A Brief History of Series Romance
Category lines, or series romance, are one of the cornerstones of the romance novel industry. We’ll delve deeper into each line as we document the genre’s past at Sweet Savage Flame. We’ll also be adding more pages to the site. As always, you can access pages via the top MENU. Please follow us via e-mail to stay informed of our latest updates.
What Is Category Romance?
Category or Series Romance
Category romance, or series romance, differs from long-form, single-edition romances in several ways. Most notable is the length. Category romances run from 55,000 to 70,000 words. These range from 150 pages to a short novel of 300 pages. As the name implies, they are sorted into category “lines.” Tropes also define them.
Tropes are common devices in stories that appeal to readers. They can be a type of plot, character, a theme, or a setting that writers use because of familiarity. Some examples are Highland Scots, second-chance-at-love, playboy billionaires, or arranged marriages.
All genre fiction uses tropes in some way. Time travel, artificial intelligence, chosen one Messiahs, and space travel are a few examples of Science Fiction tropes.
Tropes are not clichés. Clichés are ideas that are so overused they become trite. They irritate rather than engage. Examples that are found in romance would be the spunky heroine who stomps her foot when angered or purple-prose phrases like “whirling vortex of desire” to describe sex scenes.
Romance Lines or Imprints
What is a line or an imprint? A line is a category, or series, of books written by assorted authors that, while usually unrelated, share commonalities. These can be heat level, book length, and tropes employed.
A publishing house creates and distributes books. Publishers use trade names, or imprints, to market their books to the appropriate audiences.
Historical or Contemporary, What’s the Difference?
Harlequin is a publisher of romances. They have numerous category lines, such as Presents, Intrigue, and Historical.
Kensington Books is also a publisher. Zebra is one of their imprints. The historical Lovegram and Heartfire books were two of Zebra’s lines. Many other publishers, like Harlequin, have also released historical romance lines.
Why don’t we at Sweet Savage Flame classify these lines as category romances?
There are several reasons:
- Generally speaking, publishers didn’t number historical categories like contemporary series romance.
- These books run at 300-600 pages at a greater length than usual category romances.
- At Sweet Savage Flame, we try to separate historical from category and contemporary romances, as they have different lineages and genre conventions.
When we review books from historical category lines, such as Harlequin Masquerade, Harlequin Historical, and Signet Regency, please note that we file them under Historical Romance Reviews. If the books have a number, we provide that information.
Mills & Boon
Mills & Boon is the big grandmother of category romance. They originated in 1908 in the United Kingdom as a general publisher. Fortuitously enough, their first book released also happened to be a romance, Sophie Cole’s Arrows from the Dark. Romance would not be Mills & Boon’s primary focus until the 1930s, however.
Mills & Boon sold their romances mainly to lending libraries. They produced brown, hardcover books which were instantly recognizable. A UK-based company, they never directly released their books in North America. They distributed them through Harlequin. In 1971 Harlequin Ltd bought out Mills & Boon.
Mills & Boon’s romances were almost always told from a third-person perspective that focused on the heroine. Usually, they left the hero’s thoughts unknown. Only through his words and deeds did the heroine, and thus the reader, know how he felt about her. The stoic, inscrutable hero would be a staple of the genre for decades.
Harlequin
Harlequin Ltd. was founded in 1949 as a Canadian company that printed paperback editions of previously published works. Mysteries, westerns, and historical fiction were among their reprints.
The first romance Harlequin published was Nancy Bruff’s The Manatee in 1949.
Medical romances were popular in the 1950s and 1960s, so Harlequin capitalized on the market, reprinting them as early as 1953. These were huge sellers for the company.
The Romance Series
In 1957, Harlequin entered into a partnership with Mills & Boon, where they established the North American publishing rights to their romances. The first Mills & Boon released as a Harlequin Romance was The Hospital in Buwambo by Anne Vinton (#407). By 1960, Harlequin would release category romance exclusively.
The books would never extend into the bedroom. They consisted of no more than kisses and passionate embraces. If there were any love-making scenes, they were between married partners and never explicit but written in a “fade to black” sense.
Harlequin purchased Mills & Boon outright in 1971, significantly expanding their library. By 1972 the monumental revolution in the industry and culture would lead to major changes at Harlequin.
The Presents Series
In response to the radical sexual transformation of the 1970s, Harlequin created the Presents line. In the beginning, these were just reprints of “steamy” Mills & Boons repackaged and rebranded.
Authors Anne Hampson, Anne Mather, and Violet Winspear would be the sole producers of Presents romances for the first couple of years. Cover artist Don Sinclair would create new artwork for the first 100+ editions of Presents.
More sensual in nature than Romances, Presents would move beyond kisses, often using euphemisms to convey sex. However, it would be a while before plots contained explicitly detailed scenes. Intercourse between unmarried partners, particularly the kind that wasn’t considered “forced seduction,” was still years away.
Usual tropes included arranged or forced marriages, Greek or Latin millionaires, and widowed heroines who had never experienced true sexual pleasure.
Harlequin Presents has been and remains the world’s best-selling category line.
The Super Romance Series
With the creation of the Silhouette imprint and other competitors arising in the early 1980s, Harlequin would introduce new lines to keep up with the changes. The SuperRomance line was one of them.
Category romances generally ran under 200 pages in length. In the 1970s, thick doorstopper epics ruled the day. Harlequin released extended-length romances to enable more character development or longer plots. These were similar to the standard Romance line but contained about 100-150 pages more.
American Romance
Another series that Harlequin introduced in the early 1980s was the American Romance line. They had published authors from outside the United States, primarily the UK, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Indeed, Janet Dailey was Harlequin’s only American author until she moved to Silhouette. Nora Roberts was famously rejected by Harlequin, who declared they only needed one Yankee.
The American Romance line was created to allow for more familiar settings written by American authors.
Temptation
In 1983, Harlequin would produce their most sensual line yet: Temptation. These took place in America or Canada, although they could be set in other nations. The protagonists were usually both North American. This series featured people from all walks of life: ordinary Joes and Janes to the jet-set.
These books ran between the length of the Presents and SuperRomance series, fewer than 250 pages.
The first Temptation released was an unnumbered special edition. The line officially began with Lavyrle’s Spencer’s Spring Fancy.
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Hi, Jacqueline.
Thank you for this article about the beginnings of the romance novel industry and its various publishers and imprints. I look forward to reading more of these articles in the future.
Much appreciated, Blue Falcon! There’s so much history behind all the publsihing houses and imprints, I figured I’d start with a general article and add more articles to the pages.
Hope you’re keeping on keeping on! All my best!