100 Years of Mills & Boon

This year Mills and Boon celebrates a century as one of the most enduringly popular brand names in publishing. Over the past 100 years the Mills and Boon imprint has become synonymous with romantic fiction and today is part of Harlequin, the world’s largest publisher of romantic fiction.

In 1908 the firm began as a general publisher. In addition to early novels from PG Wodehouse, Jack London and Hugh Walpole their list included non fiction titles such as The Poultry Keeper’s Companion and Twenty Four Years of Cricket by Arthur A Lilley. Early on, the firm focused on establishing branded series publishing, but it was during the 1930’s and 40’s as the demand for popular escapist romance fiction increased that the transition to household name began.

200 million books are sold worldwide every year.50 new titles are published every month. Books are published in 26 different languages and sold in over 109 international markets. A Mills & Boon is sold every 5 seconds in the UK. They have a global author base of more than 200, and ‘Mills and Boon’ has even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a phrase meaning ‘romantic story book’.

Roger Sanderson is the only UK based male author. He writes under the pseudonym Gill Sanderson and has had enormous success writing romance over the last six years.

He started writing as a husband-and-wife team; while Gill created the storyline, characters and background, Roger helped with the actual writing. But as Gill’s job became more time-consuming, he took over all of the work. He has written many novels for Mills & Boon’s Medical Romance series, and he claims his ideas come from his children; a midwife; a health visitor and a consultant oncologist. According to Mills and Boon, he has worldwide sales in excess of 3 million and has written 32 titles.

Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon’s most prolific writers, with 180 titles to her name. She writes for the flagship series, Modern, a globally best-selling series, and has worldwide sales in excess of 85 million. She has been writing for over twenty years, producing titles such as A Perfect Family; To Love, Honour and Betray; The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which reached both The Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists.

She started writing by entering a competition held by the Romantic Novelists Association. Although she didn't win, an agent got in touch and in 1979, she published her first novels – Regency romances – as Caroline Courtney. From 1981 to 1983, she signed air-hostess romps as Melinda Wright and thrillers as Lydia Hitchcock, and in 1981, Mills & Boon accepted her first novel for them, Falcon's Prey signed as Penny Jordan. Since then, almost 70 million copies of her Mills & Boon novels have been sold worldwide.

(Image: Detail from Taken by the Sheikh)