By Kathleen Scheibling Today’s updated post from our archives was written by Kathleen Scheibling, the Executive Editor of Harlequin Dare, back in 2015. Read on for her great advice on writing romance at different heat levels and targeting the right Harlequin series for you. Sex doesn’t matter. There, I said it. I better clarify something…
By Deirdre McCluskey “Historically, men are not used to watching films that are made from the point of view of women. They are almost never called on to do that.” filmmaker Anna Biller Our local public library allows members access to a great movie streaming site, and while browsing their collection, I came across what…
By Katie Gowrie With the final season of Game of Thrones wrapping up, I need to be vocal about my undying devotion to Sansa Stark. I’ve loved her since the beginning, and that love was affirmed when I devoured A Feast for Crows—some people found it boring, but I loved it. Don’t get me wrong,…
By An Editor At submissions@harlequin.com, we receive several hundred emails a year. That’s a lot of mail! In that giant virtual stack of mail, there are some things that crop up frequently, including letters and requests that can needlessly take an editor’s time (because the information is readily available on our submissions page, for example),…
By Patience Bloom Do you live in fear of the rejection letter? Maybe you’ve received a few and spend days trying to decipher the strange editor language. Just between us, we don’t really like writing these letters. In fact, we’d rather be buying new authors and showing off your amazing stories! But to be helpful,…
by Johanna Raisanen, Editor (from a 2014 post on this blog) So you’ve written a secret-baby story and you’re debating submitting to us. Well, you should! But perhaps you’ve been told that secret-baby stories are so cliché! I recently read an article about “the worst romance-novel clichés,” where the author lists a lot of tropes…
We hope you enjoyed our month-long focus on author voice in romantic fiction and found it helpful! To round off the month, we asked our editors to let us know what makes a manuscript stand out from the crowd. What makes a romance submission unique and fresh? (And we included key tips from our guest…
Harlequin editors read a lot of romance books. Sometimes a scene idea or plot twist that seems fresh to a new author is actually one we’ve read many times. And that’s not surprising. When starting a new creative venture, it’s natural to emulate artists whom you admire, including aspects of their “voice” – word choice,…
Ah, it’s that time of year again when love is in the air, Christmas is all around, preteens cover Mariah Carey and that guy from The Walking Dead declares his undying love for his best friend’s wife with what you either consider a grand romantic gesture or the behavior of a stalker in the movie,…
Today, we bring you a post from our Archives as we continue our Inside Harlequin series. Harlequin editor Carly Silver offers a breakdown on what happens at the line editing stage of a book. By this point, the book has had a substantive edit, to work out the big-picture kinks with characterization and plot development.…