1981: The SECRET of MILLS AND BOON's Success | Newsnight | Writers and Wordsmiths | BBC Archive

Описание: "There's nothing misty and romantic about the company's operation - Mills & Boon's success rests on hard-headed marketing, meticulous research, and careful editorial control."

Fran Morrison reports on Mills & Boon publishers, whose rising sales provide a rare British success story in an otherwise depressed publishing industry. Mills & Boon's stock-in-trade is the romance novel, and they have cornered the market so successfully that the name of the publisher itself has become synonymous with a certain kind of romantic fiction, dubbed "the literature of reassurance" by its in-house sociologists. Mills & Boon readers are not typically invested in any particular author in the publisher's stable - few people are familiar with Mary Wibberley, for example, despite her books selling over 20 million copies worldwide - but rather they follow the umbrella brand.

Year on year, Mills & Boon are seeing their readership and profits increase, while seemingly every other major British publisher is faltering. They have recently launched the first ever nationwide television ad campaign by a book publisher, and are expected to see their readership grow again in the coming year. What is the secret behind their success? What makes a Mills & Boon novel?


Clip taken from Newsnight, originally broadcast on BBC Two, 23 March, 1981.





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