Mills & Boon
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Mills & Boon is a British publisher of romance novels, part of Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited, a subsidiary of Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. It has nearly 75% of the British romance paperback market share, publishing under the brandnames Mills & Boon, Silhouette and MIRA.
Mills & Boon were founded by Gerald Mills and Charles Boon in 1908 as a general fiction publisher. It was not until the 1930s that the company began to concentrate specifically on romances.
Their books are sold through a combination of subscription and retail sales. For example in any given month they publish four novels in their Historical line, three of those are available on the retail market, and all four are available to buy directly from the company. Mills & Boon encourage readers to subscribe to their favourite lines, whose books will then be delivered to their home.
One distinctive feature of both Mills & Boon and Harlequin (in the US) is the length of time their books are available to buy. They publish a set number of books each month which are sent to subscribers and displayed on stands in bookshops. At the end of the month, any unsold copies in the shops are withdrawn and pulped. Titles are available to buy direct from Mills & Boon for 3 months or until they are sold out, whichever is sooner. Again, any remaining books are disposed of. Fans looking for particular books after this time must find them second-hand.
Mills & Boon has over 3 million regular readers in the UK annually, though the company has a poor reputation otherwise due to its lack of variety in plotlines, the inevitability of their happy endings, and a more simplistic writing style than literary works. The books are highly branded and are normally in a separate section of bookshops and libraries from the other paperback fiction and romance novels. The more upmarket a bookshop is, the less likely they are to stock Mills & Boon novels. There are persistent rumours that their books are written to a strict formula which dictates everything including on which page the hero and heroine first kiss. In reality, their submission guidelines are very similar to those of most major romance publishers and not as strict as this, but many books do still follow a similar plotline. Many involve rich, ennobled and initially unattainable males, the desire of a character to have a baby (with this being thwarted by infertility or an unsympathetic husband), or the breakup and mending of a relationship.
Linguistically, the books reinforce their traditional views of men and women, with the women being described using stative verbs concerned with feelings and thoughts and the men with dynamic verbs, verbs associated with actions. The woman is also often the object in sentences where the male has performed an action.
As of 2004, the Mills & Boon lines are Modern Romance, Tender, Sensual, Medical, Historical and Blaze. Silhouette is aimed at younger affluent women and includes Desire, Special Edition, Sensation, Superromance, Spotlight and Intrigue.
[edit] See also
- Harlequin Enterprises Ltd
- Charlotte Lamb - one of the best-known M&B novelists, publishing more than 150 romances from the late seventies until her death in 2000.
