Harlequin is ending the Heartsong Presents line it acquired in January 2012 from Barbour Publishing, which founded Heartsong in 1993. HarperCollins recently acquired Harlequin Enterprises and completed its purchase of the company in August.

Steve Laube, literary agent at The Steve Laube Agency, said that Heartsong Presents has been “primarily a ‘direct-to-consumer’ book club which published romance titles with a specifically Christian message.”

Laube said that Heartsong will continue publishing the books already slated for release through June 2015, and that Kathy Davis, editor of the line, will be leaving the company at the end of January.

Heartsong Presents published four new fiction titles a month.

Harlequin “used the incredibly successful network of the Love Inspired lines as their resource,” Laube said. “Unfortunately the efforts did not produce the necessary growth.”

Laube saw Heartsong Presents as financially “vulnerable.”

“When a book retails for only $4.99, you have to sell a lot of copies to cover production costs,” he said. “And without a bookstore component, the publisher must rely on the very expensive method of direct mail or the vague method of email marketing to build subscribers. A subscriber had to commit to buying all four books each month, which is a bargain and quite convenient. But growing those numbers into the tens of thousands is not an easy task.”

But he celebrated the legacy of Heartsong Presents, citing the fact that “many of today’s best-selling Christian novelists either got their start at Heartsong or published with them on a regular basis while also writing for other publishers.”

Another part of Heartsong’s legacy is that it gave “new voices a chance,” Laube said. “This willingness is harder to find nowadays because the financial stakes are higher in publishing, and testing authors is not a normal thing to do.”

Some of those key authors are Tracie Peterson, Wanda E. Brunstetter, Colleen Coble, DiAnn Mills and Susan May Warren.

With more than 1,000 books published in the line, Laube believes “the industry owes Heartsong Presents a debt of gratitude.”

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