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Yes, Carina is Harelquin's digital-only line.
As someone who buys a lot of romance ebooks, I have found that, while the quality of standards (writing tone, grammar, etc.) are good at Carina, many of the plots they offer are uninteresting. The more creative stories are being sold by indie ebook publishers where the writers get much better royalties. I bought 20 ebooks yesterday. Only one of them was from Carina, and that only happened because that author is someone I read already and whom also publishes ebooks a number of ways including indie ebook publishers and self-publishing.
Ebook authors don't publish exclusively anymore and Carina, and I also think other traditional publishers, haven't been able to keep up with the lure of ebook authors getting a better cut elsewhere. Print gets you more distribution (and hopefully advertising support), but how are they treating their ebook authors in comparison to what they get from the indies?
I think marketing has been an issue too. Luna was a great line but I worked in a bookstore when they first started coming out and I can tell you that booksellers didn't know if they should be shelving them with all the other Harlequins or if they should go into the Fantasy section. I used to actually move a few copies into the SF/Fantasy section myself because they'd actually sell there, as opposed to the Romance section which is where our head office told us to put them. And Carina... no one knows who they are. Maybe they should have put Harlequin into the name somewhere and used that branding as leverage. Lost opportunities.
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