney: I’m not a big nonfiction reader but I am dying to read Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser. This book was released less than a month ago and it’s gotten tons of buzz from NPR, the NYT, and more. In many ways, the Wilder books defined pioneer America for generations. Laura, Mary, Pa, Ma, Silver Lake, Alonzo–almost 50 […]

By Dabney Grinnan|2017-12-17T10:15:15-05:00December 17th, 2017|Categories: All About Romance, Christmas, gifts|11 Comments

Heroes in Real Time

I admit that I love to read romance novels for pretty much one reason – the swoon-worthy heroes. Be they Navy SEALs, roguish pirates, Scottish warriors or powerful tycoons, their confidence and swagger and charm all draw me in and allow me to escape to a fantasy world where the good guy will always save the day.

Given all of the recent turmoil in our world, what with hurricanes and political tempests galore, it’s tempting to escape into those fantasies as much as possible. But every once in a while, I’m reminded that real heroes walk among us. These are the guys and gals who put their lives on the line every day to help a stranger. They go in when others are rushing out. They serve as real-life examples to our sons and daughters of the best that humanity has to offer.

Below are photos of these super folks in action. We tip our hats and thank them profusely for […]

By Jenna Harper|2017-09-15T16:23:03-04:00September 15th, 2017|Categories: AAR Jenna, All About Romance, Heroes, Heroines, Real Life|3 Comments

The Holiday Ever After Box Review

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Is there anything better to get in the mail than a box of goodies? Especially one that celebrates one of my favorite things? The Holiday Ever After Box, sent to me by the wonderful Jeannie Lin, has helped make this December a big more festive. (AAR and the Ever After Box are teaming up in 2017 for a fabulous collaboration but more on that later.)

When mine came, I sat down and opened it, aquiver with anticipation. I was not disappointed. Here’s what it looked like:

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The Holiday Ever After Box turned out to be an advent calendar with a month’s worth of gifts from participating romance authors. How cool is that? I, of course, had to pull all the bags out and, whoa, at the bottom was Sarah Morgan’s lovely Miracle on 5th Avenue (a DIK here at AAR) complete with a note from […]

By Dabney Grinnan|2017-06-23T08:30:03-04:00December 14th, 2016|Categories: All About Romance, Authors, Christmas, Dabney AAR|Tags: Ever After box, Jeannie Lin|2 Comments