Harlequin romance what is

By then, Fabio had faded, as had the brand with which he had long been identified. Harlequin Books Limited—now Harlequin Enterprises—was founded in in Canada as a small printer, packager, and distributor of books. By , romance novels were a 1. Harlequin will become a division of News Corp. When Fabio—the Great Blond One—arrived on the scene, he was a natural fit. People were reading digitized Harlequin editions, but the Kindle and other e-readers had also made it easier for individual authors to self-publish their novels and for smaller romance publishers to get attention for their titles.

Some of these novels were racier than what Harlequin traditionally offered. But some self-published novels went beyond even the most liberal Harlequin lines. Several Amazon best-sellers, like T. Harlequins can get racy, but they retain something of their genteel British roots. Allison Kelley, the executive director of the Romance Writers of America, told me that, historically, Harlequin was where budding romance writers would start their careers, since the publisher accepted submissions from anyone—even writers without agents.

It was so lucrative it would make a modern publisher weep. Remember: this is before big-box bookstores spread across America, before Amazon and long before the rise of digital self-publishing.

There just wasn't as much to read, and romance devotees are famously voracious. Harlequin promised consistently entertaining books you could read in a couple of hours, clearly packaged, available for purchase without so much as driving fifteen minutes out of your way.

Imagine you're a woman with three kids and maybe a part-time job, on a budget that's far from unlimited, and think about the power of that promise. And, oh, the marketing! Never has a publishing company gone to such dedicated, batshit-crazy lengths to move its product. They plowed money into TV advertising, sure, running commercials during prime-time programs like Kojak and Laugh-In , which catapulted Harlequin into a household name. But the variety and range of promotional capers is truly astounding.

Other promotional ventures done on a contractual basis include a complete romance published in Good Housekeeping that was followed by a coupon the reader could send in to receive a free Harlequin; a romance packed in the large-size box of Kotex feminine napkins and Bio-Ad detergent; romances given away to customers at McDonald's restaurants on Mother's Day; romances given away with purchases of Avon products and Jergens lotion and a free romance given in exchange for a coupon found on the bottom of Ajax cans.

I would not be at all mad at more Kotex gifts with purchase. It's pretty clear these sorts of wildly successful! It offends delicate literary sensibilities to see words packaged and sold so nakedly like a TV dinner, no matter how successful a moneymaking strategy.

And too, Harlequin was unashamed about going where its customers were—and its customers were women, often housewives. They knew they were selling to women, and they chased women's dollars without embarrassment or apology. And let's face it, being associated with women is often the shortest route to being dismissed in the broader culture as fundamentally unserious. But it damn sure worked financially.

After the TV advertising push, sales jumped 30 million books in two years, hitting 72 million in Grescoe says that by the mids, the company printed , copies of every single fucking book. By the end of the decade, Harlequin had spent several years perched atop a golden goose. In the book business, stores can return unsold inventory for a refund, which often screws with publishers' balance sheets. Harlequin's returns were the envy of the industry. Their market share was unrivalled. The world was theirs.

And they'd done it all without especially dramatic changes to the books. Via Grescoe, here's author Violet Winspear explaining her approach:. I put all these cruel manly words into these men's mouths… and then work so as he makes a grab for the girl.

And then she's half fainting, you know what I mean, with a burning desire, which she doesn't even understand herself. And then he's bruising her mouth with his urgent, demanding kisses, and he's got this strange steely light in his eyes.

And I get it so the girl says to herself, 'What does it mean, what does it mean? Even outside Presents, it was increasingly explicit that the tension simmering between hero and heroine was sexual in nature, even if it was never consummated outside the bonds of holy matrimony: these were the glory days of the punishing kisses.

His power over the heroine is exercised mainly through sexual domination, but he is also the richer and more powerful of the two; often, he is her boss.

There are always exceptions when you talk about something so diverse as Harlequin, but I think it's fair to say the s were peak jerk. The absolute low point of reporting this article was reading a Harlequin Presents by Anne Hampson, in which the "hero" kidnaps the heroine and tells her either they get married or he rapes her.

I couldn't even make it halfway through. While they published authors from around the Commonwealth lord, the Australian romances! They turned Nora Roberts down multiple times; in a interview with the journal Para-Doxa , she said: "I received my manuscript back with a nice little note which said that my work showed promise, and the story had been very entertaining and well done.

But they Harlequin already had their American writer. Roberts means Janet Dailey, who wrote hugely popular westerns. For Harlequin, Dailey was all they needed. They'd gotten a little too comfortable. Harlequin's monopoly on the market was a state of affairs too good to continue forever, and it was inevitable that other publishers would take notice and start angling for their own cut. In the late '70s, Harlequin made it easier for everyone by shooting themselves in the foot.

They decided they could handle American sales with their own team, cutting ties with Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books, previously their distributor below the 49th parallel. If you have this on VHS somewhere, I am begging you to send it my way. Silhouette had plenty of manuscripts to pick from, because there were scads of American women who wanted to write romance but didn't have a snowball's chance with Harlequin and their Brit-controlled editorial department.

Company politics made the situation even worse: Grescoe reports that a Canadian-based editor had made multiple attempts to launch an American line, commissioning manuscripts that would ultimately get scotched. Guess where agents went to sell those finished but homeless books? You guessed it—Silhouette. In magazines from the period like McCalls, you'll see giant full-color advertisements for Harlequin and Silhouette practically side-by-side in the same issue, jostling among the consumer packaged goods and the coupons.

Silhouette eventually sweet-talked Dailey onto their list and made her their star attraction, parking her square in their TV commercials and magazine ads, too. Yet another giant fuck-you to the Canadians:. Meanwhile, other publishers were piling on; seemingly every company decided to launch its own category line.

Dell had Candlelight Ecstasy, whose covers alone are enough to tell you these were sexier, more explicit reads. Berkley launched Second Chance at Love. Bantam had Circle of Love, which, judging by the ads, were sweet enough to make your teeth hurt. Fawcett made a crack at the model with historicals sold as Coventry Romance.

You get a category romance line! And you get a category romance line! Everybody gets a category romance line! The fight was vicious but brief. In , Harlequin purchased Silhouette. By the late '80s, several competitors had folded RIP, Candlelight Ecstasy, your covers were too fine for this world.

In , president David Galloway was back to trumpeting the company's 75 to 80 percent "series" romance market share to the Financial Post.

The "romance wars" of the '80s this is a real term adopted by the business press to describe the bitter industry brawl, it is not my coinage fragmented the market into a million bosomy pieces. Silhouette, now a Harlequin subsidiary, still retained substantial independence. Bantam's Loveswept had survived the reckoning, as did Zebra. Avon had emerged as a major single-title publisher and exerted increasing influence over the genre.

With so much more competition, things got interesting again. For one thing, the Americans had stormed the gates, and they wanted to experiment with new characters and plots and settings and dynamics. Nora Roberts, talking to Para-Doxa :. When Silhouette opened in , looking specifically for new American writers to tip at the Harlequin format a bit, it opened a new era for romance and offered an entire generation of writers a chance…. This is the primary reason, I believe, that category romance, and the entire romance market, has grown and evolved over the years.

The American market was poised for the change, for stronger heroines, less domineering heroes, for more contemporary themes.

For myself, and many of the writers who started during the early 80s, we were readers of the genre first. We knew what we wanted to read. So we wrote what appealed to us.

And it worked. As Roberts describes, this maligned corner of the business—so often treated as the same book over and over and over—turned into a laboratory for innovation.

So you could put in a book that was a little wacky and see if it worked. Categories also became the place where many big names got their start. Women like Roberts, Dailey, Linda Howard, Sandra Brown and Elizabeth Lowell, who'd go onto tremendous success, launched their careers in categories, in the midst of the change prompted by the romance wars; later writers like Lori Foster and Jennifer Crusie would follow the same path. Another development in this period: Harlequins weren't so chaste anymore.

The world had changed since Mary Bonnycastle was handpicking doctor-nurse romances. Peyton Place was published in ; Woodstock happened in ; Deep Throat hit theaters in Other romance publishers were getting raunchy, too, and this is where the "bodice ripper" comes in.

Though I hate this snotty term, it's useful as a way to point to a different strain within the romance genre—a type of book totally distinct from Harlequins. The term sprang from the sweeping, sexed-up historical romances of the mid-to-late s, a boom that kicked off when Avon editor Nancy Coffey fished Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower out of the slush pile.

These books were the farthest thing from innocent, chock full of bedroom scenes. Honestly, I find some of them tougher going than the syrupy doctor-nurse romances of the s, because they traffic heavily in "forced seduction. But they featured a feistier brand of heroine, they were more overt and, increasingly, explicitly tied sexual pleasure to the happily-ever-after.

Take this passage from Woodiwiss's The Wolf and the Dove , published in , which follows the post-Conquest travails of dispossessed Saxon Aislinn and conquering Norman Wulfgar the very first romance I ever read :. Her heart trembled under his demanding passion. It touched a quickness deep within her, a glowing spark that grew and grew until it seemed to shower her with burning embers. A thousand suns burst within her and spread their surging heat in ever flooding tides to the very limits of her senses.

With a gasp she rose against him, her eyes widening and staring in amazement into the gray ones bent upon her. Purple as hell, sure, but unmistakably an orgasm. Did I mention at one point the hero chains the heroine at the foot of his bed, where she sleeps in a pile of pelts? The result was ultimately more empowered heroines and more frank, unembarrassed sexuality. Unfortunately, within Harlequins—at least at first—this more liberated sexuality was less often claimed freely by the heroine than taken forcibly by "heroes" who sometimes read today like simulacra crafted from used condoms and wadded-up guitar tabs for "Blurred Lines.

They didn't necessarily go over so well at the time, either. In Reading the Romance , published in and one of the better-known academic texts on the genre, one of the interviewees complains: "I get tired of it if they [the heroes] keep grabbing and using sex as a weapon for domination because they want to win a struggle of the wills. I'm tending to get quite a few of these in Harlequins and I think they're terrible.

But the long history of Harlequin does a lot to explain why "no no no OK actually yes" became such a popular trope. It's very easy to forget how hard women had to fight over the course of the twentieth century to feel they had a right to sexual pleasure. And so, while romance is often treated as a static genre, I prefer to think of it as a sprawling, decades-long intergenerational discussion sometimes polite, sometimes a bare-knuckle brawl among women about what constitutes love, how one finds a partner that's worth putting up with the occasional tantrums and dirty socks.

Scenes that disturb the modern reader nevertheless paved the way for the more sex-positive genre we enjoy today. There are also critics who put the dynamic into context.

Dixon, for instance, argues that:. This dovetails nicely with romance novelist Sarah MacLean's feminist theory of romance as a broader genre. Which provides another way to read the novels of the 70s and 80s as products of their time: "You're in the heroine's head, even though it's third person, and the hero is closed off to her. She has to break him open, like he's a world she can't be a part of," said MacLean.

They unlock the 'female' part of him," and "when she's doing that, she's imbuing the hero with femininity. She's saying, it's OK for you to love. It's OK for you to care. Starting around , Harlequins suddenly look a lot more modern.

Heroines have careers and ambitions and personalities. They're older, and even the young women no longer seem quite so wet-behind-the-ears, so helpless. Maybe the hero's still ultimately forgiven for being a dick, but the text is likely more self-aware about the fact that he's being a dick.

While you'll still find Alphamen roaming free in the romance aisle generally and the Harlequin display specifically, outright brutishness increasingly had to be curbed or explained more convincingly or capped off with a really good grovel—or all three.

You get the sense that bad behavior is deployed in the service of eventual emotional catharsis, rather than excused. With the company occupying a plum position in the marketplace, Harlequin's array of offerings multiplied at a dizzying rate in the late 80s and into the 90s.

Lines divided and subdivided. Within various lines like SuperRomance and Silhouette Intimate Moments, they began carving out thematic series, denoting what was inside with stickers like "Count on a Cop" or "Hope Springs.

There was the great romantic suspense craze, which survives in the form of Harlequin Intrigue, and then the paranormal boom, which inspired the creation of Harlequin Nocturne. That wild diversification was enabled, in part, by the advent of computers. You're not going to spring butt sex on somebody who's been reading Harlequin Presents since ; that requires the creation of a new line.

But if readers wanted more mystery, or more babies, or more vampires, well—coming right up. And I'd say, well, the trends come from you guys," said Macro. Today the company's offerings are so diverse it's well-nigh impossible to generalize. When I called Regis, one of the first things out of her mouth was a warning that, "Almost any statement you make is going to have to be qualified.

You like it hot! Harlequin Blaze stories sizzle with strong heroines and irresistible heroes playing the game of modern love and lust. They're fun, sexy and always steamy. Harlequin Kimani Romance stories feature sophisticated, soulful and sensual African-American and multicultural heroes and heroines who develop fulfilling relationships as they lead lives full of drama, glamour and passion.

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