HarperCollins's Harlequin Trade Publishing is relaunching and renaming its main romance imprint, HQN Books, as Canary Street Press. The change reflects in part the company's goal of publishing "a greater variety of modern, commercial love stories."
While remaining a romance imprint, Canary Street Press will publish more "inclusive stories that represent everyone's happy ever after." Canary Street Press will appear in trade paperback, hardcover and mass market formats.
Canary Street Press editorial director Susan Swinwood said, "The Canary Street Press name was inspired by the Canary District, an historic area in downtown Toronto that has undergone a renewal, and is an example of a modern, revitalized community with a rich heritage. Canary Street Press is expanding our editorial direction to celebrate romance for every reader looking to see themselves in a HEA."
Harlequin Trade Publishing executive v-p and publisher Loriana Sacilotto commented: "Canary Street Press will be a destination imprint for romance of all kinds as we add new and fresh voices to our existing author list and continue our focus to bring new readers to the genre."
Canary Street Press's first title, to be published in February, will be Never Never by Colleen Hoover and Tarryn Fisher, which will be available in print for the first time. Never Never is a three-part collection, a "dark, twisty romance about two soulmates trying to find their way back to each other, and the secrets that stand in their way."
Regular publication of Canary Street Press will continue with new titles beginning in summer 2023. Those titles include:
Even If the Sky Is Falling (May 30), an anthology of six stories by Taj McCoy, Farah Heron, Lane Clarke (writing as S.T. Cori), Charish Reid, Sarah Smith and Denise Williams. "Filled with hope, humor, and heat, the stories explore the chances a couple may take when they mistakenly believe the world is ending."
Mickey Chambers Shakes It Up (June 6) by Charish Reid, "a witty, contemporary love story with high emotional stakes and a multicultural cast, about a widowed bar owner who, upon returning to college at 42, inadvertently hires the woman who turns out to be the adjunct instructor of his online writing class to help tend bar at his failing establishment."
The Secret to a Southern Wedding (July 19), the first book in Synithia Williams's new Peachtree Cove series, which is "filled with southern charm, good friends and bad decisions, about a woman determined to stop her mother's impulsive wedding to man she barely knows, only to find herself irresistibly drawn to the groom's son."
Exes and Prose (July 25), the sophomore rom-com from Erin LaRosa, "a friends (with benefits)-to-lovers story about a romance author who's never been in love and who makes an ambitious plan to overcome her writer's block: reunite with her exes to learn why--and document it all for her millions of new online followers."