Category Romance Lines: What the Name on the Spine Promised

For most of the old site’s life, the name of the line on the spine told a romance reader more than the name of the author on the cover.

That sounds like an insult to authors. It was not meant as one, and most category authors I knew would have agreed with it. A reader in 2003 who picked up a Harlequin Intrigue knew, before she read a word, that the book would run to the line’s set length, that someone would be in danger, that the hero would be competent with a weapon and the heroine would not be stupid, and that the couple would end together before page 250. She could buy four of them at the grocery store on a Thursday, read them by Sunday, and come back the next month for the next four. The author’s name mattered less than the brand’s promise, and the brand kept its promise with remarkable consistency.

The publishers list in the archive preserves dozens of these lines. Many no longer exist. This is my attempt to explain what each one meant to the readers who reviewed them here, with the caveat that my memory for launch and closure dates is worse than my memory for heroes, and where I am not sure, I will say so.

Category and single title

The distinction confused new members, so it is worth setting out plainly.

A category romance belongs to a numbered line. The publisher releases a fixed number of titles in that line each month, all roughly the same length, all following the same guidelines for tone, heat and plot. The books sit on the shelf for about a month, then the next batch replaces them. Readers often subscribed by mail and received the whole month’s set.

A single title romance stands alone in the publisher’s catalogue. It has no line number, its length depends on the story, and it stays in print as long as it sells. Nora Roberts’s big hardcovers, Julia Quinn’s Bridgertons and Linda Howard’s thrillers were single titles.

Many authors moved from one to the other. Nora Roberts began with Irish Thoroughbred for Silhouette Romance in 1981. Jennifer Crusie’s first novel, Manhunting, came out as a Harlequin Temptation in 1993. Linda Howard wrote for Silhouette Intimate Moments, including Mackenzie’s Mountain, before her single-title career took off. Jill Shalvis published a long run of category novels before her small-town single-title series. Category was the apprenticeship, and for many writers it stayed the job they preferred.

The Harlequin lines

Harlequin, the Toronto publisher, ran the largest stable of lines during the site’s years. The lengths below are approximate, taken from guidelines as I remember them from the period. Harlequin adjusted them more than once, so treat the numbers as a rough guide rather than gospel.

Line	Rough length	What it promised
Harlequin Romance	50,000–55,000	Sweet, emotional, little or no explicit sex, often set abroad
Harlequin Presents	50,000–55,000	Glamour, wealthy and powerful heroes, intense conflict, Mediterranean settings
Harlequin American Romance	55,000–75,000	American settings, families, small towns, warmth
Harlequin Superromance	75,000–85,000	Longer, more complex plots, subplots and secondary characters
Harlequin Temptation	around 60,000	Contemporary, sexy, modern heroines
Harlequin Blaze	55,000–60,000	Explicit, sex central to the plot
Harlequin Intrigue	55,000–60,000	Suspense, danger, mystery alongside the romance
Harlequin Duets	two short books per volume	Romantic comedy, two stories bound together
Harlequin Love and Laughter	short	Romantic comedy, an earlier attempt at the same market
Harlequin Historical	70,000–75,000 or more	Historical settings, mostly British and American West
Harlequin Medical Romance	around 50,000	Doctors and nurses, hospital settings, imported from Mills & Boon

Presents was the line people imagined when they mocked Harlequin: the Greek tycoon, the innocent secretary, the title with “Mistress” or “Bride” in it. It also outsold almost everything, and its readers reviewed it with a clear eye. A Presents review that gives an 8 usually means the author did the tycoon well, not that she transcended him. The tycoon also needed somewhere to be rich, which is why so many of these books moved between a Mediterranean villa and a Caribbean island; the piece on Caribbean romance settings looks at how to make that island more than a postcard.

Superromance, which Harlequin launched in 1980, was the line for readers who wanted category reliability with more room. The extra length let authors handle grief, divorce, adopted children and second marriages, and its books tend to draw thoughtful reviews.

Temptation and Blaze sat in sequence. Temptation launched in March 1984 and carried the sexier contemporaries through the 1990s, and Blaze arrived in 2001 with an explicit promise that went further. Temptation published its last title in June 2005, and many readers treated Blaze as its heir.

Duets and Love and Laughter were Harlequin’s two attempts at a comedy line. Love and Laughter ran for a few years in the late 1990s. Duets followed with a two-books-in-one format and lasted into the early 2000s. Readers liked the comedies more than sales apparently justified, and both lines folded.

Silhouette

Silhouette began in 1980 as an American competitor to Harlequin, backed by Simon & Schuster, and Harlequin bought it in 1984. For another quarter century the two brands ran side by side under one owner, with separate lines and separate identities.

Silhouette Romance was the sweet, shorter line, and the one where several of the biggest names began. In February 2007 it was folded into Harlequin Romance.

Silhouette Desire promised a sensual, emotionally intense story in about 55,000 words, with the hero’s point of view given real space. Desire readers expected a strong alpha and a fair amount of heat.

Silhouette Special Edition ran longer and focused on family and emotional drama. Debbie Macomber and Nora Roberts both wrote for it, and it produced a great many linked family series.

Silhouette Intimate Moments was the action line, with suspense and danger in longer books. Suzanne Brockmann’s Tall, Dark and Dangerous series about Navy SEALs appeared there in the 1990s. Silhouette renamed it Romantic Suspense in 2007.

Silhouette Shadows was a short-lived line of darker, gothic and paranormal-tinged romances that ran from 1993 to 1996. It arrived a few years too early. Had it launched in 2005, after paranormal romance took off, it might still be running.

Silhouette Time Twist appears on our publishers list attached to a handful of time-travel titles. I have not been able to pin down its dates or whether it ever functioned as a full line, and I would rather say so than guess.

In April 2011, Harlequin moved the remaining Silhouette lines under its own name. Desire and Special Edition carried on under the Harlequin brand, and readers who had grown up with the silhouette logo on their spines treated its disappearance as a small bereavement.

Mills & Boon: the British parent

Mills & Boon began as a London publisher in 1908 and became the British name for romance in the way Harlequin did in North America. Harlequin started out reprinting Mills & Boon novels in the 1950s and eventually bought the company in 1971. The Wikipedia history of Mills & Boon covers the details better than I can.

The practical result for our reviewers was confusion. The same book could appear in Britain as a Mills & Boon Modern and in North America as a Harlequin Presents, sometimes with a different title. A reader in the UK or Australia could meet a book months before or after the North American release, and matching editions in the booklists is still slow work.

The others on the rack

Harlequin and Silhouette dominated category, but plenty of other publishers ran lines, and some of the most loved books in the archive came from them.

Bantam Loveswept

Loveswept launched in May 1983 with Sandra Brown’s Heaven’s Price and ran until early 1999. It was Bantam’s answer to the Harlequin lines, a little longer, with a reputation for humour, quirky heroes and authors who later became stars. Sandra Brown, Kay Hooper and Iris Johansen all wrote Loveswepts before their single-title careers. Random House revived the Loveswept name in 2011 as an e-book line, which pleased readers who remembered the old one.

Zebra and Kensington

Kensington’s Zebra imprint published in quantity and covered almost every subgenre. Zebra Heartfire was its historical line of the 1980s and early 1990s, known for lush, dramatic covers and plenty of heat. Zebra Regency kept the traditional short Regency alive through the 1990s and into the 2000s, alongside Signet’s Regency line from Penguin. Both Regency lines wound down in the middle of the decade, and traditional Regency readers have mourned them ever since. Zebra Historical Romance carried the longer historicals.

Kensington also launched Brava, a line for erotic romance that brought explicit books into chain bookstores without the plain brown wrapper.

Dorchester: Leisure and Love Spell

Dorchester published in New York under the Leisure and Love Spell imprints. Leisure carried historicals and westerns, along with horror. Love Spell became the home of paranormal, futuristic and time-travel romance in the 1990s, years before those subgenres were fashionable, and Christine Feehan’s Dark Prince appeared there in 1999. Dorchester ran into serious financial trouble and in August 2010 announced a shift from mass-market paperbacks to e-books and print on demand. Several authors had difficulty getting their rights back, and in 2011 a group of them organised a public boycott over unpaid royalties.

Avon True Romance

Avon True Romance was a Young Adult line from the early 2000s, publishing historical romances for teenage readers, with Meg Cabot, Beverly Jenkins and Lorraine Heath among its authors. The YA subject index gave it a heading of its own, AVON: TRUE ROMANCE. It ran to only about a dozen novels, but its readers remember it fondly.

Steeple Hill and Red Dress Ink

Harlequin ran both, at opposite ends of its catalogue. Steeple Hill was the inspirational imprint, home to Love Inspired from the late 1990s, publishing short Christian romances without explicit sex or profanity. The Steeple Hill name was later retired in favour of Love Inspired. Red Dress Ink launched in November 2001 as Harlequin’s chick-lit imprint, with trade paperbacks and a focus on single women in cities, and faded as chick lit left the bestseller lists. I have not been able to pin down the year it closed.

Arabesque, BET Books and Genesis Press

For years the major lines published almost no romances with Black heroes and heroines. Arabesque changed that in 1994, launched by Kensington’s Pinnacle imprint with contemporary romances by and about African Americans. BET Books bought the line in 1998, and Harlequin acquired it in December 2005, making it part of its new Kimani Press. Genesis Press, an independent publisher from Columbus, Mississippi, ran its own line called Indigo. The Multicultural community existed for readers of exactly these books, many of whom had waited a long time for them.

ImaJinn and the small presses

ImaJinn Books, a small press specialising in paranormal romance, appears on our list alongside other small publishers. Small presses took risks the major lines would not, and some authors built a readership there before the bigger houses noticed them.

Lines that folded

Readers ask me often which lines are gone. A short list, with my usual caution about dates:

• Harlequin Love and Laughter: late 1990s, a brief run.
• Harlequin Duets: launched in the late 1990s, closed in the early 2000s.
• Harlequin Temptation: 1984 to 2005.
• Silhouette Shadows: 1993 to 1996.
• Silhouette Romance: folded into Harlequin Romance in 2007.
• Bantam Loveswept: closed in 1999, revived as an e-book line in 2011.
• Zebra Regency and Signet Regency: wound down in the mid-2000s.
• Red Dress Ink: faded after the chick-lit boom; closing date uncertain.
• The Silhouette brand: its lines became Harlequin lines in 2011.
• Harlequin Superromance and American Romance: both closed in the mid-2010s, as I recall.

Lines folded for three common reasons: the subgenre fell out of fashion, the parent company reorganised, or the readers stayed loyal but too few to sustain a monthly release. Comedy and traditional Regency suffered from the third. Readers who loved them bought every title, and there were never enough of them.

Why the line name was a promise

A reader in 2003 had limited ways to learn about a book before buying it. The internet was growing, and this site was part of that growth, but most romance readers still shopped at a supermarket rack or a chain bookstore, picking up books based on the cover and the back blurb.

The line name compressed a great deal of information into two words. A reader who loved Intrigue and disliked Presents could walk past the Presents rack without reading a single blurb. She knew the heat level, the length, the type of conflict, the likely setting. A new author in Intrigue got her trust immediately because of the line, not because of her name.

That trust ran both ways. Harlequin’s guidelines held authors to the line’s promise, and editors cut or reshaped books that strayed. An author who wanted to write something different had to find a different line or move to single title. The system was restrictive for writers and reassuring for readers.

When the promise broke

The promise did break sometimes, and a good review catches it. A reviewer might note that a Presents title had a heroine who was a surgeon, not a secretary, and praise it, or note that an Intrigue title spent more time on the romance than the mystery and complain about it. A Superromance with a bleak ending could expect angry comments from readers who felt cheated.

Reviews like that show the system working. Readers knew the promise well enough to notice when it broke, and they wrote about it. The old book clubs of 2003 and 2004 picked one title a month for discussion, and whether a book kept the promise of its shelf is exactly the kind of question they were set up to argue over.

The field guide to romance subgenres explains how the communities on this site sorted books by mood rather than by publisher. The two systems overlapped but never matched. A Silhouette Intimate Moments title might land in Suspense or Contemporary depending on the reviewer, and the line name would tell you more about what to expect than the community label did.

If you are hunting for an out-of-print category novel now, start with the publishers list and work forward from the line you remember. Most category books were never reprinted, but the line numbers make them easy to identify in used bookshops and online listings, and a surprising number of them still turn up for a dollar in a box at a library sale.

Sources and further reading

• Harlequin’s founding in Winnipeg in 1949, its 1957 North American deal for Mills & Boon titles, its 1971 purchase of Mills & Boon and its 1984 purchase of Silhouette: Wikipedia, Harlequin Enterprises.
• Silhouette Shadows running 1993 to 1996, Silhouette Romance merging into Harlequin Romance and Intimate Moments becoming Romantic Suspense in 2007, and the Silhouette lines becoming Harlequin lines in April 2011: Romance Wiki, University of Birmingham, Silhouette.
• Harlequin Temptation’s run from March 1984 to June 2005: Romance Wiki, Harlequin Temptation.
• Loveswept’s launch in 1983, its close in 1999 and its 2011 return as an e-book line: Romance Wiki, Loveswept.
• Harlequin forming Kimani Press in December 2005 by buying Arabesque from BET Books: Wikipedia, Kimani Press.