I recently ran a report at Google Analytics to look at what are the most read pages at AAR. It was somewhat surprising and very interesting. This report is from the past three months but these same pages show up on the report for the past year.
In the past three months AAR had 443,750 pages views, 137,500 users, and 1,177,000 clicks or events. (Sadly, this does not translate into the same sort of dollars.)
The Home Page had 77,849 views, 12,490 users, and 195,049 total interactions. Power Search v.2 had 10,250 views, 4,083 users, and 29,102 total interactions.
Here are the Top 25 Pages and Their Views over the last 90 days:
- New Reviews: All About Romance – 8,876 views
- Plus size heroine Archives: All About Romance – 6,009 views
- Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros: All About Romance – 5,390 views
- Twisted Lies by Ana Huang: All About Romance – 4,974 views
- To Sir Phillip, With Love by Julia Quinn: All About Romance – 3,504 views
- Book-Deals – 3,383 views
- Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood: All About Romance – 1,682 views
- Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros: All About Romance – 1,572 views
- AAR’s Top 100 Romances: 2018: All About Romance – 1,546 views
- Archer’s Voice by Mia Sheridan: All About Romance – 1,510 views
- The Best of 2023 – Maggie’s List: All About Romance – 1,463 views
- Bride by Ali Hazelwood: All About Romance – 1,377 views
- The Best of 2023 – Kayne’s List: All About Romance – 1,275 views
- The Do-Over by Lynn Painter: All About Romance – 1,229 views
- Time Travel Romance Archives: All About Romance – 1,224 views
- Icebreaker by Hannah Grace: All About Romance – 1,223 views
- The Graham Effect by Elle Kennedy: All About Romance – 1,134 views
- The Best of 2023 – Lisa’s List: All About Romance – 1,102 views
- France: Enlightenment & Revolution: All About Romance – 1,031 views
- The Best of 2023 – Charlotte’s List: All About Romance – 979 views
- The Best of 2023 – Maria Rose’s List: All About Romance – 965 views
- The Best of 2023 – Rachel’s List: All About Romance – 956 views
- The Best of 2023 – Jessica’s List: All About Romance – 945 views
- The Best of 2023 – Caz’s List: All About Romance – 929 views
- The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon: All About Romance – 926 views
Thoughts? What are the places you visit the most at AAR?
I’ll share my AAR routine, which maybe will amuse you. On work days, I surf the site once, in the evening after dinner. I do the same order every time:
Start on Home Page
If I see a new review that interests me, click that
Return to Home Page and click on the day’s Steals & Deals
Return to Home Page and if there is a new blog post then read that
Return to Home page and click on View More Comments
Go down to last comment I recognize then scroll up to see what comments interest me (so going chronologically forward from the last comment I read)
I think I do it this way so that I read/buy stuff first then save for later pages where I might add comments (clicks first then typing later!)
That is my exact same routine: start on Home; check out the new review IF it interests me then go to Steals and Deals (I buy from there 10 percent of the time), then check out the daily Blog and discussion.
Keep up the good work AAR!
Thanks! Very Similar, two differences:
Like Carrie G, I like reading nearly all reviews, even for books I will very probably not read, or even definitely not read.
I rarely go to steals and deals, because on Amazon.de, most of them do nor apply 🙁 different pricing policy. Which can be good too, since some books are much cheaper, but just means that the hard work you do on S&D is not useful to me.
My routine is similar to Manjari’s, with just a few differences:
Start on Home Page
Look at Steals and Deals
If I see a new review that interests me, click that
Return to Home Page and if there is a new blog post then read that
Return to Home page and click on View More Comments
Go down to last comment I recognize then scroll up to see what comments interest me
That’s my morning routine. The rest of the day till about five pm or so, I will check back if I have a review up or if there is a lively thread of comments going on, and I want to watch the conversation.All depends on how the day is going too, busy days I may not make it here very often if at all.
On a side note, this list brought to my attention a book that wasn’t even on my radar. I will have to check out The Do-Over by Lynn Painter. It sounds very similar to Rachel Lynn Solomon’s See You Yesterday and Justin A. Reynold’s Opposite of Always, both of which I loved.
Six of the top ten book reviews were reviewed (and asked for) by Kayne. She’s definitely got her finger on the current pulse of romance!
That’s pretty amazing. Congrats, Kayne!
This is a surprise! Thank you Dabney and Maggie! I am thankful for the AAR coummunity!
Interesting. I have to admit what I click on to read doesn’t directly translate to what I’m most interested in. If I did that I’d only click M/M reviews, some of the blog posts, and the Steals and Deals. However, I generally real all the reviews and comments for each, and all the blogs and comments. So, I guess I’m just curious about the reviews even though I have no interest in actually reading the books. I don’t know if other people do that as well. I also looked at everyone’s Best Of 2023 list, even though, again, I generally only read M/M. So I guess I’m saying what I click on isn’t indicative of what I’m most interested in, but does indicate that I’m generally curious about people’s opinions and enjoy reading book reviews.
I also want to say that I’m so happy LGBTQ books are getting reviewed more. 10 years ago I wanted to review an M/M book for one site and was told no. They thought it would alienate some of their readers. Now queer books routinely get reviewed here and on other popular review sites showing that while they may make up a smallish section of what is read, they are still an important subgenre of romance and one that is by all accounts continuing to grow. Many younger readers either explicitly seek out queer romances, or are accepting of queer charcter (main or side characters) in their romances.
Shoutout to Kayne. AAR needs to review the TikTok grand slams.
Thank you Bunny Planet Babe!
Thrilled to see the plus sized heroines section getting more attention!
I usually open AAR in the morning before leaving for work: I look at the latest book review to see if it’s a book I might be interested in reading. Then I look at all the blog posts & comments. I generally revisit blog posts for several days—especially if there have been a lot of comments posted. I look at the Steals & Deals later in the day when I’m decompressing from work: “Oh, I had a busy day, but AFTERSHOCK is only 99-cents. Yay!”
One item I looked forward to AAR was the upcoming releases for next month. It was a pretty good round up of what was coming soon – I also enjoyed the comments where readers posted the books they were looking forward to reading. I got lots of recs that way. But I haven’t noticed that post this month or the month before – are you not doing that anymore or I have just missed it?
We haven’t been doing it. It didn’t seem very popular and it’s a lot of work. But I’ll rethink that choice. Thanks for the feedback.
I always enjoyed that feature—I never failed to find a book or two I hadn’t known was about to be published. However, I can see that it would have been a lot of work to pull it all together, not to mention that with release dates changing all the time (I’ve been waiting since December for Ainsley Booth’s THE SCORING SECRET, which keeps getting postponed for another month—right now it’s showing a release date of late March, but I’m not holding my breath), there were probably a number of books every month that showed up but never got released. I can clearly understand your rationale for dropping the feature, but I miss it just the same.
It didn’t help when Amazon decided to do away with image links – whereas before, I’d been able to cut and paste links, I had to switch from a 1-step process to a 4-step process (get image from Amz, upload to AAR, get text link from Amz, add to image) for every title.
And as you say, there were changes we couldn’t always incorporate each month, especially when it came to self-publishing authors, who might announce a new book just a few days prior to release and that I’d only find out about if I happened to see it on social media or in a newsletter (and of course I can’t subscribe to them all!). Back in the old days, we had 2 or 3 staffers who pulled the posts together from the lists we were sent by publishers – we no longer have the manpower and trad. published books are only a proportion of what’s out there.
I hope I don’t seem ignorant, but could you post the links with the name/author of the books without images? If so that would cut the process in half maybe? I know the images are really nice, but at least it would be a list for people who wanted to ahve a heads up about what coming.
It’s a possibility, although it wouldn’t be very visually appealing 🙁
I know, but personally I’d rather have a list than nothing, if it’s not too much trouble.
I have put one up for Monday. It took me about 30 minutes to pull together.
That said, no one seems to buy from these lists–I’m guessing most use them to mark books they’d like to get from their library. Which is great. I’m all for libraries. I just say this to point out that we are trying to figure out what kind of content will keep us on line and coming soon has not helped our bottom line!
Maybe. I am looking into another way of doing it.
Just a thought: have you thought about putting some content behind a monthly subscription paywall? Something like this that may not get the clicks, but clearly AAR regulars find value? (I was missing this feature as well.) I’d pay a reasonable amount (subjective, I know…) monthly to get extras to support the site. A lot of websites, creators, content producers use subscriptions to get a steady stream of income to keep the lights on and offer more than they necessarily would have been able to with a fully free website. It may not be much revenue, but maybe it can offset some losses that you’ve noted here that have happened over the years, and maybe cover more of the upkeep.
To be clear: I’m not saying make the whole site behind a paywall. Just a thought.
I have thought about that a lot. At this point I’d rather as that regular readers treat AAR LIKE a subscription. (AND THANK YOU TO THE MANY THAT DO!)
Many of our readers–but not enough!–are giving us money each month through our paypal link. It’s actually what’s keeping us online.
Doing a subscription would be more work and I’m not sure how I would do it. I think the only way it would work is to put almost everything behind a paywall and I’m very conflicted about that.
And it wouldn’t really help with the manpower issue – as things stand currently, we don’t have the staff to produce the extra content that subscribers to things like Patreon are accustomed to.
Even if I wanted to spend my time doing it, I don’t see it as sustainable for us.
I like the current model. I contribute monthly, also to keep the site open. I want the occasional visitors and potential future fellow posters to be able to be here – I would withdraw if this became a (largely) closed group on a subscription model.
This is my sense too. But, at the same time, this means that we need our readers like you who do support us monthly big time.
So THANK YOU!!!
This conversation is reminding me that this came up before? I think it was towards the end of last year. I just added a reminder in my calendar for once a month so I’m not as haphazard as before with donations. (Venmo unfortunately doesn’t have auto payment functionality yet that I can tell.)
I think we should bring back the WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO? though.
Maybe as an ask@AAR at the end of the month?
I also liked this monthly feature but even more than seeing the lists themselves, I liked the comments section as readers would typically add quite a few books and/or tell why they were excited about a particular book on the list. Could there be a monthly post where one or a few reviewers highlighted just 1-2 new releases each that they were most looking forward to and then it was left to readers to add more in the comments?
Let’s try it tomorrow and see!
AAR has been part of my daily routine since 1999. I first discovered it due to the Favorite Funny lists. I posted more often during the years of several message boards, and some of my thoughts on romances with humor were incorporated as part of one of the old LLB columns. My current daily routine is similar to several already described: check Steals & Deals, check new reviews (reading many), read new blog posts (and their comment threads if they are still active). I also check the Agora for new posts, though that hasn’t been very active for some time. A huge number of authors I read were discovered through AAR reviews, message boards, blog posts, and comment threads.
I tried a number of romance book sites in the 1990s and cut down to just AAR most of the time by 1999. My tbr shelves vastly exceed my reading time. Since I switched almost entirely from printed books to ebooks several years back after we ran out of room to build any new bookshelves, I keep a spreadsheet of all ebook purchases to avoid losing track and double-buying. Once that spreadsheet passed several thousand records, I started keeping a spreadsheet with the highest priority tbr subset. That spreadsheet now has over 3,000 entries, yet I still keep checking AAR for possible new-to-me authors and books. I am rather obviously addicted to books.
That’s a very sane addiction to have!
One of my daughters is an avid knitter, and there is acronym in the knitting community that I think is STEEL (stash exceeds expected lifetime); and although she (and most knitters I know) have long achieved STEEL status, she continues to purchase yarn. As she puts it, acquiring yarn and knitting something with that yarn spark two different pleasure centers in the brain. That explanation resonated with me in reference to books: acquiring a book and reading a book are two separate pleasures. So now when I buy a book—even though I have every intention of eventually reading it—I allow myself to enjoy the process of acquiring the book and not stress too much about the future decision about reading it, lol.
The one I usually hear is SABLE Stash Acquisition/Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy and yes, it doesn’t stop anyone from buying more yarn or more books.