Macmillan Press

The Macmillan logo as displayed on their website.

The Macmillan Publishing House:

The Macmillan Publishing House is a very well known press, and one of the Big Five that many traditionally published authors go to today. They have published many well known books and have received significant acclaim and fame among the publishing community.

Mission and History: Macmillan’s mission is to promote literacy in youth, maintain access to all kinds of books, banned or otherwise, and be an environmentally sustainable press. They combat censorship by supporting organizations such as the “National Coalition Against Censorship” and “Unite Against Book Bans”. They also support organizations like “The Soho Center”, the “National Book Foundation”, “Lambda Literacy”, and “Words Without Borders”, which are groups dedicated to literacy and community engagement and development. The press was founded by Daniel and Alexander Macmillan in 1843 and has since expanded to become an international publishing house with offices all over the world and a total of ten imprints. This was largely due to the fact that when former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan became Chairman, he chose to focus on the literacy and educational value present in Macmillan, and with his leadership, Macmillan established themselves as a global press. The press gained popularity publishing authors such as Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, and to this day remains one of the largest presses that authors seek out, and one of the Big Five Publishers.

Ownership and Structure: Macmillan press contains the publishers Celadon Books, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Flatiron Books, Henry Holt, Macmillan Audio, Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, the St. Martin’s Publishing Group, and the Tor Publishing Group, to name a few.

Notable Titles and Authors: Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Upton Sinclair, Leigh Bardugo, and Sarah J Maas. Titles include Six of Crows, Court of Thorns and Roses, The Lunar Chronicles, and many more.

Financial Information: According to the profile on D&B Hoovers, Macmillan has a total sales of 33.24 million for the domestic total and 1.96 billion for the Global Ultimate Total. Clearly, Macmillan publishing is doing extremely well and making a great deal of profit off of books they are publishing. Therefore they are very likely to continue thriving and growing well into the future of the publishing industry.

Audience/Community: The audience for Macmillan can be all ages, but it seems to be particularly geared towards teen and young adult readers, as the website has ways to search specifically for books for those ages. The readers who consume media published by Macmillan are also likely fans of nonfiction, mystery, or science fiction, as those are the pinned genres on Macmillan’s site. They also publish books in other genres such as bios and memoirs, children’s literature, comics, fantasy, games, horror, literary fiction, mystery, nonfiction, politics, romance, science fiction, self-help, and YA books. This makes it so that a large variety of both readers and writers come to Macmillan, either to find quality books or to be published. Because of this wide range of genres and ages, this publishing house has a large reach and influence over the population of readers, especially since it is a Big Five publishing house.