On Tuesday, Bloomsbury restructured its Academic division, following the acquisition of Roman & Littlefield in May, integrating editorial, marketing, and sales teams “alongside a streamlined approach to branding.” According to a spokesperson for the company, a “small number” of positions in the division were cut. At the time of the R&L acquisition, Bloomsbury said it brought over 115 new employees to the company. The spokesperson said, “The purpose of the new structure is to co-ordinate our global publishing strategy with integrated US and UK editorial teams organized around subject and product expertise, scalability to match both the new size of […]
Penguin Publishing Group Acquires Amber-Allen Publishing List
Penguin Publishing Group announced it is acquiring the publishing assets of Amber-Allen Publishing, with Tarcher Perigee managing the titles once the deal is completed. Founded in 1990, Amber-Allen is a self-help and spiritual publisher, whose books include The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills, which has sold over 15 million copies. Tacher Perigee publisher Tracy Behar said in a release, “Amber-Allen, and especially the Toltec Wisdom series, has had a remarkable and enduring impact on the world. It is a great honor to protect the legacy that Janet Mills has created, and to bring these classic titles into […]
Audiobooks Contribute to Higher Spotify Margins
In its third quarter earnings report on Tuesday, Spotify noted that audiobooks (along with music) contributed to a gross margin increase for the brand’s premium offering, up 473 bps to 31.1 percent. Premium subscribers grew 12 percent compared to a year ago, up to 252 million. Those subscribers are up 6 million from the second quarter and the company expects to add another 8 million in the current quarter. Overall sales for the company were up 19 percent to €3.988 billion ($4.227 billion at current exchange rates) and operating income was €454 million. According to the Wall Street Journal, “a […]
PRH Helps Bertelsmann’s Organic Growth
Bertelsmann released a brief financial update on the first nine months of the year. In the third quarter, Bertelsmann’s sales were approximately €4.4 billion ($4.66 billion at current exchange rates), compared to €4.9 billion last year. They say top titles in the quarter for Penguin Random House were Nicholas Sparks’ Counting Miracles (published in Germany and referred to in the release as Our Time of Wonder) and Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus. For the year-to-date, the company’s sales were down 8.4 percent to €13.4 billion ($14.2 billion), still attributed to the sale of Majorel. Organic growth for the year stands at […]