elsewhere/media relations: "harlequin is publishing WHAT?"

[iainpj]

Media Relations: harlequin is publishing WHAT?/ November 9, 2009:

So Harlequin is going to be publishing Gay and Lesbian romances. And, like, smutty books.

No, really.

No ... really.

Carina Press [...]

... Most likely, to the extent that gay romances get published, they're going to be M/M romance rather than gay -- that is, aimed and oriented at their women readers, rather than at the gay market. Developing a new client base would be massively difficult, after all, and they've had Torquere and Samhain and Dreamspinner and Ravenous Romance and (somewhat accidentally) Cleis Press to show them that yes, there are lots and lots of women out there who will read stories of men in love and/or gettin' it on. And Carina, as long as people know that it's a Harlequin imprint, would be a desperately hard sell to gay bookstores and gay male readers. After all, men have long been conditioned to run screaming into the woods at the very sight of a Harlequin romance, because gooshy books that women like are icky! Icky icky icky! (We men are delicate flowers that wilt at the mere mention of women's literature and/or romance. Be gentle with us.) [...]

...I have to admit, I am rather curious as to how Harlequin's M/M books will turn out. My main issue with the M/M romances that I've read is that the men frequently aren't particularly realistic, but then, I'm never quite sure how realistic romances are supposed to be. After all, they're a fantastical sort of literature, entirely by design. It seems rather pointless to harp at fantasies for not being real. I suppose my particular taste in romantical literature would be for more real men, though. Somehow, that seems to make for a story that works better....

Comments

[nonelvis]

For some reason, I thought Harlequin already had a gay imprint! I guess not.

[p-j-cleary.livejournal.com]

Back in the 80s, there were a ton of gay Harlequin-type books on the shelves at the gay bookstores. I guess as gay literature went into the mainstream, the mainstream gay literature went away?

[iainpj.livejournal.com]

No, not really. Or, not precisely. It shifted all over the place, but it's still around. Alyson used to publish more of the literary type stuff, along with a couple of other smaller houses that did go away -- Knight's something or other and GMP, among others. Then many of the smaller presses just went away, and Alyson got bought (and bought and bought), and shifted its focus for a long time; it seemed that it wasn't publishing anything but porn, and while that's still a huge part of its catalog, other types of books seem to be coming back. A fair amount of gay book publishing in this country seems to have been picked up by Kensington. That said, the bulk of gay publishing generally does seem to have been mainstreamed into the big presses.

Gay Romance publishing specifically went through some weird changes. There was only ever the odd book, usually with a romantic plot that was nevertheless not actually called a romance, until the Romentics line came out initially, back in the 1990s sometime. It demonstrated that there was actually a reasonable market for that sort of thing, got picked up for distribution by Warner Books, and promptly disappeared for a long time. (It seems to be back again, sort of (http://romentics.com/non_flash/romentics.html), with the same people who initially founded the line.) Then the whole field, as a coherent marketing sort of thing, disappeared again, and only recently made a reappearance, this time as books largely aimed at women. (Cleis is an exception to this; their gay romances actually are aimed at gay men; it's just that women happen to be buying them too.)

Um ... which was all probably more than you wanted to know about that. Sorry. There was an entry I was doing to do on all this that got eaten by the great kerfluffle over the Lambda Literary Awards. It would have been really savagely misinterpreted, so I decided to let it go, but it seems to have been bubbling under here and there.