All Romance Writers is your gateway to romance
Booklists, reader reviews and the old character indexes, put back on the domain where readers left them.
From 2001 this site was where romance readers came to settle arguments. Which book was the one with the heroine called Abby Merganser? Is there a sequel? What did other readers give it? Volunteer reviewers scored books from 1 to 10, every listing was tagged by heroine, hero, subject and publisher, and a network of sister sites, one per sub-genre, fed reviews back to this hub.
The database went dark around 2016. What you see now was rebuilt from archived copies: 63 complete author booklists covering 1,710 titles, the review excerpts that rotated on the front page, and both halves of the character index, the Leading Ladies and the Leading Men.
New writing lives at the Writers' Desk, named after the members area the site promised in 2003 and never quite opened.
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Shadow Rider by Christine Feehan
June 21, 2016 · Paranormal · 10 -
Once a Soldier by Mary Jo Putney
June 17, 2016 · Regency · 10 -
A False Proposal (ebook) by Pamela Mingle
June 5, 2016 · Regency · 10 -
Too Hot to Handle by Tessa Bailey
June 2, 2016 · Contemporary · 9 -
Mad About Max (ebook) by Holly Jacobs
June 2, 2016 · Fantasy · 9 -
I Wish You Were Mine (ebook) by Lauren Layne
February 12, 2016 · Contemporary · 10
browse the archive
from the writers' desk
Writing a Caribbean Romance: The Dominican Republic as Setting
Paradise is the laziest word on a back cover. The books that make an island work treat it the way a good historical treats a century: as part of the conflict.
Historical Romance Settings: An Era-by-Era Guide
Readers of the old archive tagged books into dozens of historical periods, and each one came with its own pleasures, its own heroes and its own ways to trip a careless writer.
Category Romance Lines: What the Name on the Spine Promised
In 2003 a reader at the supermarket rack trusted the line name more than the author's, and she had good reasons.
Romance in the Classroom: Studying the Romance Novel
Scholars stopped apologising for romance decades ago, and a student who picks one for a literature paper has a real body of criticism to stand on.
Heroes and Heroines: What 3,661 Names Say About Romance
We counted the titles and first names in the Leading Ladies and Leading Men indexes, and the peerage turned out to be very crowded.
Critique Partners for Romance Writers: Finding and Keeping One
The old Writers' Desk plan never fully launched, but the idea behind it, writers trading honest notes on each other's chapters, is still the cheapest education in the genre.
How to Write a Romance Review People Will Use
A good romance review tells a stranger whether to spend her Saturday on this book, and the old site's rules were built for exactly that job.
Plotting a Romance Novel: Beats, Conflict and the Ending
A romance has two fixed points, the meeting and the ending, and the craft lives in everything you build between them.
A Field Guide to Romance Subgenres, Shelf by Shelf
Eleven shelves, 199 themes, and fifteen years of arguing about where a ghost story with a duke in it belongs.
book club picks
In the autumn of 2003 every genre community ran its own reading group through Yahoo. These were the books on the table that October:
| Club | Book | Author |
|---|---|---|
| Contemporary | Paradise | Judith McNaught |
| Historical | To Marry the Duke | Julianne MacLean |
| Fantasy | The Legend MacKinnon | Donna Kauffman |
| Paranormal | Haunted | Heather Graham |
| Suspense | Flash Point | Metsy Hingle |
| Time Travel | A Garden in the Rain | Lynn Kurland |
The full schedule, including the picks booked into 2004, is on the book clubs page. Readers who want the October 2005 showcase can go straight to the featured books.
for readers who write
Plenty of romance readers have a half-finished manuscript in a drawer. Writing reviews, the way volunteers did here for years, trains the habit every romance novelist depends on: noticing exactly which detail made a scene work. The scarred hand on the steering wheel. The church at the top of the hill that the bride had to climb to in her heels.
That habit of picking the right detail and leaving out the rest is the same skill a school or college assignment asks for when it says describe. If you are starting from an essay rather than a novel, this walk-through on writing a descriptive essay covers choosing a dominant impression and building it from concrete sensory detail, which is close to how the best romance authors introduce a hero or a place. Then read a few of the opening lines in our review archive and watch the reviewers do it in two sentences. Writers working on a setting can go on to the Writers' Desk piece on making a Caribbean island more than a backdrop.
new here?
What was All Romance Writers?
A romance readers and writers community that went online in 2001. It kept author booklists, reader reviews scored from 1 to 10, an index of heroines and heroes, a subject index and, for a while, genre book clubs run through Yahoo Groups.
Is this the original site?
It is a restoration on the original domain. The booklists, review excerpts, club picks and indexes come from archived copies of the old pages; the Writers' Desk articles were written for the restored archive.
Can I still submit a review or add a book?
Not at the moment. The old submission forms depended on a database and a reviewer login that did not survive, so the archive is read-only while we decide what to rebuild.
Where do I start if I just want something to read?
Try the reader reviews page, which you can filter by community, or the 2005 featured books. If you remember a character but not the book, the Leading Ladies and Leading Men indexes were built for exactly that.