Avon Books

Avon Books was founded in 1941 by the American News Company as a low-cost paperback rival to Pocket Books. Brother and sister Joseph Meyers and Edna Meyers Williams were brought in to run the new house. For nearly three decades, Avon printed mass-market fiction of every flavor: mysteries, westerns, science fiction, ghost stories, and digest magazines, alongside a brief but notable run of comic books. By the early 1950s it was moving more than twenty million copies a year. Hearst Corporation purchased the company in 1959.

The pivot came in 1972, when Avon published Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower, the first single-title romance novel released as an original paperback. It sold 2.35 million copies. Two years later, Rosemary Rogers's Sweet Savage Love and Dark Fires hit bestseller lists and gave the "sweet savage" subgenre its name. After News Corporation bought Hearst's book division in 1999, Avon's non-romance and hardcover lines shifted to sister company Morrow, and the imprint became a romance house full-time.

Today Avon is an imprint of HarperCollins, sitting within the General Books group alongside William Morrow, Dey Street, Voyager, and the digital-first Impulse imprint (launched in 2011). Its author roster includes Julia Quinn, whose Bridgerton-regency novels such as The Duke and I have produced fourteen consecutive New York Times bestsellers, as well as Lisa Kleypas, Kathleen Woodiwiss, Johanna Lindsey, and Elizabeth Lowell. The house also runs KissCon, a multi-author bookstore event series it created in 2014 for its reading community.

A reader picking up an Avon title gets a story written to a specific audience: someone who tracks an author's career over two decades or more, who knows the difference between a Regency courtship and a contemporary one. Quinn has worked with the same Avon editor for twenty-two years. The annual list runs around sixty to seventy original paperbacks, a size the editorial team considers optimal for sustaining that kind of close relationship.