Bloomsbury Publishing founder and CEO Nigel Newton has made no secret of his desire to expand in the U.S., and to grow the company’s academic business. In May, he satisfied both objectives in one deal, acquiring Rowman & Littlefield’s academic publishing business, a move that added 41,000 titles to Bloomsbury’s backlist and doubled its U.S. academic revenue. And this fall, Bloomsbury established its first-ever in-house sales team in North America.

Meanwhile, the publisher continues to deliver eye-popping financial results. In October, Bloomsbury reported a 32% jump in revenue and a 50% increase in earnings in the first half of fiscal 2025 over the same period last year, led by booming sales for Sarah J. Maas’s novels. Those results follow a record-setting fiscal 2024.

True, such returns are what one might expect with an author like Maas in the mix. The publisher says Maas’s books have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide since 2010, when editor Margaret Miller first discovered Throne of Glass on a self-publishing site. “We are beyond grateful to Sarah,” Newton says, also adding thanks to the author’s partner, Josh Wasserman; her agent, Simon Lipskar at Writers House; and her in-house team led by Noa Wheeler and Erica Barmash.

Maas’s success is not unprecedented for the publisher. Since Newton founded Bloomsbury in 1986 at the age of 31, the house has had an uncanny knack for picking winners: it was Bloomsbury, after all, that introduced the world to J.K. Rowling’s young wizard, Harry Potter.

Informed of his selection as a PW notable, Newton was quick to credit his team. And despite the successes, he says 2024 was “a year of sadness” as the company grappled with the shocking death of president Adrienne Vaughan in August 2023. “The interim leadership team of Lenny Allen, Troy Martin, and Valentina Rice and the whole U.S. staff worked incredibly hard to implement the strategies Adrienne put into place,” Newton says. “And we were extremely fortunate to find a great successor to Adrienne in Sabrina McCarthy.”

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