Tim Cooper won't be offended if you think his customers are all old women with blue rinses and dirty minds. "It's one of the great stereotypes about our readers but it's not true," says the director of direct and digital marketing operations at Harlequin Mills & Boon. "People do believe Mills & Boon books are just for old women, but we've been publishing them for more than 100 years now, so we must be getting new customers somewhere along the line."

A quick browse of the Mills & Boon catalogue reveals 12 series of books ranging from traditional romping romances with names like Virgin for the Billionaire's Taking and Romancing the Cowboy, to more adult titles in the Desire and Blaze ranges.

What began as a London-based family fiction business is now part of Canada's Harlequin Enterprises, the world leader in romance publishing, selling more than 130m books a year. While any UK publisher would be pleased to be selling a book every three seconds, Mills & Boon is looking to target a younger demographic, recently pushing out racier jacket designs and a range of books based on 'paranormal desires' as it looks to catch young fans of the US million-selling saga Twilight .

A large part of reaching new readers is new formats. Cooper joined the company over six years ago to handle its direct marketing operation, but it has only been within the past few years that digital was, in Cooper's words, "tagged onto direct". Despite this seeming snub, digital is now held in high regard by the publisher, with online accounting for 3% of total sales in 2008 and set to increase to 13% this year.

"We're committed to digital, but it's more about giving customers the choice of how they want to buy and read their books, whether it be through a bookshop, online or mobile. We try to make our content as widely available as possible, and make sure we're on every platform."

While other publishing giants handpick titles to release in e- book format, from early this year every Mills & Boon UK paperback was made available in e-book format simultaneously. By May it announced it had sold more than 10,000 e-books. "We went in guns blazing and pushed every title in e-book format," says Cooper. "It was bold but online reads were the most visited area of the site, so we knew our customers were already predisposed to reading electronically and familiar with e-books."

The publisher also tied up with mobile platform GoSpoken to distribute its e-books to mobile phones.