![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This is bullshit.
February 6th, 2026 04:12 pmWell, this is not how I intended to start my blogging year, but here it is:
Harlequin has announced that the Historical line will be discontinued in September 2027. They cite a decline in popularity of HR over the last few years. This is both devastating and infuriating. It's devastating because Harlequin has one of the strongest stables of authors publishing today, and now where will these stories go? It's infuriating because of the company's absolute utter failure to support them. Harlequin Historicals only recently starting showing up on shelves at my local B&N again. They are not carried in drugstores/supermarkets anymore (no paperback books are), and unless you are "in the know" enough to purchase direct from publisher, you are pretty much never going to get these books in paper form.
These authors - these stories - deserve better.
I say in my About Me post on this blog that I have not cared for the direction HR has gone in the last 10 years, and that's still true. The only new Historical novels I've purchased since 2018 have been from Harlequin. With the loss of this line - making the prophecy that HR is dead decidedly self-fulfilling - I don't know where I'm going to find new offerings.
I will continue to scour the secondhand market for vintage gems, but I worry for the authors who are currently writing. Where will they end up? Maybe at Sourcebooks Casablanca? The only other publisher that seems to be pushing HR these days is Dragonblade, a small press without a developmental editor and which is locked in Kindle Unlimited.
As a vintage romance reader, one of the best things about these books is that they *are* physical objects which can be held and enjoyed. The demise of MMPB is going to be bad enough (I can already smell used book prices going up) but the loss of a major publisher is worse. As the person in the video says, this is likely the beginning of the end of category romance as a whole.
Harlequin has announced that the Historical line will be discontinued in September 2027. They cite a decline in popularity of HR over the last few years. This is both devastating and infuriating. It's devastating because Harlequin has one of the strongest stables of authors publishing today, and now where will these stories go? It's infuriating because of the company's absolute utter failure to support them. Harlequin Historicals only recently starting showing up on shelves at my local B&N again. They are not carried in drugstores/supermarkets anymore (no paperback books are), and unless you are "in the know" enough to purchase direct from publisher, you are pretty much never going to get these books in paper form.
These authors - these stories - deserve better.
I say in my About Me post on this blog that I have not cared for the direction HR has gone in the last 10 years, and that's still true. The only new Historical novels I've purchased since 2018 have been from Harlequin. With the loss of this line - making the prophecy that HR is dead decidedly self-fulfilling - I don't know where I'm going to find new offerings.
I will continue to scour the secondhand market for vintage gems, but I worry for the authors who are currently writing. Where will they end up? Maybe at Sourcebooks Casablanca? The only other publisher that seems to be pushing HR these days is Dragonblade, a small press without a developmental editor and which is locked in Kindle Unlimited.
As a vintage romance reader, one of the best things about these books is that they *are* physical objects which can be held and enjoyed. The demise of MMPB is going to be bad enough (I can already smell used book prices going up) but the loss of a major publisher is worse. As the person in the video says, this is likely the beginning of the end of category romance as a whole.
