Quote:
Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
Would anyone even have heard of the stupid publisher without this row? I mean today there is Harlequin/Mills&Boon (who probably rarely take new writers, as is the case with big 5 and other popular genres) and then Self Publishing.
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Harlequin/Mira/Carina/Harlequin Teen/Love Inspired and the other Harlequin imprints publish debut authors all the time, and they're a division of HarperCollins, so they _are_ big 5. Locally, Australian rural romance is extremely popular, and published by big 5 (Mira and the Escape imprint of HC, and Allen & Unwin, for example).
Four of the absolute biggest romance hits of the past 18 months have been debuts (The Kiss Quotient (Berkley), Well Met (Berkley), The Friend Zone (Forever) and Red White and Royal Blue (St Martin's Griffin) - and I'm sure many others, I just only read romance sometimes, category romance (which Harlequin specialises in) rarely, and don't hold a lot of the details in my head of what is and isn't a debut.
Random House has romance imprints, Random Penguin does too, Hachette publishes Nora Roberts and Fiona Palmer and Christina Lauren among many others; Macmillan has Danielle Steel and others; then there's Entangled, Avon (did HC gobble that up too?), Kensington, Dorchester, Berkley and a gazillion other medium and small publishers. And this is basically off the top of my head, with quick google doublechecks.
The big 5 would have been absolutely bonkers to bow out of the romance publishing industry. It's the biggest book genre by a mile, not a little obscure corner of the industry.