the ask@AAR: And the top selling books at AAR this year are….
I’m always interested to see what AAR readers buy through the links on our site and in our newsletter. After looking over the data from Amazon for our account, it’s clear this is the year of historical romance. Out of our top ten best sellers, eight are historical romances. (I’m including Sherry Thomas’ Murder on Cold Street.)
We sold fewer books this year which I suspect is due to Amazon’s subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, and to libraries putting more romances up on their online systems. In the first 11 months of 2021, we sold, via our links, 17,591 books–audio, print and Kindle. Readers paid $151,071.00 for those books and AAR earned $3013.00. The average price of a book was $4.95.
All of our top ten books were DIKs at AAR and I think all were, at some point, featured in our Steals and Deals. All are M/F romances and all but one, Kate Clayborn’s Love At First, are part of a series. Two are self-published and two were debuts.
They are:
Any Rogue Will Do by Bethany Bennett (254 copies)
Devil in Disguise by Lisa Kleypas (231 copies)
Ten Things I Hate About The Duke by Loretta Chase (164 copies)
A Lady’s Formula for Love by Elizabeth Everett (130 copies)
The Heiress Gets A Duke by Harper St. George (122 copies)
Not Quite A Marriage by Bliss Bennet (120 copies)
Love At First by Kate Clayborn (108 copies)
Murder on Cold Street by Sherry Thomas (108 copies)
Wilde Child by Eloisa James (98 copies)
Just Not That Into Billionaires by Annika Martin (92 copies)
Thoughts?
Yayy my Bliss Bennet review moved some books!
Although I read more historicals this year ttheni have for a number of years, the only one I’ve read is Devil in Disguise as Lisa Kleypas is an autobuy author. I got fed up with publishers a number of years ago and the vast majority of books I read are self published. I like that the author can write exactly what she wants by self publishing. Also one of my favourite genres is Sci-fi romance and I’m not sure , except for self publishing or small epublishers how many of that type I can find.
Since I favor historical romance, I like this tally. Chase wrote my favorite romance this year–haven’t read the Bennett or the Everett but will consider them.
I’m never sure what a “qualifying” purchase is. I buy a lot from Amazon though fewer “bookie-books” as these days I use my kindle for almost all fiction. But, for example, I purchased an Amazon Echo Show in the Black Friday sale just over a week ago (over £100 in order value) but had no notion if that qualified. Is it just books? What about kindle books? Used books – I assume these will be way outside of the “qualifying” parameters? And everything else? Face masks (!!)?
Anything you buy when you go to Amazon from our page and buy ON THAT VISIT should give us a small fee. But you have to use our link to get to Amazon and you have to purchase it then. And if you have a charity set up, it won’t work.
I have a question, will you also get money, when one shops at another amazon site? Like UK, Germany ….
I believe so – I’m in the UK and when I click THIS LINK it takes me to Amazon UK. Also, the links on the acutal reviews should take you to your local site. The only time that may not happen is when books are published by different publishers in different territories – then you should use the first link I’ve given as that will take you to the relevant home page and you can navigate from there. (I’m sure Dabney will correct me if that’s wrong!)
Thanks for asking!
For me (in Germany) this unfortunately does not work. I manually replace the ‚.com‘ part of the URL with ‚.de‘. If the book is the same as in the US this works well. I‘m not sure if AAR gets the commission, but I do try.
Same here. The Amazon links on this site take me to amazon.com; from there I follow the redirect link to amazon.com.au.
We are supposed to–Amazon has a program called One Link. If you click to Amazon from our page, even if the .com changes to .de, it is still supposed to work.
But, again you have to purchase on that visit. You can’t put it in your cart and come back later.
Well I tried it and will keep on trying. Can you see what has been bought? I could buy something in German and if you get money for that, we would all know.
Yes–I can’t see it connected to a person, I can see all the items in a given day.