In publishing news this past week, News Corp has made a deal to buy Harlequin, and make it a division of HarperCollins. According to this Publisher’s Weekly article, HarperCollins has previously bought Thomas Nelson and merged it with Zondervan to form HarperCollins Christian Publishing. Harlequin publishes hundreds of romance books per month and distributes them mainly by mail to consumers’ houses. Why does this interest me? Harlequin today has many romance lines. Just about any thing you can think of, from historical romance to vampires and werewolves, including erotic stories. But, one line at Harlequin is called Love Inspired. Love Inspired books are Christian romances. Literary agent Steve Laube writes on his blog, “Harlequin’s Love Inspired and Heartsong lines publish 20 new romance novels each month in the contemporary, suspense, and historical categories. Since they recently expanded my numbers may be a little off, but you get the general idea. 240 new titles per year written with the Christian reader in mind. This is significant. It makes them the single largest publisher of Christian fiction in the industry by sheer number of annual titles.”
Originally posted May 6, 2014, http://christineareed.com/?p=68
Christine A. Reed 