Macmillan’s Jon Yaged spoke to the strength of Macmillan’s sales—particularly in audio—and the company’s efforts to combat nationwide book bans on a recent episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi’s show profiling some of the business world’s top execs.
Salvi opened the interview with questions about Yaged’s journey into the C-suite and his leadership style at Macmillan, but the conversation’s center of gravity quickly shifted to the state of publishing. “There's been people talking about the demise of publishing for hundreds of years,” Yaged said, “and [yet] we continue to grow industrywide.”
Macmillan has been posting steady growth since Yaged was named CEO in 2022. Yaged told Salvi that 2024 was their “best year in terms of revenue and profit,” with sales up 18% from the previous year. Yaged attributed some of this success to Macmillan’s responsiveness to industry trends—particularly the rapid growth in their audio sales, up to some 15% of the total.
For the most part, however, Yaged said that Macmillan’s recent results are representative of industry-wide trends. “People still love reading. It's a very accessible form, it’s still relatively inexpensive. You can learn a lot. It's portable. It doesn't need a battery, unless you have an e-book,” he said. “There's a lot of good things about books, and the format is still resonating with people.” Yaged said that 65% of Macmillan’s sales last year came from print books, while 20% came from e-books.
When asked about other industry trends, Yaged briefly noted the well-documented genre boom—particularly romantasy—and the growing popularity of self-publishing as a legitimate path to authorship. Self-publishing has “sort of come out from under the shadows,” he said. “For a lot of people, it gives them a lot of flexibility; a lot of authors start in self-publishing and find their way to traditional publishing.”
Despite his general optimism about the industry, Yaged didn’t neglect the topic of book bans, of which he has been an outspoken critic. Macmillan has been active in lobbying and litigation against nationwide attempts to block books with LGBTQ+ and racial content from schools and library shelves—attempts which Yaged called “an organized playbook” for the right to “get their ideological views across.” While specific laws are easily targeted, Yaged pointed to the creep of local policies and authoritarian community norms as a particularly worrying threat.
Yaged went on to say that, though book bans themselves are important, they make up only a small portion of the threats to free expression the country has faced, particularly since the start of the second Trump administration. “Things don't even rise up to an area where you'll see it until your author or someone from the community contacts a publisher and says, ‘Hey, do you know your book is being banned?’” Yaged said. “There's so much noise. It’s a classic authoritarian regime format—to give people so much noise that they can’t focus on the things that really matter.”
Yaged said that Macmillan was committed to proactive lobbying for library funding, and doing what it can to hold representatives accountable. “They’re driven by some special interests and some money and some misinformation, and I do think that that's going to change,” he said. “We're going to get to keep shining light on all this nonsense.”
What really matters for Yaged—and for Macmillan—has been and will continue to be books. Reading is “foundational for humanity,” he told Salvi. “It’s fundamental for democracy and I don’t think you can overstate it.” While he plans to keep up with trends in AI and other technologies that could impact the industry, Yaged said that Macmillan is intent on continuing to “maximize what we do best: working with creators, getting them to be as creative as possible, and making sure as many people know about their books.”
