From Hard to Soft: An Unexpected Shift in Romance
How Paperbacks Changed the Industry
Romance publishers have been at the forefront of industry innovation and disruption since the beginning. The many iterations of romance novel distribution are (in my opinion) uniquely fascinating within the publishing industry. Circulating libraries. Grocery store checkout lines. Kindle Unlimited. And initially, the focus of this article was going to be mail-order catalogues. If you’re questioning how I’m going to make the history of catalogue shopping interesting, I never said I would.
But I realized that before one can even begin to study the stimulating world of catalogues, we have to address the shift that helped make everything after it possible: enter the paperback.
Because it cannot be overstated how closely the history of the paperback and the history of the romance novel became intertwined in the twentieth century. So much of what we associate with romance as a category is tied to its physical format: mass-market sizing, clinch covers, and stepback jackets.
Paperbacks have existed in one form or another for centuries, with various softcover formats appearing across Europe and North America long before the modern romance industry took shape. One early example in North America dates back to 1777.1
But the paperback industry gained traction much later, particularly in the mid-twentieth century. As war era paper rations eased and the high-speed rubber plate rotary press emerged (which we’re all familiar with), mass-produced paperbacks became cheaper and more efficient to produce at scale.2 Paperbacks didn’t simply change the format of books. They changed the economics of reading.
Up until this point, romance novels were heavily tied to lending and library-based circulation models. Due to the cost of hardback novels, most romance readers opted to rent rather than buy—we’ve always been high-volume consumers. Mills & Boon, one of the most influential romance publishers, is a perfect example: their romances were distributed through weekly two-penny libraries, where they became known as “the brown books,” thanks to their distinctive binding.3
But once readers could buy their own copies easily and cheaply, the lending-library ecosystem began to lose its grip on popular fiction. Naturally, romance pivoted.
Sticking with Mills & Boon, the publisher cast a wide net in order to draw in readers. They were now competing against television and magazines for escapist entertainment. Rather than view this as competition, the publisher recognized the opportunity.
Mills & Boon began partnering with magazines such as Women’s Weekly, releasing serial content to draw in readers. Thanks to cheap production and postage, the company would even send out first chapters free of cost upon request, unimaginable before the paperback.
Mills & Boon had long printed their entire catalogue at the end of each book. But as their backlist grew, they began to spotlight new releases.4 To allow readers to see the full inventory available, they would send out the Happy Reading catalogue twice annually.
While the paperback disrupted the industry, it wasn’t until the Romance Wars of the 1970s that we saw its full evolution—complete with the drama of aggressively coded branding, designed to announce the genre from ten feet away. Next week, we’ll get into exactly how (and why) romance covers became a battlefield.
Paul Grescoe, The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 1996), 27.
Paul Grescoe, The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 1996), 28.
Mills & Boon, “Our History,” accessed February 2, 2026, https://www.millsandboon.co.uk/pages/our-history
Joseph McAleer, Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 181.
Fascinating!