Curses! is the fifth adventure featuring Aaron Elkins’  Gideon Oliver, E-Reads’ resident forensic anthropologist. Well, we doesn’t exactly reside here but he will reside in your memory when you immerse yourself in his latest adventure….
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Mayan ruins in the Yucatán…a secret room in a tomb…age-old skeletons. To anthropologist Gideon Oliver, the renowned Skeleton Detective, the invitation to join the archaeological excavation of Tlaloc promises two months of paradise on earth.

That is, until an ancient series of Mayan curses against desecrators of the site is unearthed. When the first one comes to pass (“The bloodsucking kinkajou will come freely among them”), it’s taken by all as a practical joke. But by the time the fourth one is apparently consummated (“The one called Xecotcavach will pierce their skulls so that their brains spill onto the earth”), nerves have begun to fray and suspicions and discord to mount.

The steamy jungles weigh down upon the band of eccentric anthropologists as one by one the curses continue to materialize. It takes Gideon’s special talents for deduction—along with the enigmatic insights of Mexico’s one and only Mayan-Indian inspector of the state judicial police—to resolve an ancient riddle and a modern, murderous mystery.

Addicted to Gideon?  Have another, the sixth in the series, Icy Clutches

Gideon Oliver expects to be amicably bored when he takes on the role of “accompanying spouse” at a lodge in the magnificent wild country of Glacier Bay, Alaska, where his forest ranger wife Julie is attending a conference. But it turns out to be exactly his cup of tea. There is another group at the lodge: six scientists on a memorial journey to the site of a thirty-year-old glacial avalanche that killed three of their colleagues. Their leader is TV’s most popular science personality, the unctuous M. Audley Tremaine, who is the sole survivor of the fatal avalanche.

But he doesn’t survive long, and is soon found hanged in his room. If that isn’t upsetting enough, shocked hikers discover human bones emerging from the foot of the glacier—are they the shattered remains of the three who died, finally seeing daylight after their two-mile. three-decade journey within the glacial flow?

When the FBI seek expert help, everyone agrees how fortunate it is that Dr. Oliver, the famed Skeleton Detective, is on the scene. Everybody, that is, but the person who wants ancient history to stay that way—and who believes that murder is the surest way to keep the past buried.

Indulge your Gideonphilia.  Turn to Aaron Elkins’ author page and find lots more.

From time to time we bring back some of the more popular articles and blogs posted on E-Reads. This one is from November 2009.

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A while back we wrote up a book lover who said she was reluctant to buy a Kindle “unless Amazon comes out with a special ‘book scented’ Kindle.” (See If They Can Make the Kindle Smell Like a Book, Maybe She’ll Buy One). It was all kind of a joke, but an enterprising manufacturer took it seriously enough to produce a line of aromatics simulating book scents. The aromas include New Book Smell and Classic Musty. The product is trademarked as Smell of Books™ and here’s how their website describes it:

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?
Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?
If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.
But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.
Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book.
Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-reading devices and e-book formats and is 100% DRM-compatible. Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much.

Among the five smells offered is “Crunchy Bacon”. This is a welcome novelty for noses jaded by such natural book fragrances as grass, leather, printer’s ink, and decaying paper. Hopefully, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France will invest heavily in shpritzing their collections with Crunchy Bacon. Some other but lesser known aromas associated with books are baked lamb shank, General Cho’s Chicken, and asparagus vinaigrette.

On a more scientific note, Henry Fountain of the New York Times reports on research to quantify old-book odors to help librarians preserve books more effectively. Fountain describes how conservators “analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly.”

There was apparently no manifestation of crunchy bacon in the spectrum analyzed by the scientists, but it is well known that subatomic bacon particles are even more elusive to detect spectrometrically than the Higgs boson, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN may be required to capture one.

Read Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Reading Cory Doctorow’s serialized account in Publishers Weekly of his self-publishing venture is like watching a man walk across the United States.  We thrill to his courage and determination and root for him to prevail when he wanders down a wrong path or finds his way blocked. We know many people will extend a hand out of the goodness of their hearts.  When it’s over some will applaud his amazing achievement. Others will say he could have done it better, faster, and cheaper by driving an air-conditioned car from coast to coast.

Whichever way you look at it, Doctorow is – or says he is – weeks away from crossing the finish line with his book With a Little Help. We have been chronicling this pilgrim’s progress as he attempts to beat publishers at their own game, using every resource at his disposal to not just self-publish his book but make a profit as well.  So far he’s he’s done the latter: in advance of publication date he reckons “Total expenditures to date: $3,959. Total income: $10,000.”

When Doctorow announced his scheme we asked What Can We Learn from Cory Doctorow? Our answer then was: Everything. But now we’re not so certain.  Yes, we believe that With a Little Help will be published, and yes, we believe it will make money, and yes, it’s been an entertaining adventure.  What we’re far from sure of is whether it will yield any practical results, the kind that any publisher – major, minor, or one-person – can scale up. He has created his Spruce Goose with chewing gum and bailing wire and though we’re sure it will fly, it’s hard to understand what we can apply to our own processes that will make us better publishers.

For instance…

• Contemplating the problem of shipping his $275.00 hardcover edition, Doctorow decided to wrap the books in burlap coffee sacks, and luckily came across a London coffee roasting firm that had a surplus of them and gave them to him for nothing.
• To affix an SD (Secure Digital) card to each book cover, a reader friend created a “quick and dirty duplicator app” enabling him to load cards onto the books. The price of the friend’s services? Free.
• Doctorow obtained another service by barter. “While on the road, I put out a call on Twitter for someone to help me tweak my launch template—after all, the different audio/hardcover/paperback/e-book choices can be hard to present in a clear way. I offered a limited edition hardcover in exchange… A designer named Andrew Crocker came through with a brilliant design and even put together the HTML/CSS template, saving my Web master, Mike Little, some time.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, and it would be hard to find a more inventive improviser than Cory Doctorow.  But what’s the takeaway?  Can Hachette’s David Young cadge burlap sacks from a coffee roaster?  Can Simon & Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy get someone to design a launch template in exchange for a free book?

There is a lesson that all publishers can learn, and that is to think outside the box and seek creative solutions to difficult problems. Doctorow’s brilliant use of social media and network of devoted fans and friends point the way to approaches to the publishing game that conventional houses are clueless about or are just beginning to explore.  But for publishers to apply on a wholesale basis Doctorow’s one-of-a-kind experience – that just isn’t going to happen. When we’re talking about total expenditures not of $3,959 but a hundred times $3,959, creativity invariably yields to expediency, conventionality and risk-adversity.

Read how Doctorow’s book stumbles toward publication day in With a Little Twitter Help.

Richard Curtis

As we’ve noted in a previous posting (see Pirate Stole Your Book? Prove It), you would think that as soon as you discover that your copyrighted book has been pirated, the Internet Service Provider carrying it would hasten to yank the pirated material off its website. But, as those who have complained to their carriers have discovered, it’s not that easy, because the service provider has no way of knowing whether or not the complaint is valid. “You have to prove that you are the true copyright owner and have a valid claim of infringement,” we wrote. “The victim, in other words, has to demonstrate that he or she is in truth the victim. Here is where injury is compounded by insult. Anyone who’s ever been abused and then told that he or she was ‘asking for it’ will appreciate how offensive it is for an author to be asked to provide proof of authorship.”

Astrid Anderson Bear, daughter of one great science fiction writer (Poul Anderson) and wife of another (Greg Bear), runs a small yarn business and is president of the Friends of the University of Washington Libraries. When she and her husband discovered numerous cases of piracy of Anderson’s and Bear’s works she launched a campaign to file takedown notices with the offending websites.  She has shared her experiences with us.

RC

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Taking Down the Pirates – by Astrid Anderson Bear © 2010 (for all the good it does)

I first became aware of the scope of problem of pirated texts when a well-meaning Facebook friend posted a link to a story of my father, Poul Anderson’s. The story had originally come from Project Gutenberg, and my friend felt that since it was from them, it was okay as a free download. It was not, and looking at Project Gutenberg’s site showed me a list of several stories available for there that I knew to be protected by copyright. Then I searched for other sites that were carrying pirated downloads of my father’s work and was appalled to find that not only the few stories being encroached on by Gutenberg were widely available, but most of his the rest of his lifetime’s work, over 100 novels and many, many shorter works, were there for the taking as direct downloads or reading onscreen in PDF form, or available in torrent form from bit torrent sites. Novels were available as individual titles and often there were also huge files containing dozens of novels bundles together.

This is not limited to older works by a dead author. My husband, Greg Bear, has also had all of his books appear as free illegal downloads, and pretty much any new title quickly makes its way into this shadow epublishing world. Current bestsellers are either available or you can see where they used to be available.

Thus began my new hobby: sending takedown notices into the whack-a-mole world of illegal downloads. By Googling “Poul Anderson downloads” I found half a dozen illegal sites on the first page of results alone, with such names as torrenz.com, torrentzap.com, btjunkie.org, etc. Clicking through to those sites often lead to another set of links to other sites, and to date I’ve sent notices to over 20 sites. Googling the title of a work can bring additional results.

Go ahead – are you a published author? Google “[your name] free download” and see what happens. You will be appalled. Take a deep breath. Here is what you do next.

To send a takedown notice, poke around the site until you find their procedure. Some have an online form, some need an email sent to a specific address. This can be hard to find: start by looking for DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], Report Abuse, Terms of Service, or Contact Us at the bottom of the opening page and be prepared to rummage around the site a bit to find what you need. If it’s an online form, fill in what they ask for. If their policy is that you send an email, they may give you the format to use, or use this one: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/09/dmca-notice-of-copyright-infringement.html#dmca

You’ll need to include the individual URLs for all the offending materials, as well as assert copyright protection for each item. I’ve stated the name of the work and given the original copyright date, as well as any subsequent copyright information. You’ll also need to state that you are the copyright holder or authorized to act on that person’s behalf, swear under penalty of perjury that you have provided correct information, and that you have a good faith belief that the posting is unauthorized. Stick to the legal language in the example given above (there are a few variations out there: use any one of them, but don’t get creative), and push “Send”.

You may get an acknowledgment with a few hours of your claim saying that the website has received it and is reviewing it, but not all sites do this. So far, I’ve gotten responses verifying the takedown as quickly as two hours (Fliiby) and as long as two days. Each site usually states how long they take to process a claim, and it can be up to a week. Making a log of your claims will help you keep track of when to do follow-up. Not all sites have responded, but anything to help stem the tide is worth doing.

When I get an email saying that a takedown has been done, I click through the link in question to make sure it’s been done, and I suggest you do the same. Also, sites may take down the material or block the torrent without getting back to you about it, so check the link after the stated period of time and it should be gone. Seeing “This content was removed at the request of [your name here]” or “This page not found” will bring a smile to your face — but keep watching the net.

Go back to sites that have taken down your copyrighted material. In a few days or less, new material will likely be up, or the same titles at a new URL within the site. New uploads and links are constantly being posted by anonymous or pseudonymous members and users.

Audio books are also prime pirate fodder. But here you have someone else on your side: the publisher of the audiobook. Notify them when you find a site offering illegal downloads, and they should be eager to do the takedowns.

Next week we’ll pay a visit to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
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For a complete archive of E-Reads postings on piracy, visit Pirate Central.

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney bartered speaking fees for guaranteed purchase of his book, according to Gawker.

Though it’s not uncommon for speakers to ask their host schools and organizations to buy copies of their books, Politico’s Ben Smith shared with Gawker a document confirming Romney’s willingness to waive speaking fees of between $25,000 and $50,000 in exchange for book purchases that would drive his book onto the New York Times bestseller list.

The ploy worked. The book hit #1 on the NYT hardcover nonfiction list in March 2010.

Romney is by no means the only political figure to game the bestseller list – Sarah Palin’s political action committee spent $63,000 to bulk-purchase her memoir Going Rogue, for instance – the brazenness of Romney’s deal takes bestseller list manipulation to a new low. What does Romney have to say about it? Nothing, and that should come as no surprise given the title of his book: No Apology.

Is it reasonable to ask Romney’s publisher St. Martins Press to state where this deal stands on a moral scale of 1 to 100? Probably not. That’s too much to ask of publishers, whose job is to make money, not to look gift horses in the eye. But it is worth observing that many publishers now make it a contractual condition that prominent politicians, business people and other celebrities guarantee purchase of a minimum number of copies.

Where we come from that is called subsidy publishing, and it used to be a term of derision. But in this era of self-publication, the moral turf has tilted toward a Do What You Gotta Do attitude. (See You Got That Right, Ecclesiastes!)

Well, okay, but maybe we should consider a new category for the bestseller list called Books That Made It On Their Own. We might actually see some honest authors on it.

Meanwhile, we should not be surprised to find No Apology become required reading at the colleges that took Romney’s devil’s bargain. What else are they going to do with them?

Read details in Gawker’s Mitt Romney’s Mischievous Plot To Conquer the Times’ Bestseller List

Richard Curtis

Hey, who d’ya like? How about C?

At morning line odds of 8 to 11, so many readers picked C to win the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for fiction that online wagering was finally suspended at Ladbrokes, one of the major bookmaking establishments in the UK. 

C is not the name of a hayburner in the 4th at Pimlico.  It’s a novel by Tom McCarthy. What is it about?  How should I know?  I’m still getting through V. I’m a gambling man, not a reading man. If you want to know what C is about, go to Amazon. All I know is, I loved the odds. Lucky for me, I couldn’t find anybody to take my bet. I was ready to hock my condo.

The thing is, even though they’re called bookies American bookmakers aren’t bookish, so when I called Benny from Hoboken and told him I wanted to put two large on C in the Man Booker, he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about but he could give me good odds on Philly to win the Series in six.

The oddly named Man Booker Prize (it’s an amalgam of the two companies that sponsor it) is one of the world’s richest awards for literary achievement. This year McCarthy’s novel was “given shorter odds than 2009 winner Wolf Hall, which also left bookmakers out of pocket,” writes Larry Ryan in The Independent. “William Hill puts McCarthy’s book at 8/11 to land the coveted literary prize.”

We have to hand it to the Brits. Unlike American bookies, for whom the word “book” means the inside scoop on a ballplayer (as in “What’s the book on Alex Rodriguez?”), British people wager on literary achievement. But in this year’s Booker the oddsmakers misread the field and it almost cost them big time – in the six figures (and that’s pounds, not dollars). They should have known better because that’s just what happened last year when “Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall became the first odds-on favourite to win the prize, costing bookmakers dearly,” writes Ryan. This year a lot of British bookies were ready to do the Midnight Flit to escape a mob demanding a payoff that seemed easier than taking candy from a baby.

Happily for the bookies, order was restored when the prize went to Howard Jacobson for a novel called The Finkler Question, but it left some punters (as they’re called across the pond) wondering how the front runner suddenly faded in the home stretch and this other entry came out of nowhere. Just askin’! This literary agent friend of mine says it’s not that hard to influence book people – just buy them lunch and you own them. But these British judges look pretty hard to get to. One of them, Frances Wilson, wrote this account of how she and her colleagues evaluated the candidates (Man Booker Prize: High Risk Reading). They read ever damn one of the 139 finalists.  Why didn’t anybody tell me these people are clean? I wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to find someone to take my wager.

It just goes to prove the old saying: never trust a bookie who spells “Favourite” with a u. So long, suckers!

Read Bookies fear big loss if favourite wins Booker

Richard Curtis

PS – Now I read that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom has been scratched for the National Book Awards. And you don’t think something funny is going on?

From time to time we bring back some of the more popular articles and blogs posted on E-Reads.  This one is from November 2009.

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“All is vanity.”
Ecclesiastes

The uproar over Harlequin Enterprises’ launch of a self-publishing venture reminded me of something my father used to say. He was an honest businessman, but every once in a while, when he saw an unscrupulous competitor getting stinking rich, he would shake his head and say, “I’m in the wrong racket.”

I sometimes wonder if I’m in the wrong racket too. Maybe I should have gone into vanity publishing. I’m sure I’d have made a fortune. Everyone who’s gone into it has made one, so I can’t blame anyone for succumbing to its allure.

And now mainstream publishing has jumped on the bandwagon, with respectable firms like religious publisher Thomas Nelson and, most recently, Harlequin Enterprises picking up the banner. The line that once sharply separated traditional publishing (“We pay you”) and vanity publishing (“You pay us”) has all but dissolved in this corrosive environment of fabulous riches.

My early exposure to the power of vanity occurred when I joined Scott Meredith’s literary agency after graduating college. Meredith had a fee-reading operation that ran like a turbine engine. Using his agency’s track record as bait – his brochure was a collage of six- and seven-digit checks paid to professional clients – Meredith attracted countless would-be authors prepared to shell out hundreds of dollars for a manuscript reading they hoped might lead to acceptance for representation and an eventual professional career. I don’t believe I ever saw a book accepted for representation out of the fee-reading program in all the years I worked there. Meredith’s operation made tons of money and he died a wealthy man.

Around 2000 a number of enterprising business people recognized the profit potential in self-published books utilizing digital media. (For purposes of this piece I draw no distinction between self-publication, subsidized publication and vanity publication.) Until then the most famous name in subsidy publishing was Vantage Press (which, significantly, is still going strong). But companies like iUniverse, Xlibris and an outfit called Fatbrain offered a variety of self-publication services. How well did they do?

Well, Fatbrain with its subsidiary Mighty-Words, which published technical and professional material online (someone described it as Amazon for geeks), was sold to Barnes & Noble for $64 million. Xlibris? Acquired by Random House for an undisclosed sum, then sold to Author Solutions, the vast self-publishing empire which embraces iUniverse, Author House, Wordclay, Inkubook and Canadian vanity publisher Trafford Press. Kevin Weiss, CEO of Author Solutions, projects $100 million in revenue in 2009. Last year, Author Solutions released more than 21,000 new titles, according to Mediabistro, “including one out of every 20 new titles put into distribution in the U.S. Overall, ASI’s catalog now includes more than 120,000 titles from more than 85,000 authors.” Author Solutions is partnering with Harlequin in its soon-to-be-renamed Horizons self-publication program.

But there’s more. Publishers Marketplace publisher Michael Cader recently reported that “Ebook distributor and online self-publishing platform Smashwords announced late Friday that BarnesandNoble.com will sell titles from the company as part of its new ‘premium feed.’ Smashwords, which says they publish about 2,600 titles electronically, will sell to BN.com at a traditional discount… Founder Mark Coker says that ‘additional distribution relationships are forthcoming.’ He says that ‘until today, it was difficult if not impossible for independent authors and publishers to gain such mainstream digital distibution.’”

Yet another company, Scribd, calls itself “the largest social publishing company in the world, the website where tens of millions of people each month publish and discover original writings and documents.” Scribd boasts “10 million documents published” and “5 million Scribd document reader embeds.” Last spring it was reported that Scribd was partnering “with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications, to legally offer some of their content to Scribd’s community free of charge. Publishers have begun to add an array of content to Scribd’s library, including full-length novels as well as briefer teaser excerpts.”

With so much money being thrown at subsidy publishers, and with the blessing of mainstream publishing, the evolution of vanity from the margins to the center of the publishing universe is complete. The erosion of traditional gatekeepers like reviewers, critics, newspaper book editors, and other refined literary tastemakers makes it clear why even a conservative publisher might lose its head over the prospect of all that money – and be tempted to go into another racket.

Richard Curtis

Harlequin, the world’s leading romance publisher, is undergoing a brand-lift, but in the process it is phasing out Silhouette.

Silhouette, a key imprint of the parent company for decades, is a portmanteau for numerous romance lines, many of them beloved of both readers and authors. A press release issued by two leading executives, Publisher & CEO Donna Hayes and Executive VP Global Editorial Loriana Sacilotto, confirms the attrition that HQN-watchers have noted from such recent developments as the shift of the Nocturne imprint from Silhouette to Harlequin

They Were Expendable

“In April 2011,” states the October 7 memo to the company’s authors, “our Silhouette series will become Harlequin series… Special Edition, Romantic Suspense and Desire will appear with their new Harlequin brand in April. Rebranding the Silhouette series as Harlequin will ensure that these series benefit from the promotional resources dedicated to the Harlequin brand and will strengthen the Harlequin consumer brand as the market leader in romance fiction.”

What’s behind this transformation?

It seems that the brass engaged a New York-based outfit called Pentagram, a “world-renowned design and branding company” that has redesigned both Harlequin’s corporate and consumer logos. But obviously the branders feel that Silhouette creates consumer confusion and is redundant.

A Marriage Made in Toronto

Unless you’re a veteran of book industry mergers and acquisitions (we are and have the scars to prove it) you may not be aware of Harlequin Silhouette’s fascinating history. Though the couple (up to now at any rate) have been compatible in the 26 years since they tied the knot, their romance was forged in the molten heat of a nasty corporate war that brought about nothing less than the birth of the modern romance industry. We have Wikipedia to thank for refreshing our recollection.

By the mid 1970’s the list of Harlequin, then distributed by Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, consisted entirely of British authors published by the parent company Mills & Boon. But American readers, who constituted the majority of the company’s readership, yearned for something sexier and more muscular than the often treacly fare produced in England. Spearheaded by Janet Dailey, the ranks of American writers swelled and the company began to prosper. But the British owner was not comfortable with what was taking place in the American colony across the sea.

We’ll let Wikipedia take it from there (and for the full article with footnotes visit the Wikipedia entry here:

Dailey’s novels provided the romance genre’s “first look at heroines, heroes and courtships that take place in America, with American sensibilities, assumptions, history, and most of all, settings.” Harlequin was unsure how the market would react to this new type of romance, and was unwilling to fully embrace it. In the late 1970s, a Harlequin editor rejected a manuscript by Nora Roberts, who has since become the top-selling romance author, because “they already had their American writer.”

Harlequin terminated its distribution contract with Simon and Schuster and Pocket Books in 1976. This left Simon and Schuster with a large sales force and no product. To fill this gap, and to take advantage of the untapped talent of the American writers Harlequin had rejected, Simon and Schuster formed Silhouette Books in 1980. Silhouette published several lines of category romance, and encouraged their writers to experiment within the genre, creating new kinds of heroes and heroines and addressing contemporary social issues.

Realizing their mistake, Harlequin launched their own line of America-focused romances in 1980. The Harlequin Superromance line was the first of its lines to originate in North America instead of in Britain. The novels were similar to the Harlequin Presents books, but were longer and featured American settings and American characters.

Harlequin had also failed to adapt quickly to the signs that readers appreciated novels with more explicit sex scenes, and in 1980, several publishers entered the category romance market to fill that gap. That year, Dell launched Candlelight Ecstasy, the first line to waive the requirement that heroines be virginal. By the end of 1983, sales for the Candlelight Ecstasy line totaled $30 million. Silhouette also launched similar lines, Desire and Special Edition, each of which had a 90-100% sellout rate each month. The sudden increase in category romance lines meant an equally sudden increase in demand for writers of the new style of romance novel. This tight market caused a proportionate decrease in the quality of the novels that were being released. By 1984, the market was saturated with category lines and readers had begun to complain of redundancy in plots. The following year, the “dampening effect of the high level of redundancy associated with series romances was evident in the decreased number of titles being read per month.” Harlequin’s return rate, which had been less than 25% in 1978, when it was the primary provider of category romance, swelled to 60%.

In 1984, Harlequin purchased Silhouette. Despite the acquisition, Silhouette continued to retain editorial control and to publish various lines under their own imprint. Eight years later, Harlequin attempted to purchase Zebra, but the deal did not go through. Despite the loss of Zebra, Harlequin maintained an 85% share of the North American category romance market in 1992.

Got Along Withoutcha Before I Metcha, Gonna Get along Withoutcha Now
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Can Harlequin live without Silhouette? Obviously it is confident it can. As for the rest of us, we’ll wait and see. In publishing (as in other industries) consolidation inevitably means displacement of some of the work force. So, if history is any guideline, we may see a shrinkage of opportunity for authors. On the other hand, given the vibrant history of Harlequin and its never-ending experimentation and reinvention, we won’t be surprised if HQN is the exception to that rule.

We certainly hope so

The letter to authors issued by Hayes and Sacilotto is reproduced in full here. Images of logos referred to are not included in our posting.

Richard Curtis

October 7, 2010

To Our Authors,

In the rapidly changing world of media and entertainment, publishing, too, is experiencing exciting new changes. To position ourselves for opportunities and growth in the future, we want to expand and celebrate our strength and diversity as the leading publisher of entertainment for women.

Our current solid reputation in this arena and our strong identity continues to be the envy of many publishers. In the past 15 years, Harlequin has come to mean much more than series romance. We have expanded into mainstream fiction and romance, Christian fiction, African-American fiction, teen fiction and nonfiction. As we move toward the next 15 years, we hope that Harlequin will mean even more.
This summer, we worked with the world-renowned design and branding company

Pentagram, in New York, in order to re-envision both our branding strategy and our look. In 2011 you will notice a number of changes relating to the Harlequin brands. We have redesigned our Harlequin corporate logo, which you can see at the top of this letter: the four diamonds have been replaced with the letter H inside one larger diamond.

Because Harlequin is increasingly recognized as a publisher of a broad range of women’s reading, we will be placing the corporate logo on the back cover of all the books we publish. In the digital future, search and discovery will become even more important, and customers’ ability to find our authors and books will be enhanced by the use of the Harlequin brand.

We have also redesigned the Harlequin consumer logo associated with our series romance programs. For the consumer logo, we have replaced the harlequin figure inside the diamond with a stylized figure representing our reader, placing her first and foremost in our brand.

We will also be rebranding some of our series. In April 2011 our Silhouette series will become Harlequin series. As you know, Silhouette Nocturne became Harlequin Nocturne in June of this year. Special Edition, Romantic Suspense and Desire will appear with their new Harlequin brand in April. Rebranding the Silhouette series as Harlequin will ensure that these series benefit from the promotional resources dedicated to the Harlequin brand and will strengthen the Harlequin consumer brand as the market leader in romance fiction.

Also in April 2011, Love Inspired will replace Steeple Hill as the primary brand for our inspirational fiction publishing program. The Steeple Hill logo will no longer appear on the books.

While we are broadening what our corporate brand represents, we will continue to support and strengthen the many individual imprints that fall beneath the Harlequin umbrella, and that includes growing you, the authors, into strong brands of your own.

As a valued Harlequin author, you should feel free to contact your editor with any questions or concerns that you may have. We look forward to hearing from you.

With our very best wishes,

Donna Hayes
Loriana Sacilotto
Publisher and Chief Executive Officer
EVP, Global Editorial

For an in-depth analysis of Harlequin’s phasing out of the Silhouette line, click here.

Emerging from Grand Central Station on my way to a business appointment I realized I was a little early, so I decided to get my shoes shined.  A burly, jovial man gestured for me to climb into his thronelike chair, and as I placed my feet on the foot rests he reached into a cardboard carton and handed me a paperback book.  I examined it.  It was a Mira sampler carrying the opening chapters of the first three novels in a series called The Reincarnationist by M. J. Rose.”Where did you get this?”

“Some people were handing them out here on 42nd Street,” he explained.  “So I said to them, ‘Why don’t you give me a bunch and I’ll give them to my customers.  That will be good for your business and mine at the same time.’”

Like bars and airplanes, shoe shine stands are places where you can exchange life stories with strangers in the space of minutes. My man’s name was Kevin Tucker but his street name is -  well – “Street.” He’s been shining shoes for fifteen years. A lot of his Grand Central colleagues are gone – business down because too many people are wearing sneakers.

After browsing the first few pages of the sampler I looked up and said “I know M. J. Rose.” I explained that she was a writer I had met on a number of occasions and one of the first authors to publish an original novel in e-book format.  As he rubbed cordovan wax polish into my oxfords we talked about books.  A lot of his customers read Kindles while he works on their shoes.

I asked him what the reaction has been to the samplers he handed out. He said some customers took extra copies to hand out at their offices. Some of them came back for more.

He buffed my shoes to a high gloss. It had been a while since I’d had my shoes shined and the price was higher than I remembered but I gave Kevin a generous tip because he was doing something to promote books.  He thanked me and recited his motto: “Let me put a glow on your toe before you go.”  I said “I’ll go you one better: ‘Put a twinkle in your toes with Kevin Tucker and M. J. Rose.’” I took a picture of him with the tool of his trade in one hand and the tool of M. J’s in the other.

But there’s a kicker.  Out of curiosity I googled “Kevin Tucker Shoe Shine” when I returned to my office. And this is what I found:

Monday, April 27, 2009
The best shoe shine ever
By TigerHawk at 4/27/2009 12:42:00 PM

“I admire a person who can do even a mundane job with skill, humor, and aplomb. Well, I just got the best shoe shine I have ever had from Kevin Tucker, who works a stand just outside Grand Central Station on 42nd Street. Now, Kevin claims he gives the best shine in New York and will devote the entire shine to an amusing monologue about the secrets of a great shine, the importance of a great shine to attracting women and success in business, and the influence of the Navy on his shoe-shining skills. He says that he views every shine for a new customer as “an audition” for all their business. Sadly, I do not pass by Grand Central too often, but Mr. Tucker did get a free TigerHawk endorsement out of it. If you go that way, take the time — ‘perfection cannot be rushed’ — and get yourself a great shine.”

So this one’s for you, Street. And by the way, thank you. My business meeting was a success.  With that dazzling glow on my toe, how could it not be?

Richard Curtis