The color of love: Harlequin courts African American women with its own new lines and elopes with BET/Arabesque imprint.

QUESTION: What's "sweet and beautiful" and read all over? Executives at Harlequin Enterprises, the company name synonymous with romance for more than five decades, are hoping that black women will find the answer to this contemporary publishing riddle in the company's new specialty imprint Kimani Press.

Kimani Press takes its name from an African word meaning "sweet and beautiful." In addition to Harlequins bread-and-butter books--series romance--Kimani Press's bimonthly offerings will include women's fiction, single-title romances and nonfiction love stories.

The line will debut in July 2006 with Solid Soul, a lighthearted story about single parents and their matchmaking teens by award-winning author Brenda Jackson. Randy Ritchwood, winner of Oxygen's Mr. Romance contest, will appear on Solid Soul's cover. Works by Gwyneth Bolton, Donna Hill and Marcia King-Gamble will also be released that month.

"We will launch the single-title program with the real-life love story of award-winning actors Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance--told in their own words,' says Christine Saunders, Harlequin's public relations manager. "An anthology that brings together popular contemporary authors Connie Briscoe, Anita Richmond Bunkley and Lolita Files will be available in February of 2007." Books will be available by subscription through Harlequins Direct-to-Consumer book club, via the company Web site www.eharlequin.com and in retail outlets.

Black Love Is Black Wealth

Romance is big business. Nearly half of all paperback books sold in the United States are romance novels. According to statistics compiled by Romance Writers of America (RWA), a trade organization of more than 9,500 published and aspiring authors, the genre accounts for a third of all paperback, trade and hardcover fiction sales. In 2003, the most recent year for which the group has data, that translated into $1.41 billion in publishing revenue.

African American romance readers have steadily become one of the genre's fastest-growing segments since the July 1994 start of the Arabesque line by Walter Zacharias and Monica Harris of Kensington Publishing with the increase of stories for black women about women who looked like them. There are more than 51 million romance readers in North America and RWA estimates the genre's African American readership at 11 percent of that. In addition, Target Market News data, which tracks African American buying power, says black women spend more than $300 million each year on books in all genres. Harlequin hopes to penetrate what Saunders calls "a currently underserved and significant audience of African American readers."

Harlequins single-title fiction offerings "will feature novels written by and about real African American women dealing with relationships and careers, while facing life's everyday challenges," says Senior Editor Mavis Allen, who will head the line. "The sensuality of each novel will be dictated by the nature of the characters and the project."

Kimani Press romances "will be shorter in length, and the focus will be squarely on romance!" Allen adds. "We are looking for rich, realistic and intensely emotional love stories with a mainstream tone, innovative plots and satisfying endings."

She said stories would "feature appealing characters who have 'made it' and romances that embody the traditional ideals of courtship. These stories will be fast-paced, hip and hot."

Kimani Press will not publish historical, romantic suspense or paranormal fiction. When Allen describes the line, she draws from movie examples like Soul Food, Waiting to Exhale, Brown Sugar, Deliver Us From Eva and the TV sitcom Girlfriends. "Glitz, glamour, family melodrama and hip humor will sell," says Allen.

The Marriage With Arabesque

The second phase of Harlequin's double-barreled seduction of African American readers was the company's November 2005 purchase of BET Books, the publishing arm of Black Entertainment Television that includes the Arabesque, New Spirit and Sepia imprints. As this issue was going to press, financial details of the current acquisition had not been disclosed. According to a 1999 article in Book Publishing Report, however, Kensington launched the Arabesque line in 1994 at an estimated cost of $400,000 and sold it to BET in 1998 for a reported $11 million.

Linda Gill, the former vice president and publisher of BET Books, will oversee Harlequin's African American publishing program. In the position of general manager, the Dartmouth graduate will work with the publisher's sales, production and publicity areas with an eye on "the bottom line."

Everyone seems to benefit from the deal. For Harlequin, the Arabesque deal brings greater access to African American authors, backlists and a loyal readership base. Harlequin should benefit from the opportunity to establish relationships in new markets. African American bookstores will be able to offer new and increased product lines. Independent bookstores that are not black owned and already carry Harlequin imprints will have access to a wider range of African American fiction. Readers get more options.

Authors also gain more outlets for their talent and recognition for their efforts. For example, nominees for RITA Awards, the RWA's highest honor, must come from a list of eligible publishers that includes Harlequin, but not BET Books. As Harlequin writers, more black writers will be able to compete.

Gill's editorial team includes Mavis Allen; Demetria Lucas, an acquiring associate editor who will oversee development of Kimani Press; Evette Porter, who will serve as editor of the Arabesque line; and Senior Editor Glenda Howard, who will work on the fiction and nonfiction titles of the Sepia and New Spirit imprints.

100 Titles a Month

Harlequin currently releases more than 100 rifles a month. More than haft of the 2,093 romances published in 2003 were Harlequin's. Its imprints are sold in 94 markets worldwide and are published in 25 languages. However, industry cynics sniff that Harlequin's overtures to African American readers are merely part of a corporate strategy to regain its dominance in the market it created.

Harlequin was founded in 1949 by Canadian publisher Richard Bonnycastle as a reprint house that produced English-language paperbacks, and did a brisk business in mysteries, Westerns and cookbooks. But in 1957, the company began buying reprint rights for romance fiction from British publisher Mills & Boon. By 1964, as sales of romances increased, Harlequin placed most of its emphasis on the genre. Seven years later, Harlequin bought Mills & Boon and began an aggressive expansion into Asian, Australian and European markets.

In 1984, after a bitter rivalry that included several lawsuits, Harlequin acquired Simon & Schuster's Silhouette imprint. The move was what one industry watcher calls Harlequin's "If you can't beat 'em, buy'em strategy."

American women read Harlequin romances with their markedly Anglophile stories, but they eventually began to demand stories that reflected their experiences. In the 1980s, Harlequin hired Vivian Stephens, an African American editor, away from rival Dell Publishing. During Stephens's tenure with Dell, she created the "ethnic romance" with the publication of Entwined Destinies by journalist Elsie Washington (writing as Rosalind Welles) and launched the Candlelight Ecstasy line. In addition, Stephens developed editorial concepts that "Americanized the genre." She purchased the first works by Sandra Brown, Jayne Ann Krentz and other writers who now regularly appear on best-sellers' lists. Stephens is also the founder of Romance Writers of America and Women Writers of Color.

Stephens launched the Harlequin American line, which continues today. She bought manuscripts by author Sandra Kitt, who, in 1983, had the distinction of being the first known African American author to write for Harlequin. Kitt became one of the publisher's most popular authors during the '80s. She later became the first author published by the Arabesque line.

During her 10 years with Harlequin, Kitt produced a novella and nine novels--including Harlequins first African American romance, Adam and Eva. Now considered a classic, the novel will be rereleased in the summer of 2006.

"I absolutely loved writing for the [Harlequin] American Romance line. The stories at that time were emotional, and character driven and suited my voice," says Kitt.

In the second quarter of 2004, Harlequins operating revenue posted a nearly 22 percent decline. Although Harlequin's losses were offset by gains in other areas of Torstar, Harlequin's parent company, the slump affected the corporate bottom line. In a July 28, 2004, conference call to market analysts, Robert Prichard, Torstar's president and CEO said, "Our business is selling books, and we need to sell more books, not fewer, and we didn't do that this quarter."

Weeks later, The New York Times published a story "'Sorry, Harlequin,' She Sighed Tenderly, 'I'm Reading Something Else.'" The tongue-in-cheek, purple-prose headline was a clever aside to an ad campaign run during the battles with Silhouette in the 1980s. The article suggested, "Romance is not dead, but it may be suffering a slow death." However, the reports of both the genre's and Harlequin's demises may have been greatly exaggerated.

Harlequins core constituents are college-educated, aging baby boomers. A particularly fickle suitor, Harlequin is pursuing black readers while concurrently courting women over 35 with its Next imprint. In addition, the publisher has begun producing books with larger type for the bifocaled set; has entered into an agreement with Audible.com to provide romances in downloadable audio format; and experimented with romances in Manga graphic novel format via an agreement with Dark Horse Comics. Harlequin also has partnered with Vocel, a Toronto--based wireless technology company, to develop a mobile-phone entertainment platform that will include contests, daily-serialized fiction and romance-writing seminars.

Others in Pursuit

Harlequin is the largest but not the only publisher offering African American romance fiction. Avon publishes Beverly Jenkins's historical romances. Signet releases an annual romance anthology about full-figured black women. Evelyn Palfreys "romances for the marvelously mature" have found a home at Simon & Schuster. Walk Worthy Press publishes Christian romance and women's fiction. [See "Between Mission and Message," page 64.]

In addition, HarperTorch, Kensington's Dafina line, Amistad, St. Martin's Press, Pocket Books, Strivers Row, One World/Ballantine Books, Random House and independent publishers produce books for this market. The sale of BET Books makes Mississippi--based Genesis Press, the largest African American-owned romance pubfisher. In addition, Monica Harris, who launched Arabesque is creating an African American romance fiction imprint for Dorchester Publishing.

Will black women respond positively to Harlequin's overtures? Probably. Many African Americans have been reading Harlequin novels for years. Feminist author bell hooks, who examined the various facets of black love in her nonfiction books, admitted in a 1999 Washington Post interview to having read Harlequin romances for more than two decades, often at a rate of two a day. She acknowledges, "Harlequin romances, as much as I would credit Emily Dickinson, are a factor in my enchantment with words."

Gwendolyn E. Osborne is the author of "Women Who Look Like Me: Cultural Identity and Reader Responses to African-American Romance Novels," in Race/Gender/Media: Considering Diversity Across Audience, Content, and Producers (A.B. Longman Press, 2004).