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Two British publishers announce new romantic fiction imprints

Within the last month, two major British publishers have announced new romance imprints. At the beginning of August Transworld relaunched the famous Loveswept line as a digital imprint. Loveswept was a major romance publisher in the 1980s and 90s and published 917 titles between 1983 and 1999. The line launched many now big name authors including Tami Hoag and Janet Evanovich and will make classic Loveswept romances available as ebooks to British romance readers as well as publishing brand new novels.

Later this month Random House will launch a new wholly new digital-first romance imprint called Rouge. Rouge will publish novels across a variety of romance genres including contemporary, historical and paranormal as ebooks first before taking the best selling novels into paperback.

Both these steps into romance are digital so will benefit ebook readers in the first instance but it can only be good news for the British romance reader that such big names in publishing are launching romantic fiction imprints.

At the Festival of Romance which takes place next month in Hertfordshire we'll be celebrating the launch of these new imprints as well as the existing UK publishers of romance who are kindly supporting the festival: Mills and Boon, Piatkus, Choc Lit, Total-E-Bound and Xcite. Open to fans of all kinds of romantic fiction, and with 28 authors taking part, it will be the perfect moment to celebrate the start of a new romantic fiction renaissance.

Tags: and, boon, choc, lit, loveswept, mills, piatkus, rouge, total-e-bound, xcite

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Comment by Lily Roman on September 11, 2011 at 9:35: I hope they do real books too. I haven't read an ebook yet.

Comment by Laura E James on September 10, 2011 at 21:03: Thanks, Laura. :-)

Comment by Laura Bambrey on September 10, 2011 at 19:08: Hi Laura... as far as I'm aware, an imprint is a smaller segment of a larger publishing company that specialises in a specific genre or narrower field of genres that enables this imprint to be marketed at a more targeted group of concumers. So one publishing house may have several imprints... one dealing with thrillers, one non-fiction, one historical works, one poetry... etc.

Hope this helps!

Comment by Laura E James on September 10, 2011 at 15:22: Okay, so I'm new to all of this and by the following question, I will be exposing my naivety, but what is meant by the term 'imprint' when it relates to publishers?

Comment by Debbie Viggiano on September 10, 2011 at 13:02: I've made a note of these, thank you!

Comment by Francine Howarth on September 10, 2011 at 12:55: Hi Kate,

This is interesting, even a tad intriguing re new possible outlets for romance writers. But, and it's a big but, are these openings only available to agented authors? Random & Transworld have for quite a while now only accepted agented submissions. I've checked out Loveswept and there's absolutely no information with regards subbing to them. Which, implies it's a closed shop! At first glance it looks to be more a means of advertising old lines, familiar faces (authors) and books I've already read. Considering it was launched in August, and I don't know any romance authors who've heard of it let alone seen the web site, I was not that surprised to see they'd had no comments on the blog.

So, is Rouge just another advertising ploy or a genuine opening for unagented authors? Ha ha, so many questions and the darn web sites in question don't answer these vital points.

I'm happy to promote publishers who are providing genuine openings for new unknown authors, not just revamped well known (new pseudonym) authors. In fact I have a long list of publishers on my fun-writer blog in sidebar.

Unfortunately I can't make it to The Festival of Romance weekend due to family commitments of a wedding, so I'll miss out on face-to-face chances of making contacts, meeting blogging buddies and gaining inside info! ;)

best

F