On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [1]
In the late 1950s, the success of Mills & Boon romances was noted by a Canadian publishing company, Harlequin Books, which began publishing Mills & Boon books in North America as Harlequin Romances. The two firms merged in the early 1970s, with Mills & Boon becoming a branch office of Harlequin. Harlequin began setting up independent publishing offices around the world and started to publish romances in translation. In 1981, the firms became a division of the Tor-star Corporation, a Canadian communications company.
For a number of years, Mills & Boon continued to be the sole acquiring editorial office, buying books mostly from British authors. Though it began publishing American author Janet Dailey in the 1970s, Mills & Boon didn't truly open up to other American authors until the early 1980s.
In the 1980s, Harlequin purchased its main rival, Silhouette Romance, from its founding publisher, Simon & Schuster. Since that time the two companies have functioned with relative independence under the Torstar corporate umbrella, though in recent years the line between the two houses has become less distinct. Other major publishers of romance include Kensington, Avon, Bantam/Dell, Berkley/Jove, Dorchester, New American Library (NAL), Pocket Books, St. Martin's, and Warner. (Appendix E includes a more complete list of current romance publishers.)
For many years, only one brand of romance novel existed, known generically in the United Kingdom as a Mills & Boon, and in North America as a Harlequin. Despite the lack of brand-name variety, however, the stories published under
these imprints were widely divergent. Contemporary, medical, and historical romances were all published as Harlequin Romance or Mills & Boon Romance.
But readers who gobbled up those original romances wanted even more variety, and authors wanted to stretch their wings with different kinds of stories— longer, spicier, more sensual, more confrontational, and including elements that just didn't fit in the short, sweet, traditional package.
Various types of romances began to split off from the long-established core. Harlequin editorial offices in New York City and Toronto began acquiring new kinds of stories, written by new authors. Radically different cover designs and distinctive brand names helped the reader more easily distinguish between the various styles of romances.
Some of those changes were made in response to other publishers, who had noticed the success of the Harlequin/Mills & Boon machine and started bringing out their own romance novels. But not long after those other publishers launched their romance titles, they discovered that a commercially successful romance novel requires more than a simple handsome male meets cute female formula. Unsuccessful lines and subgenres soon disappeared from the market. Since then, the romance market has been ever changing, as new lines are brought out and foundering lines and subgenres are abandoned.
At any given time there are at least twenty lines, series, or categories of romance novels (we'll look at the different categories beginning on page 8). The three terms are roughly synonymous, though series can also refer to a set of more closely related books (for instance, a trilogy in which each of three books features a different family member). In this book, however, we'll use the term category romances.
Category romances are groupings of books that have certain elements in common; for instance, they all involve a mystery as well as the romance, or they are all romantic comedy. Category books are published in sets of a predetermined number of titles each month. Though the characters and story lines are different in each book, romances within each category are packaged with similar covers, and they're marketed as a group rather than individually. They generally stay on the shelf for a month, sometimes less, before being replaced with