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Shares in Bloomsbury Publishing hit a record on Wednesday as the group best known for backing JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series hailed fantasy author Sarah J Maas as a “publishing phenomenon” helping to turbocharge its sales and profits.
The London-headquartered group raised its profit outlook for the second time in three months due to soaring demand for its fantasy novels, led by those authored by Maas, forecasting annual earnings “significantly ahead” of market expectations.
Bloomsbury said the consensus market expectation for the year ending February 29 was for revenue of about £291mn, and for profit before tax and highlighted items to be £37.2mn. The group will report results in May.
“Sarah J Maas is a publishing phenomenon,” said chief executive Nigel Newton. “We are very fortunate to have signed her up with her first book 13 years ago.”
Maas’s most recent novel which was published last month, House of Flame and Shadow, has topped the charts across the UK, US and Australia, while boosting demand for the previous 15 books in her series, the publisher said.
Bloomsbury said it had contracted the bestselling author for six more books, expecting her audience to grow further on the back of “word of mouth recommendations”, particularly by TikTok and Instagram book bloggers.
BookTok — the TikTok content sub-genre for book reviews — is shaping the publishing industry “more than you could imagine”, said Newton.
“It plays a huge role in the genres of publishing that its users are interested in”, he said. “It is not driving sales of thousand-page-long works of history, but it’s an absolute phenomenon in fiction”.
The group — which also publishes Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Susanna Clarke and popular comic book writer Alan Moore — said it was investing further into the fantasy genre, which has grown increasingly popular among UK audiences in recent years.
The publisher also remarked on the growing demand for its digital academic resources, which universities pivoted towards at the outset of the pandemic and have continued to subscribe to since.
Bloomsbury’s shares were up almost 9 per cent following the trading update on Wednesday, hitting an all-time high of 535p. Their value has risen more than 130 per cent in the past five years.
Analysts at Investec said on Wednesday they believe the business is “fundamentally undervalued”, given the “resilient, accelerating growth [it] can deliver over time”. They now expect profit before tax for the year to be 31 per cent higher, at £48.1mn, with forecast revenue at £329.3mn.
