Publishers Weekly just put out its annual list of the world’s biggest publishers, and it’s interesting to see who ranks where. The list was published as a graphic to avoid cutting and pasting, so it’s a bit hard to link, but you can see where various comics related companies come in.
Author Jim Milliot notes that the total revenues of the top companies rose to $69.7 billion in 2023 (the year covered) from $69.05 in 2022, so even allowing for inflation, publishing is not dead. Far from it. I thought it would be fun to run down the list, pointing out where comics make a significant impact. Bear in mind, this is a back of the envelope quick survey – please leave corrections in the comments.
You might think that with beloved authors like Sarah J. Maas, Jeff Kinney and Colleen Hoover selling kabillions of books, consumer-based publishers would be the biggest money makers in the world. But you would be wrong. The list is dominated by a very different kind of publishing.
• Coming in at #1 is RELX Group, the UK-based STM publisher. (STM is Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers and they are most of the top of the list.) You have probably never read a RELX book for pleasure as they specialize in “information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers, enabling them to make better decisions, get better results and be more productive.” This is essentially B2B publishing and it’s a huge business. Who knew? Their website includes this graphic of how revenue breaks down:
As you can see, Print is a tiny aprt of what they do, so I’m not sure they actually publish books?
RELX also has an event arm, RX (Reed Exhibitions) which has a little division known as ReedPOP, which puts on NYCC, PAX, C2E2 and so on.
• #2 is Canadian ThomsonReuters, a company I only am vaguely aware of, although they own the news service Reuters, der. What do they do? “Thomson Reuters is an AI and technology company empowering professionals with trusted content and workflow automation to know now and navigate what’s next.” More STM, B2B, with many legal applications.
Together these two data publishers made more than $12 billion in 2023, so people like data!
• With #3 we finally get to books you like to read! Bertelsmann is the German parent company of Penguin Random House, the most storied “traditional publisher” in the US, and home to more than 300 imprints and brands, including such comics oriented imprints as Random House Graphic, InkLore, Ink Pop, 10 Speed Graphic, Pantheon…..and most recently, Boom. PRH took in $5.6 billion in 2023.
• #4 is Pearson, a UK educational publisher. After the B2B stuff, textbooks and so on are a huge driver of sales worldwide, as long as the kids allowed to be learning.
• #5 is Dutch-based Wolters Kluwer, which puts out “a range of professional print and digital publications, books and textbooks in specialties, such as health, tax, accounting, legal. compliance and finance.” You guessed it, more business and educational stuff. Their health section links to papers on important topics such as “PROGRESSION OF PERIPAPILLARY AND MACULAR CHORIORETINAL ATROPHY IN MULTIFOCAL CHOROIDITIS IS ASSOCIATED WITH PERIATROPHIC INFLAMMATORY PLUMES”, which you might not read but you would like your eye doctor to be familiar with, I’m sure.
• At #6, France’s Hachette Livre is back in the readable books business. Graphic novel publishing is scattered around their many imprints, including Little Brown, LB Ink, Grand Central and so on. In France they have several comics imprints, including Les Éditions Albert-René, which puts out the Asterix books, Pica, a manga publisher, and several more I didn’t have time to dig around to find.
Interestingly, the Hachette page does not list Yen Press, among its imprints, perhaps because it’s a joint venture with Kadokawa – for more on that see below. Despite this, Yen is one of the biggest manga publishers in the US, and they doubtless contribute a bit to Hachette’s $3.1 billion 2023 revenue.
• At #7 we have the Hitotsubashi Group of Japan. Although that name may not be familiar to casual readers, as a conglomeration of Shogakukan, Shueisha, and Hakusensha they are the world’s biggest manga publisher. In the US they own Viz Media, which is the biggest manga publisher in the US comics market. I’ll leave it to our manga sensei Deb Aoki to explain the ins and outs of Hitotsubashi, which took in $2.5 billion in 2023 – but it is a story full of twists and turns and Succession-like family fighting.
• #8 is German Springer Nature, yet another STM publisher “Springer Nature advances discovery by publishing trusted research, supporting the development of new ideas and championing open science.”
• At #9 we have Wiley, the biggest academic/educational publisher in the US. While poking around the website, I noted that they offer publishing services for authors, mostly in the academic realm – it’s not exactly vanity publishing but I don’t quite know how this works? They also have a few more consumer-facing imprints which occasionally dabble in comics, or at least comics adjacent areas, like the For Dummies series.
• Coming in at #10 its good old HarperCollins, home to several imprints that have publishers comics, and at least one comics-focused one, HarperAlley.
I’m not going to run down the rest of the list, except to note that other better known comics publishers come in the top twenty, including N. America’s biggest comics publishers Scholastic, at #12, Holtzbrinck, home to First Second, at #13, manga giant Kodansha at #19 and Simon & Schuster, which publishes comics in a few places, notably kids lines, at #20.
Other notables: Kadokawa, recently a target of a Sony takeover, and co-owner of Yen Press, comes in at #23 with just over $1 billion in revenue. Mediá Participations, parent company of Abrams in the US, and Dargaud, Dupuis, Kana and many more BD/manga publishers in France, is ranked at #27.
Internationally, there are many more comics publishers on the list, including Grupo Planeta of Spain (#22), and Italy’s Mondadori (Rizzoli in the US) at #33.
Is there a takeaway from this? Well, STM/technical publishing is huge! This whole piece actually clicked in place as I recalled a FB post by Steve Bissette which included this dispiriting graphic:
I’m no expert in this field, but academics and scientists actually have to pay (sometimes thousands of dollars) to get their articles published by the top STM publishers. There’s a lot of discussion in the comments of Bissette’s post if you want to get started on the discussion. But these publishers make billions by not paying authors, apparently. More in another tweet by Bilal.
As for what this list tells us about publishing comics…it may not be the biggest business, but it’s certainly a key element of the publishing world. And “traditional publishers” have gotten much smarter about how to do it, even if they haven’t all launched comics-focused imprints. But as I was going over this I wondered if the Boom acquisition might be the start of larger publishers acquiring smaller comics publishers? The next few years are going to be BUCK WILD, especially if tariffs massively increase the costs of book publishing.
APPENDIX:
While I was going over this list, I wondered where RELX ranks among event organizers. It turns out that they are the second biggest event company in the world, after Informa, based on this list I found:
- 1. Informa Markets £1.7 billion
- 2. RX (Reed) £1.3 billion
- 3. Clarion £500 million
- 4. Emerald £349 million
- 5. CloserStill £202 million
- 6. Hyve £195 million
- 7. Easyfairs (inc venues) £188 million
- 8. Ascential * £180 million
- 9. DMG £150 million
- 10. ARC £150 million
- 11. Terrapin £98 million
- 12. Questex £95 million
While the vast majority of money these companies make is from B2B trade shows, the top three companies all have comic-con/pop culture event arms. Informa owns the Fan Expo brand, Reed owns ReedPop, as noted, and Clarion owns the Leftfield Media family of events, including Awesome Con, Rose City and a few more.
Comics may not be big business, but big business likes comics!
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