Bombed

Harlequin has cancelled the Bombshell line.



Besides the fact that the guy who designed the logo and many of the covers is a personal friend of mine, I never had much to do with these books. I tried two - AKA Goddess by Evelyn Vaughn and another one I couldn't finish - and they really weren't for me, though Goddess was pretty good. I know that writers had a hell of a time trying to sell into this line, because it was so hard to figure out what they wanted, and that a rejected Bombshell MS was pretty much impossible to sell anywhere else.

So I'll just give my two cents as a consumer. As a reader, I was always a little baffled, not sure if this was supposed to be a line about cops, spies, futuristic warriors, or supernatural beings. It had all of them at one time or another. A line about crime-fighting, OK. A line about vampires and other creatures, OK. A futuristic line, OK. Maybe I'm narrow, but I sort of needed to know which it was because, flat out, I'd be down for futuristic and cops, but vampires interest me not at all. And going to the racks and sorting through all the blurbs to figure it out... well, I had other books to buy.

So, there you go. The average low-IQ consumer and her narrow-minded view. But - and this is big - I would have tried it again, and even again, if they had let it go a little longer. They're probably under the gun to make a line turn a profit in a certain amount of time, which is something I see daily in the TV biz, and is a shame all around. In TV, you sometimes need to let something run to build up an audience. Bombshell was kinda like that; it needed a bit more time to gather steam. But time is something no big conglomorate has enough of these days.

Still, you have to admit, the logo kicked ass.