Well… a lot, actually!
For starters, the annoying ads are generating much needed revenue for us. I am deeply appreciative you guys are putting up with them. Thank you!
We’ve also, I hope, successfully switched hosting companies. Our new company charges about half of what our old one did and, thus far, appears to be more stable. We are still, however, recoding the site to make it more stable and less demanding. Over the years, as our database has grown, we’ve struggled to get enough bandwidth for the sheer volume of data AAR has. If we want to be able to continue to grow, we need for our coding to be as efficient as possible. So, you may still see some weirdness on the site but it’s my hope that most of that is behind us.
In other big news, we are going to absorb the fabulous site AudioGals. They have decided not to continue on and their publisher, Melinda, did not want all their wonderful reviews to vanish. So we are in the process of adding their 2000+ reviews to the database at AAR. They’ll be tagged in a way that readers will be able to identify them as AudioGals reviews and will also be searchable through PowerSearch. I’m very excited about this–their work is wonderful.
Despite not having a podcast or being on TikTok, we’ve managed to keep our traffic numbers up there. Thus far this year, we’ve had over 750K views of the site and our visitors spend over two minutes at a time. I think we could do a lot better if we actively worked with a PR person but that’s not yet in the budget.
I’m also thrilled to share that a major American university is now working with me to archive all of our data for academics to use. Not only is it about time great that academia is starting to take romance seriously, it is also gratifying to know that all the work the many many wonderful reviewers and publishers who’ve created AAR since its inception in 1996 will never, I hope, vanish.
So, that’s what’s up here. Any questions? What’s new with you?
I’m really pleased that AG’s 2000+ reviews aren’t just going to disappear from the internet 🙂 For anyone not familiar, AudioGals has been around since 2012 and is, I think, still the only review site dedicated specifically to romance audiobooks. The audiobook world has changed so much in that time – going from small numbers of releases each week to hundreds – and I think many more people are listening to and enjoying them, which is great.
We’ve got a big library of reviews for titles old and new, and it’s a great resource for any romance fan who wants to dip their toe into the audiobook world. So ‘migrating’ all the reviews here is a really good fit.
I plan to continue to review audiobooks here at AAR.
Thrilled and relieved that AudioGals fantastic content will be migrated to AAR and that you (Caz) will continue to review audiobooks on AAR. Hooray! I have been a happy consumer of AG content since 2012 – thank you to the AAR leadership and Melinda and team for giving us a HEA!!
Oh, this is great, great news! Frankly, I have feared that AAR wasn’t long for this world. Like so many things, when you don’t have them, you realize only then what you had. I didn’t want to experience that with AAR.
It is very hard to stay online. I am grateful for the donations we get. Without them, we’d not be here!
I was super disappointed when so much of the Cover Cafe’s content disappeared, and The Romance Reader’s reviews are only accessible through the Wayback Machine now, so it’s great that AAR will continue to be around!
So glad to hear all this good news, Dabney! Will be especially good to be able to access AudioGals reviews here. Will you be adding new audio reviews, too?
We already do audio reviews so this is just more that we are adding Audiogals content.
I plan to continue to review audiobooks here – probably not quite as many as I used to for AG, because I have sometimes reviewed a book here, and the audio at AG when it appeared months later (given that not all formats are published at the same time!), so it’s unlikely I’ll review two formats here. You’ll definitely find some of my older audio reviews for books I’ve reviewed at AAR once all the AG reviews come across.
Whelp, now I can say my work is available for academic citation!
I’m wondering if my name could be added back to a DIK review I wrote about 24 years ago, lol. It just says “other” now. I would love to know my work is also available as academic citation.
Sure. Email me about it. dabneygrinnan@allaboutromance.com
I’m so pleased to hear the Audiogals reviews will have a home here! That made my day! I doubt I’ll be reviewing anywhere except on GR now, especially since Caz and I read so many of the same books, but knowing the reviews will be archived and searchable is wonderful.
Very glad that the ads are helping your bottom line. I stop into your site often and have found some great reads from the reviews here.
Thank you, Holly. We aim to please!
Wow Dabney, you have been busy! Thank you for all your hard work 🙂