The AAR Top 100 Poll: October Is Just Around the Corner
Get ready…it’s coming! Yes, we’re going to be updating the All About Romance Top 100 Romances Poll this coming October. To refresh your memory, here are the reigning Top 100.
It’s been three years since we last polled for your top 100 romances in October 2007, and it’s time for an update. So, from October 1 through October 31, 2010, we’ll be polling for your favorite romances.
Why are we giving you so much warning? Well honestly, it takes most people a fair amount of time to prepare their ballots. While we had a number of ballots on the first few days of voting back in 2007, we were literally swamped with ballots in the last few days.
While some people only voted for 10 to 20 romances, the majority of voters listed up to 80 or more romances on their ballots.
So, start getting your lists ready. Totally stumped? No idea how to get a ballot ready? Well, you might start by looking through your shelves of books, and just make a list of some of your favorites.
Don’t keep any books in your home? Then other good places to start are to review the AAR Annual Reader Polls, as well as performing power searches of A+, A and A- reviews at AAR.
And, if you keep spreadsheets or other documents of books read through the years, then get ready to sort for your favorite titles there too.
Good luck! And remember, October is just around the corner. Really!
– Lee, Cindy, and LinnieGayl
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Thanks for explaining how important the rankings are. This is going to be one of my summer projects (along with reading the rest of Laura Kinsale’s backlist and continuing to search for Carla Kelly titles).
I’m glad this heads-up is helpful for so many of you. I still have my ballots from all of the past Top 100s, so each for each new one, I start with it.
Library Addict — that’s exactly how it works. You list your books in order, so your #1 gets 100 points, your #2 gets 99 points, etc. So it’s really important that you rank them. I actually play around with my list a lot moving books around. Of course, you don’t have to vote for 100 books. If you only have 10 or 20 that you really like, you can just order those.
I look forward to this poll and appreciate the early heads up. It’s such a great tool to identify new books and authors — along with the great reviews at AAR! Ditto on the comments for a Top Author’s poll.
I’m fairly new to AAR so have never voted in the top 100 poll. When we make our list of books, do we need to rank them in order or just list our personal top 100?
What I mean does the book at the top of our list get 100 points, next one 99, etc, etc. Or does each book mentioned get a point and then the results are tabulated and the book listed by the most people is #1 on the AAR list, second most #2, etc etc? Ranking my favorites will be a difficult task and I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing so if it’s not necessary.
This makes me SO happy!!! I LOVE the top 100 poll!
Because of time constraints I’ve never submitted a list before but with this head’s up I do believe I’ll be able to scour my keeper shelves and attempt a list. I think I’ll whittle down the literally thousands of books stored in those bookcases by listing only those books I’ve read, shelved and then pulled out to reread and sometimes to reread once again. These are the books I use to break a reading block or to bring back my love of reading after plowing through several disappointing (not lived up to the hype) or truly boring books. ;-)
Thanks, everyone. We’re very excited about redoing the Top 100 Romances as well. Although it’s a lot of work, it’s a really fun poll.
Wendy L. We don’t publish individual reader’s ballots as they come in. In 2007 we posted an “”interim”” list of the leading top 200 books about half-way through. I’m not sure how useful that was. However, once the poll was over, many readers posted their Top 100 ballot in the forums.
Wendy L – I wonder if it’s because a lot of those authors haven’t gotten one individual book out there which gained enough momentum to get them on a list.
AAR, I love your polls and I think they’re tremendously useful. I would love to see a Top 100 Authors poll (or even just Top 50) some year instead of the individual books – I think it would give us great information for finding backlists and hidden treasure authors, especially prolific authors of category romances who split the vote too many ways to make the Top 100 Romances.
Good idea. Authors would appreciate this I imagine. And I think it would also help authors who have so many good books, they compete against each other and bring their overall book rankings down. I know everyone has a different opinion of Lisa Kleypas or SEP’s best book, right?
Yay! I imagine there will be a LOT more paranormal/sci-fi romance this time around.
Will you guys publish the responses as they come in? I’ve always wanted to see that, and I’d like people to be able to look at my list so that I can maybe jog a few memories of wonderful books that have never made the cut. Like, why hasn’t Deborah Smith ever appeared? Or Jane Goodger? I don’t remember seeing Abe or Jennifer Ashley either.
Thanks for the poll, it’s always interesting.
I love these lists! I was hoping you would do this again this year. Since since 2007, I’ve started to keep a database of books I’ve read just to make compiling my top 100 easier. Thanks for the heads up. I’ve got some reading to do of potential best books.
I actually found my list I saved in Excel from 2007, will make it easier to update!
Way cool!! Now that I’ve read ~85 or so books from the curent list, I need a fresh one to work from.
I organize all of my reads over at Goodreads.com, so it will be fairly easy to pull a list of 100 favorite books. Of course, ranking them 1-100 will be difficult, so I appreciate the advanced heads up.
Hi gals,
Having just gotten off of 2 weeks of sick leave (all better now, thanks), the very best part was re-reading about 8 of my old favorites, mostly Heyer and Kinsale. Can’t wait!