The AAR Annual Readers’ Poll
The annual AAR Reader Poll is open!
We’re pleased to announce, for the 20th year in a row, the AAR Annual Reader Poll is now open! We hope you will help us take a look back to find the best romance books the year 2015 had to offer.
The AAR Annual Reader Poll began with the best romances of 1996, and ever since then, readers have used the poll results to guide them to some of the best romances published in the past year. But for the poll to be helpful, and truly represent as many AAR readers as possible, we need you to vote! Many readers use various guides to fill out their ballots. Some AAR readers keep spreadsheets of their reading year, while others utilize such online sites as Goodreads for their records, making it relatively easy to fill out a ballot. If you haven’t kept a spreadsheet or reading chart (and there are just as many readers who don’t), you can use the Power Search function at AAR to search for reviews from the 2015 reading year. In Power Search you can search by genre, reviewer, year published, grade, and other categories which should help you in filling out your ballot.
In recent weeks AAR has published a number of posts that offer some of our favorite romances of 2015, including the favorite 2015 romances of the entire staff and their favorite audio listens, so make sure to check out the AAR blog for ideas as well.
The poll will be open for just two weeks starting today, Monday January 18th and will close at 12:00 midnight U.S. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, January 31th, 2016. We encourage all of our AAR readers to participate in this poll. Once again, the poll will be hosted offsite at surveymonkey.com (see the end of this post for the actual link).
There are now 25 different categories listed on the ballot but remember, for your ballot to be valid, you only have to vote in a minimum of six (6) categories. The average AAR reader votes in about 10 categories but some readers vote in all categories.
Almost every year we make changes to the poll and this year is no different. The romance genre has an ebb and flow that opens up new categories and leaves behind themes that were once popular. This year, after some debate, we decided not to drop any categories from the ballot, although a few — Best Category Romance, Best Young Adult Romance, and Best New Adult Romance – had a relatively low vote tally last year. Instead, we decided to add back in, for another try, the Worst Romance you read. We’ve also added a comment box at the end for you to make suggestions for future categories, or to offer your thoughts on the poll.
In the past, many people have posted on the boards that the winners don’t reflect their favorites. Keep in mind that this poll can only be successful with your participation, so please take the time to vote to make sure your favorites get tallied!
Look for the results to be posted at AAR in February. Ready to vote?
Click here.
LeeB. and LinnieGayl
Thanks to everyone who’s voted already. As a reminder, this is a poll for the best of romances published for the FIRST TIME in 2015, not for books you read for the first time in 2015. So even if you read a book like Outlander (published years earlier than 2015) for the first time in 2015, it doesn’t count. And count me as one of those who read a number of romances published years earlier for the first time in 2015 :)
I didn’t vote in all the categories — just the ones that made sense based on the limited stats I tracked for new releases. I know I voted in more than 6 categories, so hopefully that’s okay. Good luck with the polling!
Saw your ballot come through. Thanks! yes, as long as you vote in at least six categories you’re good. I personally am never able to vote in all the categories :)
Thanks for the confirmation. I realized after submitting my ballot that my entry for best non-romance with romantic elements was actually a 2014 release. You can disregard that, if you haven’t already figured that one out. The others I voted for should all be from 2015.
Hope my ballot went through.
I put this in the comments section of the ballot, but maybe rather than Worst Romance it could be Most Disappointing Romance (for a book you were looking forard to that didn’t work as well as you hoped). Did that used to be a category or am I misrembering? I actually had a hard time coming up with a worst romance for the ballot as most of my worst reads in 2015 were for older books.
Your ballot did come through. Right now I’m mostly just looking at the number of ballots and who submitted them.
You’re right: most disappointing was a category at one time. Based on comments/books/etc. submitted for worst, perhaps we could do “”Most Disappointing”” next year, also in the manner that Dabney suggested above — for us to learn.
Thanks for voting!!!
When you say you want to learn from the worst book, are you referring just to AAR management and not readers? I’m not sure who the “”you,”” “”we,”” and “”us”” are here. I’m not sure I would have voted if I had known votes would not be viewed by readers.
Well, we only post results that are conclusive. If there is a book that gets lots of votes for Worst Book, I think we’ll publish it. But if we gets many different candidates and there’s no clear “”winner,”” we would be unlikely to publish that result.
Okay, well that sounds more like it applies to all categories and not just one? At first I read the posts above as AAR not wanting to post results of the “”worst”” category out of concern someone would be offended. If that was the case, I wouldn’t have voted for that category.
There are many great books, but also some terrible books, please never get rid of the worst category. Thanks in advance!
I was about to retweet this, help promote it, but “”Worst Romance”” stopped me. Categories like that encourage snark and are hurtful. They don’t reflect well on a site as valuable as yours. I hope you’ll consider removing it again in the future.
I don’t like snarky either. Having said that, I actually do appreciate the worst category only because it seems fair that if we have favorites, we have books we really did not enjoy and we have a place where we can be honest as readers. It helps me to see all sides of the issue just from the perspective of making good reading choices as a consumer and hearing what everyone things about what’s out there. So, I was happy to see this category return.
I don’t think we will post the Worst Romance nominees. Rather it’s instructive for us to see what readers like and don’t like. We don’t ask for these to be mean but rather to learn.
Thanks,
Dabney Grinnan
Publisher at AAR
Our results won’t be posted? How odd!
See below.
Dabney
Thanks for responding. :)
Thanks for responding, Dabney. :)
Congratulations! Two decades is an amazing achievement.
I will vote, but I don’t know if I’m going to make it in the new ‘worst romance’. Yes, I’ve read a couple of awful books last year, but none of them was published in 2015, so I cannot include them.
Wow, 20 years! Congratulations, AAR! I always look forward to the annual results from readers.