LONDON LETTER:Secret fans of Mills & Boon romance novels can now buy them and enjoy the anonymity of the net and e-books
SEEN BY many as a throwback to a distant age filled with spinster aunts, Mills & Boon is enjoying a renaissance from the growing popularity of electronic books, now selling more of them than it does of its traditional paperbacks.
The Temp and the Tycoonhas become a particular favourite of Kindle, iPad and other tablet owners, recounting Talie Calhoun's "riveting journey" with her boss to a moment "that expresses the sheer power of love to transform hearts".
Amazon, which says that its e-book sales tripled last year, says The Tempis one of its most popular downloads, while Sony produced a version in Mills & Boon's traditional rose-pink, complete with logo, for those proud to declare themselves as M&B readers.
Not everyone is proud to so declare themselves. Indeed, the success of the romantic publisher has much to do with the fact that those who secretly enjoy its wares enjoy even more the ability to buy them privately on the web without anyone else knowing.
Founded as a general publisher in 1908, Mills Boon from the beginning published in a form and at a price that made its volumes accessible to a wide audience.
In the 1930s, it spotted the rise of libraries and a growing appetite for escapism to take readers away from the gloom of the Depression, shifting, as a result, its focus to hardback romances that were sold in a distinctive brown binding that led to them becoming known as “the books in brown”.
In the 1950s, it again realised that change was afoot. Abandoning hardbacks, it produced, and still does, monthly lines of cheap paperbacks sold through newsagents across the UK, along with developing a loyal subscription readership.
Taking note of the trend last year, industry statistician Nielsen BookScan reported that romantic fiction of all types now holds a market share in e-books that is seven times larger than its hold of the print book market.
Last month, a quarter of the seemingly endless trove of Barbara Cartland romances were published in e-book form, with her son, Ian McCorquodale, confident that such sales “will become a nice little earner”.
Like the estate of James Bondauthor Ian Fleming, McCorquodale decided not to stay with Cartland's print publisher for his foray into electronic books, instead developing a partnership with electronic publisher M-Y Ebooks.
Now that he has started, McCorquodale intends to publish five new e-book titles every month, blessed by the fact that his mother, who died in 2000 and who was famous for flamboyantly wearing pink, left behind 723 novels.
Meanwhile, Bloomsbury, which has seen days of plenty since it first signed up Harry Potterauthor JK Rowling, believes that a quarter of its revenues this year will come from e-books, following a 600 per cent increase in digital sales in January and February.
Publishers love digital books. Margins are higher since there are no printing costs involved, nor do they print too many or too few, while stocks do not have to be pulped if there are mistakes: “The biggest saving is in cock-ups,” says Bloomsbury’s Richard Charkin.
Significantly, e-books are not the preserve, necessarily, of the young. Bloomsbury’s Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson’s novel, The Finkler Question, sold four of every 10 of its copies in the United States in e-book format.
Equally, Bloomsbury reports that its alliance on a subscription basis with public libraries in the UK through its Public Library Online franchise is also bearing fruit, with interest from middle-aged readers far higher than had been imagined.
The ability to borrow and permanently keep a copy of a work – even if one cannot share it because of technology restrictions – from libraries is something that has, however, already begun to concern publishers in the US.
There, HarperCollins has announced that US libraries will only be allowed to lend an e-book 26 times before having to buy another copy, since this, it argues, is the number of times a hard copy would last before needing to be replaced. British librarians dispute the figures.
Meanwhile, there are already allegations of skulduggery. The UK’s Office of Fair Trading has opened an investigation “following a significant number of complaints” that publishers are acting in concert to keep up prices. Equally, the European Commission is showing interest. Warning that heavy fines will follow if it finds hard evidence, commission competition officials earlier this month raided a number of publishers.
The issue for investigation is the publishers’ use of the so-called agency model, where retailers get a commission for selling the works rather than buying the volumes and then doing what they wished with them, as happens usually in print.
For now, Mills & Boon and Cartland’s estate will continue to profit from e-book sales, despite the sneers of other, although their racier cousins in the world of erotic fiction have benefited just as much, if not more, according to industry sources.
Indeed, a number of them would have topped Apple's iTunes UK charts, until chief executive Steve Jobs took action to have six of them, including Blonde and Wet: The Complete Story, removed. Peter Mandelson's The Third Mantook its place in the ratings.
