After the controversy surrounding the launch of Harlequin‘s self-publishing partnership with AuthorSolutions—or, as most people dubbed it, Harlequin’s vanity press—the romance publishing behemoth has gone over the Harlequin Horizons website with a fine tooth comb, eliminated all references to the parent company, and renamed the entire enterprise DellArte Press.
It’s uncanny, really: While the similarly organized Westbow Press displays its affiliation with Thomas Nelson front and center, even sharing a distinctive visual element with the parent company’s logo, if you didn’t know going into the DellArte website that it was linked to Harlequin you’d be hard pressed to discover it. Which sort of takes away one of the key advantages that the venture had in its efforts to convince aspiring romance writers to subsidize their own publication—an association with a recognized and trusted brand that instantly conveyed the impression that Harlequin Horizons was on top of its game. So what happens to DellArte now that it’s just another rookie self-publishing imprint to much of its client base—but still distrusted by the professional writers who criticized its launch and aren’t distracted by the name change?