I love me a good Harlequin romance. At their best they’re tight little stories with an intensity you don’t often get in longer romances, just long enough to last a couple of hours, at least they do at my reading speed which is admittedly rather slow. I like to savour the books I read, not rush to the next one.

My favourite lines are Modern/Presents, Blaze and Silhouette Desire. I enjoy a bit of glamour with my romance, dreaming the dream for an hour or two. Of course I know that most successful corporate executives are workaholics, that most princes are interbred nightmares of aristocratic disdain, but I can give that a miss. Author Penny Jordan, one of the stalwarts of the Modern Romance line in the UK once described them to me as ‘modern fairy tales.’ Works for me.

But instead of simple, descriptive titles, we get the hodgepodge that’s so similar it’s hard to tell between them. HMB (Harlequin, Mills and Boon) believe that they sell more books, they track which key words sell more, they’ve even tried the occasional book with a normal-sounding title. What they’ve never tried is doing without them altogether and they just don’t get that we buy the books despite the titles, not because of them.

When someone asks me “What are you reading?” I usually say “The latest Kate Hardy,” not “Playboy Boss, Pregnancy of Passion.” That title means nothing. Twice now I’ve nearly missed a book by one of my favourite authors because the title sounds too much like something already on my shelf, so I’ve assumed I’ve already got it.

The titles make me cringe and more than once I’ve wondered why I read them. In the titles the heroes are called billionaire/tycoon/playboy/boss/prince/sheikh, or described by their nationality, usually latin in nature as in Argentinian/Italian/Spanish/Greek. The heroines are called virgin/secretary/bride/mistress (oh, I hate, hate, hate “mistress”). They use assumptions that are decades out of date, or typecast or simply misleading.

I’m reading a Kathy DeNosky at the moment, “One night, two babies.” Not only is the “one night” actually a week, it happens four months before the story starts, and we don’t find out about the two babies until over half way through the book. And recently I attached the wrong author and title to a book I read, I still haven’t found the right book. I remember reading it, I even made notes, as I do when I’m planning a review, but I jotted the wrong title down, then looked it up and got the wrong author, too. I might have got a word wrong in the title, written “playboy” instead of “billionaire,” but that’s enough to ensure the book is lost forever in the morass of playboys and tycoons.

More seriously, it makes it so easy for people to take a rise out of the books, even more than they do already. They can call the books “trash,” especially people who haven’t actually cracked the cover, they can despise them, and using them can actually denigrate the romance genre.

It’s easy to laugh at a book called “In Bed With Her Italian Boss,” a little less easy to laugh at it when it’s called “Breakfast at Giovanni’s.” With either title it’s a delightful read by one of my favourite HMB authors, but the Italian boss shtick does it no favors at all. The book won the prestigious Romance Prize in 2008 with its original title. It might not have done so with the other one.

So please, please, Harlequin, if you don’t listen to anything else, listen to this – we buy the books despite the titles, not because of them. Change the titles – please!