Saturday, November 21, 2009

Harlequin Horizons

Sarah Zettel over at Bookview Cafe has the best summary I've run into of the Harlequin Horizons blow-up. Briefly, for anyone who hasn't heard, Harlequin has partnered up with Author Solutions to form "Harlequin Horizons," a self-publishing imprint. This has gone over like the proverbial lead balloon, resulting in RWA, SFWA and MWA scratching Harlequin off their list of approved publishers. Sarah summarizes the issues wonderfully well.

Angie

PS -- I'm leaving tomorrow to spend the week with my Mom for Thanksgiving. I also have a novel due by then. [flail] If I'm not around much in the next week or so, that's why. Everyone have a great holiday!

6 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Sounds like Harlequin cut their own throats.

Angie said...

Charles -- seriously. It's surprising that a publisher which has been a major player in the industry for so many decades could make such an egregious error. It makes me wonder whether Author Solutions offered them a large signing bonus or something.

Angie

Bernita said...

"egregious error."
Exactly.
And the timing in regards to their new e-press sucked too.
Have a happy, Angie.

Angie said...

Bernita -- also very true. [nod] The response to Carina had been overwhelmingly positive, but the Harlequin Horizons thing is just poisoning everything. :(

Angie

Shauna Roberts said...

Have a great Thanksgiving, Angie.

I agree with everyone's comments. I am just astounded that a publisher like Harlequin would do something so sleazy. I wonder how many people will stop sending manuscripts to them and how many of their authors will look for a new house?

Angie said...

Shauna -- I honestly don't know how much this will hurt them, at least in the short term, over the next few years. They're still the single largest romance publisher, and that's a lot of market to ignore over principles. I can see some percentage of new writers deciding to query elsewhere first, but I'd be surprised if a significant number of their current writers moved on over this.

I'm trying to be fair, though, so maybe I'm overcompensating. [ponder] I've never been a Harlequin fan and would never have considered submitting there even before this mess, so I don't know. We'll see over the next couple of months or years. They are backpedalling like crazy, though, so they might be able to recover. Even if their rep is never quite what it was before, they might have enough banked to still keep their number one position even after this kind of blunder.

Angie