the ask@AAR: Will you support AAR in 2025? : All About Romance

It’s that time of the year when I look back at the previous year and assess how AAR is doing. The good news is we did slightly–very–better financially in 2024 than we did in 2023. This is due to two new revenue programs–the ads you dislike that run on our site and a new rewards program Amazon has created that rewards content creators like AAR for selling tons of stuff. (We make very little on every book our readers buy through our links–Amazon is trying to address that by adding an additional financial incentive for those who use their links.)  Those two programs brought in 9,000.00 in revenue for AAR. Without that–if we’d relied on the income sources we’ve used in previous years: donations and book sales–AAR would have earned 11,000.00. This is a drop, a big drop, from the preceding years. 

I, of course, find this exhausting and depressing. As I’ve stated for years, this is a volunteer run site. No one, including me, gets paid. (In full disclosure: all reviewers get a gift certificate worth a few hundred dollars or less at the end of each year.) Add to that the complexity of the site and the time it takes to create and monitor daily content–readers, it’s a lot. 

It’s no secret that today’s world is brutally hard on media sites. In the past several years, most of the other long running sites who reviewed romance have either shut down or predominantly gone up behind paywalls. Most readers increasingly turn to BookTok, Goodreads, or Amazon for book reviews where, honestly, YMMV.

It’s frustrating because so many come here for reviews, blogs, and connections. In 2024, AAR had well over a half a million active users and was visited almost two million times. (according to Google Analytics) Through our links, readers bought almost 25 thousand books and other items. And many of these are engaged readers–every month, youall post 500 to 1000 comments on our reviews and blogs. (We published 333 reviews and 115 blogs!)

I remain determined to keep AAR online and available to all but I need your help. Could you commit to–as many of our FABULOUS readers do–making a monthly contribution to AAR? You can do so here. Could you consider sharing AAR and our links as much as possible? And could you, every time you go to Amazon, start with our links? We’d be grateful.

Thanks.