The romance book biz ain’t what it used to be.
Explosive growth in the market for women’s fiction, particularly in newer genres like chick lit and women’s thrillers, has been drawing readers away from traditional romance novels, those formulaic bodice-rippers stocked with hunky heroes and love-conquers-all endings.
That is bad news for Harlequin Enterprises, the largest North American publisher of romantic fiction. Three straight quarters of declining sales and profits led Harlequin last month to begin overhauling its business, shaking up its editorial ranks, halting the retail sale of three lines of romance books in the United States and cutting back on two others.
Frankly, I think part of it is not necessarily changing tastes for women, but changing tastes among the reading population as a whole (and among how publishers package things). We now have significant other genre sections of major bookstores — sf, fantasy, mystery — taking up space that the romance genre used to hold.
Or maybe it is a matter of changing tastes:
Much of the weakness has come in the market Harlequin dominates, series romance novels, in which it releases four to six books a month in each of roughly 18 book series. Sold under the Harlequin and Silhouette imprints, the series have names – like Desire, Temptation, Bombshell and Blaze – that leave little about their content to the imagination.
Those books – sold only in paperback and with such a short shelf life they come with dates printed on the spine – generate their heaviest sales in mass-market retailers like Wal-Mart and Target and at mall bookstores, particularly Waldenbooks. They have also been sold directly to consumers through book clubs, but that business has fallen sharply in recent years.
What’s actually selling is works by given authors, rather than works in a given “series.” That’s hurt Harlequin (whose seen many of its more successful authors wooed away by more mainstream publishers), but, interestingly, it’s paralleled by changes in the comic book area, where given titles/characters have begun to fade in importance to works by particular artists and writers.