The Steve Laube Agency

Recently, a list of the world’s largest publishers was posted by Publishers Weekly. I am reminded again of how large the publishing business really is and how easy it is to forget that fact.

The largest is Thomson Reuters, a Canadian legal and professional publisher with revenue of $6.43 billion.

That’s BILLION with a “b.”

Note this is revenue, not the number of books sold. For a dive into the numbers, read beyond the chart below.

Below is the top ten listed along with their sales revenue.

Rank	Publishing Company	Country	2024 Revenue ($ in millions)	2023 Revenue ($ in millions)
1	Thomson Reuters	US	$6,426	$6,047
2	RELX Group (Reed Elsevier)	UK/NL/US	$6,197	$6,259
3	Bertelsmann	Germany	$6,066	$5,987
4	Pearson	UK	$4,446	$4,681
5	Wolters Kluwer	Netherlands	$4,248	$4,261
6	Hachette Livre (Lagardère Publishing)	France	$2,983	$3,110
7	McGraw-Hill Education (incl. McGraw-Hill Global Education & School Group)	US	$2,100	no data
8	Hitotsubashi Group	Japan	$2,255	$2,255
9	HarperCollins	US	$2,093	$1,979
10	Springer Nature	Germany	$1,918	$2,051

Of the “Big Five” trade publishers we think of in the US, note that Bertelsmann owns Penguin Random House. This includes their evangelical division, PRH Christian Publishing Group, which includes Waterbrook, Multnomah, Image, Forum Books, Ink & Willow, Align Insight, and Waterbrook Children’s.

Hachette Livre owns Grand Central, Little Brown, and the evangelical imprint FaithWords.

HarperCollins (owned by NewCorp) includes Harlequin and the HarperCollins Christian group, which comprises Zondervan and Thomas Nelson.

Simon & Schuster is no longer among those listed, as it is now a privately held company and does not report their numbers publicly.

The other “Big Five” general-market trade publisher, commonly known as Macmillan, is owned by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck (Germany) and was #14 on the list. They do not have an evangelical imprint.

In a recent development, Sourcebooks, an independent publisher, can claim it sells more physical units than Macmillan. Note that these are units sold, not dollars received. Sourcebooks sold 23.8 million books (not dollars) in the first three quarters of 2025. (The math means Sourcebooks sold 86,500 print books per day in the first nine months of 2025.) What sort of ruins the claim that they are part of the “Big Five” is that Sourcebooks is 75% owned by Penguin Random House (see above). But they do operate independently of their main shareholder, handling everything from acquisitions to editorial to distribution to payroll.

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Think about these big dollars for a minute. If a publisher sells $6 billion (US) in a year and the average net sale (the amount received by the publisher, not the retail price) is $15 (US), then that single publisher sold 400 million individual books–a little more than 1.1 million books per day. (I am using the arbitrary $15 revenue per book average to account for the mean between expensive textbooks and inexpensive ebooks, and so we can all “do the math” together.)

Then multiply that across all these publishers and consider how many books are sold worldwide each day. The top 10 on the above list account for over $38 billion in book sales revenue. $38,700,000,000.

In the third quarter of 2025, HarperCollins had to write off $13 million in bad debt due to the closure of a library distributor. That means the distributor had received $13 million worth of books, but was unable to pay for them. Yet, HarperCollins still had a profit of $58 million for the quarter. Not many businesses can absorb a loss of thirteen million dollars and still be profitable. That is how big the big publishers are.

Now consider that not all books are published in English. The scope of the book business is truly exhilarating when you think about it. In the revenue list for publishers ranked 11 to 25, three are based in the UK, three in China, two in Japan, two in Germany, two in the US, one in France, and one in Spain.

All of the books our agency represents are published in English first. Most of the time, translation rights are controlled by the publisher, which then handles the licensing with publishers in other countries. However, there are times when we’ve negotiated to control those foreign translation rights. This means that I have had the privilege of licensing clients’ books in German, French, Korean, Italian, Complex Chinese (Taiwan), Simple Chinese (mainland China), Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Dutch. My office has a full shelf of those books in non-English languages.

Even in English, your books can travel the globe. Authors have told me they have received letters from exotic places where entire villages have read their books.

My point is this: We can forget how small our personal writing and publishing bubble is. Take a moment to cast a much larger vision and pray that what you write can help change the world word-by-word.

 

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