Harlequin

Harlequin isn't the only publisher; the official term is "category". A category romance is the sort that is on sale for precisely one month, and is sold by category rather than title. You have a standing order for, say, 10 Harlequin Temptations. In January you get ten copies of "Hamsters, Babies, and Lust" and put them in the stack. In February you get ten copies of "The Amnesiac Seal's Quadruplets", tear up the remaining 9 copies of "Hamsters" (everybody thought immediately of duct tape) and go on with your life.

Harlequins are Mills and Boon in Canada and the UK, by the way.

This is the first time I've tried writing out of order, and I don't think it's a coincidence that I've never gotten anything like this far before. In some ways it feels more like assembling a jigsaw puzzle or watching a construction site slowly grow into something recognizable than the kind of writing I did for school or do for work. Before I started, I had the opening, the heroine's background, and a few scenes from various points in the plot I knew I needed. The more I write, the more I see what needs to come before or next. But Chapter Two? Still not here. Which I'm taking as a sign that what I'd planned to put in it isn't really that important and can be rushed through to get to the meat of the story.

Betsy, again, yup- that's what I think of as "line". Doesn't AVon do runs like that as well?

Nope. Category romance doesn't just mean the publisher has guidelines, it means that the book is primarily marketed by publisher and line (hence category) and stays on the shelves for only a month.

If you look at Avon Romance's page, you'll see that the emphasis in the cover design is on the individual authors' names and titles.

[link]

Contrast the cover designs on these Harlequin Temptations:

[link]

The focus is on the publishing line, much more than on the author.

And if you want to buy an Avon Romance that was first published in 1998 and is still popular, you can. There is no way to buy a new copy of a Harlequin that was first published in 2002, let alone 2003. That page I linked to is the May books. They'll be gone by July.

Scary....

Yup. When you combine that with Harlequin having a mandatory moral rights clause nowadays, I'd never write for them. (It used to be common that you did an apprenticeship in category before writing a full-length manuscript.)

The moral rights clause says that the author has no moral rights in the content: you can sell them a book and they can change the heroine's name to Petunia and make her give speeches supporting slavery and there's not a damned thing you can say about it.

Used bookstores specializing in romance novels would be the place to look for the Harlequin titles. There's one here in town, I think 80% of their stock is romance novels of all type. It's not a huge shop by any means but the owners are very nice and knowledgable and they know can also tell you if your search for a title is futile.

I was reading a semi series (not in the Harlequin line) but some author and I couldn't find one book that had the story of two characters that were constantly referenced in the others. They told me the book was so popular they never got it in and I was just wasting my time trying to find it.

I use [link] and [link] to track down old categories. That's how I found Jennifer Crusie's backlist. It won't waste your time, but you can spend $20.00 and up for hard-to-find categories.

You may ask, why the @#$@#$@ don't the category publishers reprint these? They're starting to -- Harlequin's Mira line, for instance -- but not all of them are willing.

I'm eager enough for publication that I'd probably go with Harlequin if I'd exhausted all other opportunities, but they're definitely at the bottom of my list for all the reasons Betsy cites.

Susan, you're not the only one who writes out of order. Everything I've done more than 5,000 words long has been written that way. I get the idea, I bonk out a few scenes in the middle, I write the ending, and then I go back and fill it in. Sometimes the ending gets rewritten along the way, but I always have to know where I'm going.

For me, it's too easy to get bored if I just go beginning-middle-end. Instead I write the interesting stuff first, the stuff that grabs me first, and then go find interesting things to say about the other sections. Yes, I'm weird. It's one reason why I'll never post a fic WIP.