NEW YORK -- Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., the romance novel publisher, announced Tuesday it had completed the acquisition of rival Silhouette Publishing from Simon & Schuster.
Harlequin will pay $10 million plus a share of earnings over the next seven years for Silhouette, a Simon & Schuster spokeswoman said.
The two companies also said they had agreed on a long-term arrangement whereby Simon & Schuster will distribute Harlequin and Silhouette books in the United States.
The deal reinstates what had been the status quo in the romance novel business before 1980. Simon & Schuster, a subsdidiary of Gulf & Western Industries, had been Harlequin's U.S. distributor when Harlequin controlled 90 percent of the retail romance market.
After Harlequin dumped the American publisher in 1979, Simon & Schuster started Silhouette, which captured 30 percent of the market and helped start a chain of new entries into the romance field.
While the popularity of the books had been growing in recent years, the readership could not keep pace with the outpouring of romances -- 130 a month last year. David Galloway, president of Harlequin Enterprises, said returns of unsold novels had risen from 25 percent to 60 percent.
Under the new agreement, Silhouette will remain as a separate publishing imprint, and the editorial staff will remain in New York. Harlequin is a subsidiary of the Toronto-based Torstar Enterprises.
'Under its new ownership the identity of Silhouette Books will be maintained as a leader in its category,' said Richard E. Snyder, chairman of Simon & Schuster. 'I'm also particularly pleased that we at Simon & Schuster can now reestablish a creative and profitable relationship with Harlequin Enterprises, similar to the one that existed between the company for many years prior to 1979.'
