Plus, the sheer variety of lines available makes it easy to find something that appeals to you. The quality varies, some are excellent, some are dreadful, most are somewhere inbetween. Hence all the complaints about Harlequin romances being written according to a "formula", etc.Īs a reader, I sometimes reach for a Harlequin or Mills & Boon romance as a palate cleanser between heavier and more serious books or at times when I'm tired and can't focus on anything overly complicated. Regarding the anti-Harlequin sentiment, some of it is anger and concern about the bad contracts, but a lot of it is also general anti-romance prejudice. Jeannie Lin's historical romances set in Imperial China. And the high volume and strong branding also allowed Harlequin to occasionally take a chance on a book that was a bit different from the mainstream, e.g. Their contracts were always restrictive, but because of the high volume sold in the US, the UK and around the world, the money was pretty good. Nora Roberts, Suzanne Brockmann, Tess Gerritsen, Jayne Ann Krentz, Jennifer Crusie, Linda Castillo, etc. A lot of writers got their start writing category romances for Harlequin, e.g. They accepted more than one book per year and also actively encouraged new writers (because you can't publish 100+ books per month without new writers), offered detailed submission guidelines, contests, forums, etc. Like Vivi said, until the advent of indie publishing Harlequin/Mills & Boon was the only publisher that accepted short romances of 50000 to 70000 words and one of the very few that accepted submissions from unagented writers. well I'm still working off a contract I signed over 2 years ago before I started selfpublishing. Now you're probably wondering why I write for Harlequin. Books get published in Germany, France, UK, Auz, India, Romania, Korea, Sweden, Netherlands. 10 years ago, authors were making 40K (advance and 1st year royalties) a book easily, and writiing 3 books or more a year. Years ago, they were the go to place for authors writing romance. And getting your rights back are a lessen in futility.īut their big lure is writing a lot of books, and their foreign royalties. They don't pay very much up front, and their royalties suck. It's their advances and royalties and terms of contract that suck for the most part. You submit a manuscript, an editor reads it, if they love it, they will offer you a book contract and pay you an advance. They acquire books just like all the other traditional publishers out there. Someone please educate me on Harlequin's process, please. Is this worthwhile for authors or more damaging in the end? It just amazed me to see sooo many new releases from Harlequin on their own dedicated rack, and amazed me even more that they do this practically every month. So, I'm wondering, does Harlequin do some sort of 'assembly line' with thousands authors submitting their 50k manuscripts whenever they're ready, and publishing them? Or do they assign authors A, B, and C to submit something for the month of November, while authors D, E, and F submits for December, etc? I also noticed on the spine, the books were numbered, even though there were so many different types of romance books available (everything from American Romance, Desire, Kiss, etc.), and they were well into the two thousands! Looking in the inside cover, I saw that they release a certain amount of books by different authors a month. And most of the books I saw had a maximum of 190-220 pages, which would probably be about 40k - 50k words. I've never so much as picked up a Harlequin book, so I decided to check it out and see what the big whoop was all about.
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