Mills and Boon goes to Bollywood!

On 100 yrs anniversary, Mills & Boon starts India print

New Delhi, Feb 05: Romance fiction giant Mills & Boon aims to fete its 100th anniversary by giving India a "new guilty pleasure" -- printing its steamy love stories for the first time in the morally conservative nation. According to Andrew Go, the group's head of operations in India, the books are tailor-made for a country where people flock to see Bollywood films that mirror the publishers' own rose-tinted storylines of "Boy meets girl, conflict, happy ending." "India loves romantic stories, it's the perfect plot" for a business foray into the sub-continent, he told agencies. The setting up a subsidiary here gives India a "new guilty pleasure," said a spokesman for Harlequin Mills & Boon, which is owned by Torstar Corp, Canada's biggest newspaper publisher. The world's leading publisher of romantic fiction said it hoped India, with an estimated 300 million English readers, would become one of its biggest -- if not the biggest -- markets. "The market is staggering," said Donna Hayes, chief executive of Mills & Boon, which already sells 4.1 books a second, or 131 million books a year in 109 countries and 26 languages.