All About Romance
allaboutromance.com
It’s been a great thirty years….
Dabney Grinnan
3–4 minutes
This is a hard column to write. So I’ll just say it: AAR is retiring.
All About Romance launched in 1996. It was created by the incredible Laurie Gold, and shaped over the past thirty years by a remarkable group of reviewers, writers, and devoted readers. Their work and support have built an extraordinary legacy.
The challenge is that the world AAR was built for no longer exists. Google has made it far less likely that new romance readers will stumble onto sites like ours. Search for a book title now and you’re more likely to see an AI-generated blurb, a retailer page, or a quick influencer video than thoughtful criticism. Authors and publishers increasingly court influencers, not reviewers. The books this team tends to champion—historicals, ambitious women’s fiction, indie m/m—make up a smaller share of the mainstream romance market than they once did. And because we rely on Amazon affiliate revenue, the rise of Kindle Unlimited has made our model steadily more fragile: when readers borrow instead of buy, there’s no commission to keep the site running.
Maintaining AAR requires real time and money, and as traffic has declined (although we still receive about half a million visits a year), so have affiliate clicks and ad revenue. The good news is that AAR has the resources to keep the site online for many years, which has been my priority throughout this process. The archive matters. Our reviews, blogs, polls, essays, and comment threads are part of the history of romance, and I believe readers, scholars, librarians, and longtime community members will continue to use it.
Here’s what the transition will look like. Soon, we will run our last 100 Best Romances survey, and we will publish new reviews through the end of March. After that, the site will shift into archive mode. Everything that has been published will remain available, but no new content will be added.*
We do have a Goodreads group, and we encourage anyone who would like to keep the conversation going to meet us there. I will be writing reviews at my own website, thepassionatereader.com (coming soon), and will be starting a Substack newsletter as well. Many of our reviewers will continue to post on Goodreads.
Thank you to everyone who has given so much to this site, and to the fabulous world of romance novels. It’s been an incredible run—thirty years—and I’m grateful to every reviewer, reader, and supporter who made it possible. I am so so proud of what we have done here. You guys are the best.
With gratitude,
Dabney
*I have been reposting older reviews, starting from the beginning, and will continue to do that for the foreseeable future.