Publishers Weekly just published Its annual list of the world’s largest publishers, It will be interesting to see who ranks where. The list is published in graphic form to avoid cut and pasting, so it’s a little difficult to link, but you can see the involvement of various comics-related companies.
author Jim Milliot Noting that top companies’ total revenue rose to It will reach $69.7 billion in 2023 (the year covered), up from $69.05 in 2022, so even accounting for inflation, the publishing industry is not dead. Far from it. I thought it would be interesting to go through this list and point out where comics had a major impact. Remember, this is a rough 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 billions of books, a consumer-facing publisher would be the world’s largest Money making machine. But you are wrong. The list is dominated by a very different type of publishing industry.
• Number one is RELX Group, UK-based STM publisher. (STM are scientific, technical and medical publishers, and they are mostly among the best.) You may have never read a RELX book, as they focus on “providing professional and business clients with information-based analysis and decision-making tools that enable them to make Make better decisions, get better results, and be more productive. This is essentially B2B publishing, and it’s a huge business. Their website includes this revenue breakdown:
As you can see, printing is only a small part of what they do, so I’m not sure if they actually publish books?
RELX also has an event department, RX (Reed Exhibitions), which has a small department called ReedPOP, which hosts NYCC, PAX, C2E2, etc.
• #2 is Canadian Thomson ReutersI was only vaguely aware of the company, although they owned the news service Reuters, der. What do they do? “Thomson Reuters is an artificial intelligence and technology company that provides professionals with trusted content and workflow automation to understand now and seize the future.” More STM, B2B, there are many legitimate applications.
The two data publishers will have combined revenue of over $12 billion by 2023, so people love data!
• With #3, we finally found a book you’ll love to read! Bertelsmann Group is the parent company of Germany Penguin Random Housethe most famous “traditional publisher” in the United States, with more than 300 imprints and brands, including comic-oriented imprints like Random House Graphics, Ink legend, Ink pop, 10 speed graphics, pantheon……recent, Prosperity. In 2023, public revenue will reach 5.6 billion yuan.
• #4 is Pearsona British educational publisher. Beyond B2B, textbooks and the like are a huge driver of global sales as long as children can learn.
• #5 is Dutch Wolters Kluwerhas launched “a range of specialist print and digital publications, books and textbooks covering professions such as health, tax, accounting, legal, compliance and finance. You guessed it, more business and education stuff. Their The health section links to papers on important topics, such as “Progression of pericapillary and macular chorioretinal atrophy in multifocal choroiditis is associated with peripheral inflammatory plumes”, you may not have read it, but I’m sure you’ll want your eye doctor to be familiar with it.
• France ranked 6th Hachette book It’s back to the readable book industry. Graphic novel publishing is fragmented their many marks, Including Little Brown, LB ink, Central Station, etc. In France, they have several comic publishers, including Les Éditions Albert-René, which publishes Asterix books, comic publisher Pica, and a few others that I didn’t have time to look around for.
Interestingly, the Hachette page does not list Yen Press as its imprint, perhaps because it is associated with Kadokawa – See below for more information. Still, Yen is one of the largest comics publishers in the United States, and they certainly contributed some to Hachette’s $3.1 billion in 2023 revenue.
• In #7 we have Hitotsubashi Group Japanese. While the name may not be familiar to casual readers, as a conglomeration of Shogakukan, Shueisha, and Hakusensha, they are the largest manga publisher in the world. In America they have visual media,This is The largest comic publisher in the American comics market. I’ll let our manga teacher Deb Aoki explain the ins and outs of Hitotsubashi, which is set to earn $2.5 billion in 2023, but it’s a story full of twists and succession-like family struggles.
• #8 is in German Springer Natureanother STM publisher “Springer Nature drives discovery by publishing trustworthy research, supporting the development of new ideas and championing open science.”
• In #9 we have willythe largest academic/educational publisher in the United States. While browsing the website I noticed that they offer Provide publishing services to authors, Mainly in the academic realm – it’s not exactly vanity publishing, but I don’t quite know how that works? They also have a few more consumer-oriented imprints that occasionally dabble in comics, or at least comics-adjacent areas, e.g. Fool series.
• Ranked 10th, already very old HarperCollinsHome Several bear the imprint of the publisher’s comics, and at least one comic-based work, Harper Lane.
I won’t go through the rest of this list, except to point out that other more well-known comics publishers also made the top twenty, including the largest comics publisher in North America academicin #12, Holzbrinkthe hometown of comics giant First Second, ranked 13th Kodansha In #19 and Simon and Schusterwhich publishes comics, especially children’s comics, in some places, ranking 20th.
Other famous figures: Kadokawa, Recently became the target of acquisition by Sony, and co-owner of Yen Publishing, Ranked 23rd with revenue of just over $1 billion. media participationIt is the parent company of many BD/comics publishers such as Abrams in the United States and Dargaud, Dupuis, Kana in France, ranking 27th.
Internationally, there are many more comics publishers on the list, including planeta group Spain’s Mondadori (#22) and Italy’s Mondadori (Rizzoli in the United States) ranked 33rd.
Does this have any implications? Well, STM/technical publishing is huge! As I recall, this whole piece was actually in place Steve Bissette’s FB post Which Including this depressing graphic:
I’m no expert in this field, but academics and scientists actually have to pay (sometimes thousands of dollars) to have their articles published by top STM publishers. If you’d like to start a discussion, there’s plenty of discussion in the comments on Bissette’s post. But apparently these publishers are making billions of dollars by not paying authors. More in another tweet from 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 smarter about how to do this, even if they haven’t all launched comics-centric brands yet. But as I think about this, I wonder if the Boom acquisition could be the start of a larger publisher buying up smaller comic book publishers? The next few years are going to be crazy, especially if tariffs significantly increase the cost of publishing books.
appendix:
As I was looking through this list, I wondered where RELX ranked among event organizers. It turns out they are The second largest events company in the worldafter Informa, based on this listing I found:
- 1. Informa Markets £1.7bn
- 2. RX (Reed Exhibitions) £1.3 billion
- 3. Clarion £500 million
- 4. Emeralds £349 million
- 5. CloserStill £202m
- 6. Virtue £195 million
- 7. Easyfairs (including venues) £188m
- 8. Ascend* £180 million
- 9. DMG £150m
- 10. Arc £150 million
- 11. Terrapin £98m
- 12. Questex £95 million
While the vast majority of these companies’ revenue comes from B2B trade shows, the top three companies all have Comic-Con/pop culture events divisions. Informa owns fan expo Brands owned by Reed Exhibitions reed popas mentioned above, Clarion has Leftfield Media Event Seriesincluding Awesome Con, Rose City, and more.
Comics may not be big business, but big business loves comics!