Earlier this year, when describing Simon & Schuster’s first quarter results in which the publisher reported a 17% increase in sales and a 85% jump in profits, CEO Jonathan Karp said the company “was defying gravity.” Karp, after two days of testifying at the trial in which the Department of Justice is trying to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of S&S, wasn’t available for an interview this morning, but the company posted another stellar quarter in which revenue rose 34% over last year’s second quarter, to $293 million. Operating income also jumped again, this time up 54%, to $80 million.
In a memo to employees, Karp said all of S&S’s divisions had double digit revenue growth led by two key drivers—TikTok and Colleen Hoover. “The biggest [sales] lift has come from the ongoing trend of backlist titles that have become increasingly popular on TikTok and other social media channels,” Karp wrote. “Colleen Hoover is a cultural phenomenon, with multiple books on bestseller lists worldwide.” The S&S-published It Ends with Us has sold over one million copies this and and the company will publish the sequel, It Starts with Us later this year and pre-orders, Karp said, are on a “record-setting pace.” Backlist titles by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Jack Carr also had a big sales quarter aided by TikTok and a movie release, respectively.
Karp told employees it is also “the best of times” for the company’s children’s division largely due to “the summer of Jenny Han” as three titles written by Han have sold extraordinarily well benefitting from the release of the movie based on her The Summer I Turned Pretty.
On the international front, sales were up in all major markets, including Canada, the U.K., and Australia.
In addition to the strong sales, Karp noted that Ada Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History, published by Scribner won a Pulitzer Prize.
Karp was optimistic about the fall citing, among a number of titles, new by books by Stephen King (who testified on Tuesday against the PRH merger with S&S), Nina Totenberg, John Irving, and by Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan.