Now that my ire has cooled down and the RWA has (surprisingly to this jaded author) stepped up to the plate, I was talking with a friend, and it put the whole Harlequin Horizons debacle in a new light.

You see, I’d just finished a very personal romance novel. I can’t remember the title, but it dealt with show jumping. Lynn, the heroine, was a high-flying major player on the circuit and headed to the Olympics. Ty, her partner, was a dressage rider who had been in a bad fall, and had fear issues getting back on the horse. When Lynn’s trainer buys a huge sixteen hand appaloosa (Mr. Chips, my first horse I rode) to “retrain” his new student, she’s steamed that he’d take her training time to deal with someone who could barely ride.

I finished it and promptly submitted it to Silhouette for their Desire line. This was back in 1996. I was “mumble mumble” years young (under twenty) and received back a well-written one-page personalized rejection letter.  That letter said we love your story and we wish we could publish it, but books about English riding don’t sell. Quite the coup, I thought, for a newbie author who really had very little writing training other than Iowa high school.

I think back, and I wonder how I would have felt if at the bottom of the letter it had said, “We invite you to publish with our self-publishing line…”

Now granted, the amount of money they would have been asking would have been well out of my league, but I bet I could have saved, asked for gifts, and probably gotten there. And I probably would have taken the bait, hook, line and sinker. I would have paid the money and probably gotten hurt.

Because the truth is, seeing that at the bottom of a rejection letter has implications. It would make you think that there was a way to have a Harlequin novel. It would make you think that perhaps this was your way to achieve the dream. And it would make you think that maybe, just maybe, you would become that author you’ve always dreamed of.

I was awfully naive back then. Awfully innocent and very much not as jaded as I am now. And at the end of the day, I am saddened that a company who had such a great reputation has taken this turn and become something…else. It’s not the first company I’ve seen do that, but it is one that was near and dear to my heart. And I suspect, that there would be many authors just like I was all those years ago, who would fall for it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 1:30 am and is filed under Writing Wednesday, career, rambling thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.