S&S revenues down 13% for third quarter 

Simon & Schuster’s revenues fell by 13% in this year’s third quarter to $307m (£248m) from $353m (£285m) in the same period last year, with c.e.o. Jonathan Karp noting “you can’t be stratospheric forever, but we’re still flying high”.

Operating income was down sharply to $60m (£48.5m) compared to $93m (£75m) a year ago. Karp said at the end of the first nine months of 2023, the company’s profit margin of 24.4% was “excellent”. He attributed the decline in the third quarter to sales of Colleen Hoover titles peaking in the third period of 2022 and called results in the most recent quarter “solid”.

UK results were not broken out, but S&S UK said "multiple Q3 bestsellers contributed to the Children’s division’s ongoing success". The publisher said: “A Top 10 bestseller and Times Children’s Book of the Week for Professor Alice Robert’s first book for children – Wolf Road, the return of global bestselling series Dork Diaries, and finally it’s seven weeks and counting in the YA bestseller list for the unstoppable Tiktok sensation Lauren Roberts whose sizzling romantasy, Powerless, is taking the world by storm.”

It continued: “Highlights across the adult divisions include the It Starts with Us mass market edition, which was an instant number one Sunday Times Bestseller with gross UK sales of 262,000, and Gareth Rubin’s debut novel The Turnglass, which hit the Sunday Times Bestseller list in its first week, and rights have now sold in 13 countries. Killers of The Flower Moon by David Grann has also been building steadily in time for the film tie-in edition. Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson was a Number Two Sunday Times Bestseller and is on track to be the biggest ever export hardback non-fiction title. Rouge by Mona Awad was the 10th bestselling general fiction title published in September and has already outsold every other Mona Awad title in hardback, e-book and audiobook.”

The third quarter release is the last by S&S’s former parent company Paramount Global. This week private equity firm KKR completed its acquisition of S&S. Karp said the transition from Paramount ownership to becoming a private company has gone smoothly, adding not being part of a media conglomerate for the first time since 1975 was “liberating” for S&S. “We are thinking through all the possibilities out there that are available to us [...] We look forward to reinvesting our resources into areas where we see growth opportunities.”

Despite the decline in the third quarter, Karp said he is “revved up” ahead of Christmas. Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me has sold more than 1.27 million copies across all formats in the UK and US in its first week on sale.