Harlequin Romance Tries to Adjust to Changing Times | Publishing Perspectives

Writing for The New Yorker, Adrienne Raphel looks back at the glory days of Harlequin Romances, noting that, "Harlequin Books Limited - now Harlequin Enterprises, was founded in 1949 in Canada as a small printer, packager, and distributor of books. In the 1950s, Harlequin started reprinting titles from Mills & Boon, a British publisher of popular romance novels. In 1972, Harlequin acquired Mills & Boon, and soon was synonymous with the romance novel. By 2012, romance novels were a 1.5-billion-dollar-a-year business that made up nearly seventeen percent of fiction sales. But, for the past several years, Harlequin's sales have declined as people have started getting their romance from erotic - and often self-published - ebooks instead of grocery-store paperbacks. Earlier this month, News Corporation announced it would acquire Harlequin from its parent company Torstar Corporation for about one hundred and fifteen million dollars - not much more than Harlequin's revenue last year. Harlequin will become a division of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers.