Contemporary, medical, and historical romances were all published as Harlequin Romance or Mills & Boon Romance.īut 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. Despite the lack of brand-name variety, however, the stories published under these imprints were widely divergent. (Appendix E includes a more complete list of current romance publishers.)įor 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. Other major publishers of romance include Kensington, Avon, Bantam/Dell, Berkley/Jove, Dorchester, New American Library (NAL), Pocket Books, St. 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.
In the 1980s, Harlequin purchased its main rival, Silhouette Romance, from its founding publisher, Simon & Schuster. 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 1981, the firms became a division of the Torstar Corporation, a Canadian communications company.įor a number of years, Mills & Boon continued to be the sole acquiring editorial office, buying books mostly from British authors. Harlequin began setting up independent publishing offices around the world and started to publish romances in translation. The two firms merged in the early 1970s, with Mills & Boon becoming a branch office of Harlequin. 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. As the years passed, romantic fiction outstripped other book sales by even greater margins, and eventually the firm dropped other types of books in order to concentrate on publishing romance novels. The firm soon realized that its hardcover romances, sold mostly to libraries, were more in demand than many of its regular titles.
The publishing firm of Mills & Boon, established in 1908, brought out the work of such authors as Agatha Christie and Jack London-and also published romantic fiction. Though love and romance have long been a part of the literary world, the romance novel as we know it today originated in the early twentieth century in England. If the main focus of the story is the couple falling in love while they’re hiding out, it’s a romance novel. If the main focus of the story is the chase, what the bad guys are actually up to, and why they’re after the main character, the novel is general fiction. That depends on which elements of the story are emphasized.