Business is booming at Bloomsbury Publishing, the largest independent trade house in the U.K. For several years running, the London-based publisher had notched double-digit revenue gains, hitting nearly half a billion dollars for the most recent fiscal year. The primary engine behind this precipitous rise? Bloomsbury’s once-modest U.S. division, now a powerhouse all its own.
“It’s been a small offshoot of the U.K. for a long time, and that has really shifted in the last handful of years,” Bloomsbury USA president Sabrina McCarthy said of the division, which launched in 1998. According to McCarthy, it now employees more than 300 people in the U.S.—nearly a third of Bloomsbury staff globally—and publishes roughly 60 adult titles per year.
The U.S. has become Bloomsbury’s largest market, accounting for more than half of the publisher’s revenue. In fiscal 2024, the American arm saw an astonishing 80% growth in revenue to £177.3 million ($240.9 million), which helped Bloomsbury notch a 30% gain in revenue overall. Fiscal 2025 was more modest, with the company recording an overall revenue increase of 5%, to £361 million. The U.S. division generated £194.7 million of that, representing nearly all the growth for the company last year.
Romantasy Soars
The success of Bloomsbury USA is the result of a confluence of forces, but one in particular looms large: Sarah J. Maas. The romantasy novelist was the bestselling author of 2024, according to Circana BookScan, selling nearly nine million books in the year.
Erica Barmash, VP of marketing and publicity and marketing lead for Maas, said that the author has “become a juggernaut beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.” Barmash has watched Maas’s upward trajectory from the start, having joined Bloomsbury in 2012, the same year Maas’s first novel, Throne of Glass, was published. Bloomsbury has since published 16 of Maas’s books across three series, and has signed her for a number of new titles.
During the pandemic, Barmash said, Bloomsbury “saw Sarah’s sales absolutely explode,” thanks in large part to enthusiasm on TikTok and the romantasy boom. “The explosion in romantasy has helped Sarah, even though she sort of was at the forefront of it. You can’t talk about romantasy unless you talk about her.” Barmash added, “It’s been amazing to see Sarah’s sales grow and grow and grow across all series, not just A Court of Thorns and Roses.”
This year, Maas’s blockbuster ACOTAR series turns 10, and Bloomsbury USA has spared no expense in promoting the anniversary, with digital billboards, ads in airports and in more than 200 New York City subway stations, and 6’2” cutouts of the ACOTAR books in Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indigo, and various indies—an elaborate campaign that underscores both the books’ cultural ubiquity and their publisher’s marketing prowess.
Publishing and marketing fantasy books has long been a strength for Bloomsbury USA. After Maas, its second-bestselling author is Samantha Shannon, known for her dystopian Bone Season series. Also on its robust fantasy list are Piranesi author Susanna Clarke and Alan Moore, whose novel The Great When, the first in a planned five-book series, was released last fall.
Valentina Rice, VP of sales and marketing, called readers of fantasy and romantasy especially voracious. “They’re not like the kind of readers who read one two books a year,” Rice said. “They really read and buy.”
A New Imprint
Seizing on its proven aptitude for fantasy—and the appetites of fantasy readers—Bloomsbury USA is doubling down on the genre with a new speculative fiction imprint, Archer, launched earlier this year and headed up by Barmash and Noa Wheeler, who also serves alongside Barmash as editorial lead for Maas. Archer’s inaugural U.S. list is slated for 2026, with plans to publish roughly 12 books per year and move Shannon and Moore over to the imprint.
Beyond Maas, it’s been an eventful year for Bloomsbury USA on a number of other fronts. In October, the success of the division’s consumer titles prompted the company to form an in-house sales force for national accounts in North America, including Amazon, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram. The team is headed by Sarah Rucker, former sales director for Usborne Books. McCarthy predicted that the new in-house approach “will have a very positive impact on our business” and enable a “more direct understanding of the market when it comes to the acquisitions.”
Bloomsbury USA has lately been working to develop a more targeted approach to acquisitions. Rice said that in the past three years, Bloomsbury USA undertook a “pretty big editorial shift,” becoming more selective about which U.K. titles to bring stateside. “We used to bring in everything that the U.K. published, which we don’t anymore,” Rice noted. “We bring in the books that work for our market and they sell the rights to other publishers for those that don’t, and vice versa.”
Last spring Bloomsbury made its largest business acquisition to date, buying the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group’s academic publishing division, bolstering Bloomsbury’s own academic publishing in North America (which is, McCarthy noted, “pretty separate” from its trade business). The acquisition added more than 40,000 academic titles to Bloomsbury’s catalog, nearly doubling it, and the publisher is looking to build out its academic list in the areas of business and psychology, among others, moving forward.
On the Horizon
So what’s next for Bloomsbury USA? McCarthy said one of the company’s priorities going forward is “doubling down on nonfiction” after several banner years bolstered by its fiction offerings. “Over the past three or four years, we’ve really pushed into the fiction side on the adult list,” she explained, so in February the publisher “recalibrated a little bit” by hiring Colleen Lawrie as editorial director for nonfiction, allowing Callie Garnett, who had been serving as editorial director for the entire list, to narrow her focus to memoir and fiction. The publisher is particularly excited about A Truce That Is Not Peace, a memoir by Women Talking author Miriam Toews, out in August, and is looking to invest in the coming years in publishing more “social commentary” that can help illuminate “what’s happening in the U.S.,” McCarthy added.
Indeed, the American publisher finds itself in a different political climate than it did a year earlier. “It’s a very scary time,” McCarthy said, referring to book-banning efforts and recent attacks on libraries by the federal government. “Libraries are very important to us across the board, between the academic side of the business and our children’s side of the business.” Rice noted that Julianne Moore’s picture book Freckleface Strawberry, published by Bloomsbury’s children’s division in 2007, was recently banned in schools run by the Department of Defense—and saw a sales bump as a result. Six books by Maas were also banned in Utah schools.
The best thing the publisher can do for librarians, Barmash said, is to continue investing in and promoting books it believes in, and to not allow political pressures to shape its list. Which is to say, to stay the course—a course that has, incidentally, also proven incredibly lucrative for Bloomsbury’s stateside arm. As shifting political and technological winds continue to reshape the publishing landscape, it’s difficult to predict any one publisher’s future. But after several years of exponential growth, all eyes on both sides of the Atlantic should be on Bloomsbury USA.
