Cookery titles lead Bloomsbury to a year of sizzling book sales
PUBLISHING house Bloomsbury said strong demand for its cookery, adult fiction and non-fiction books boosted revenues 11 per cent last year to £109.5m.
Titles such as Tom Kerridge’s Proper Pub Food and Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season led to what chief executive Nigel Newton described as a “spectacular year”.
Despite the sales boom, profits slipped slightly to £9.5m.
Excluding one-off charges and acquisition costs, earnings climbed by four per cent to £13m.
“We have continued to grasp the opportunities offered by the digital revolution to build a growing profitable, sustainable and balanced twenty-first century publishing business,” said Newton in a statement yesterday.
“We enter 2014-15 with a strong publishing programme including new titles from Tom Kerridge and Paul Hollywood as well as a year-long Harry Potter marketing campaign to promote the newly illustrated series.”
Bloomsbury’s stock fell 2.1 per cent to 161.5p following the results yesterday.