The Legacy of the Vanity Press and Digital Transitions

Publication year
2013
Journal
The Journal of Electronic Publishing
Volume
16.1
Comment

Most of this is not about romance. However, at the end there is a section about how

In November 2009 [...] the romance-publishing giant Harlequin announced a new venture called Harlequin Horizons. Harlequin Horizons teamed with the POD company Author Solutions to offer self-publishing services to writers who’d had manuscripts rejected from Harlequin imprints. Harlequin announced that it would be monitoring sales of texts published through Harlequin Horizons to potentially publish the ones with the most promise (or highest sales) through one of its traditional imprints. The program represented an attempt to earn profits from the explosion of self-publishing. It was presumably designed to monetize the writing of authors with rejected manuscripts and to exploit networked user-generated filtering to find titles with sales potential without having to take the initial risk of publishing them.

Harlequin’s idea met with intense resistance from groups that advocate for the rights of authors.

The permissions section of Laquintano's Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (University Of Iowa Press, 2016) states that "A portion of chapter 1 appeared in 'The Legacy of the Vanity Press and Digital Transitions'".