In the gloom of a UK economy teetering on the edge of recession, a glittering puff of smoke wafted up last week from the publisher that will for ever be associated with Harry Potter, when it reported its best ever performance.
Bloomsbury is a very different company from the one that lucked out back in 1997 with JK Rowling, whose heptalogy continues to work its magic 26 years on. Her boy wizard would no doubt spot traces of floo powder in the hearths connecting international and UK sales, ebooks for universities and old‑fashioned books for children and adults – all of them combining to fly the company to rises of 15% in sales and 16% in profits in the last year. “In challenging economic times,” said the company’s CEO, Nigel Newton, “readers are turning to books as affordable as they cut back on more expensive forms of diversion.”
The world too has changed, with more recent fantasy authors breezing along on the fan-led phenomenon of BookTok. Sales of one of them, the American author Sarah J Maas, grew by 51% over the year. Bloomsbury has published 15 of Ms Maas’s novels since 2012, and has seven more under contract. Her books have sold 26m copies around the world. Hashtag views on TikTok relating to her name stand at over 11.5bn.
Ms Maas’s novels fall into the category of romantasy – a mixture of fantasy and romance – with two of her series based on classic fairy tales. Available online for £7 in paperback and as little as £1.99 in ebook, they certainly fit Mr Newton’s model of affordable diversion. Their success also continues a shift, during the pandemic years, towards escapism.
On the question of cultural value, the picture gets more complicated. Ms Maas has yet to feature in the annual What Kids Are Reading report on schoolchildren in the UK and Ireland, but it can only be a matter of time. Two other BookTok-driven authors – Colleen Hoover and Alice Oseman – feature in the top 20 most read books by students aged between 13 and 16. The report’s authors warned that these teenagers were reading at a level more than three years below their chronological age, with a knock-on effect on their comprehension.
But it would be wrong to draw an equals sign between narrowly defined educational and leisure values: Ms Oseman’s Heartstoppers series, since made into a Netflix TV series, is a case in point. These are graphic novels, which have their own literary tradition, and a sophistication that owes more to the interrelation of word and image than to the complexity of words and syntax. In their portrayal of gay relationships, they are also socially progressive.
None of this, anyway, is the responsibility of publishers, whose job is to go on publishing as successfully as they can. As Mr Newton pointed out last week, it takes a more than a bit of magic to predict public tastes a year or two in advance – the time it takes for a book to wend its way from contract to publication. For the moment, we can rest assured that the floo powder is working very nicely.
