Fantasy bestsellers boost Bloomsbury profits

The runaway success of the American author Sarah J Maas’s fantasy romance novels has helped to put Bloomsbury on course to beat City expectations.
In results for the six months to August, the listed publisher reported its fifth consecutive period of double-digit growth in revenue, with sales up by 32 per cent to £179.8 million and profit before tax up by half to £26.6 million.
It is now on track to beat consensus expectations for the full year of sales of £319 million and profit before taxation of £37.5 million. Shares in the company closed up 58p, or 8.5 per cent, at 740p.
Maas’sThrone of Glass and A Court of Thorn and Roses series have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide. Sales more than doubled in the period, with January’s Crescent City: House of Flame and Shadow becoming a global bestseller.
Nigel Newton, Bloomsbury’s chief executive, said writers such as Maas were “very important” to the consumer side of the business. “If we don’t have any, we’re in trouble,” Newton said. “But we’re very fortunate that we’ve published two of the greatest cult writers of all time in JK Rowling and Sarah Maas.”
Sales in the company’s non-consumer division also grew by 3 per cent, though profit before taxation slipped from £5.9 million in 2023 to £5.2 million. Organic revenue from the company’s academic and professional business dropped by 14 per cent, which the publisher attributed to budgetary pressures in British and American universities and an accelerated shift from print to digital.
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“Many academic publishers have experienced change, in particular in the case of the UK, with the previous government’s exclusion of international students, which has badly damaged the finances of universities, where of course they were a big source of income,” Newton said.
The publisher said that it was “exploring the opportunity to monetise content through AI deals”. Newton said: “We either are talking to or will be talking to the obvious players, just to see what the lie of the land is and what the possibilities are. They’re more complicated in our general side of publishing because we’re determined not to do anything that is against the interests of our authors and without their permission.”
Newton has previously warned about the threat of artificial intelligence to the publishing industry. He was among thousands in the creative industries, including the actor Julianne Moore and the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, who signed a letter this week warning artificial intelligence companies that unlicensed use of their work is a “major, unjust threat” to artists’ livelihoods.