Chapter 3: Macmillan Today

Macmillan is one of the largest and best known international publishers in the world. It is characterised by high-quality academic and scholarly, educational, fiction and non-fiction publishing in many forms: from STM and social science journals to serious non-fiction and literary fiction; from educational course materials and dictionaries to college textbooks, academic monographs and reference.

Macmillan operates in over seventy countries. The diversity and relative autonomy of the individual companies within the group ensures a vibrancy and local relevance to its publishing in all markets.

A privately-owned company (once owned by the Macmillan family it is now wholly owned by the Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a German family company), one of Macmillan’s strengths is its ability to focus on organic development and investment for the long term. Macmillan prides itself on a willingness to innovate and on employing people with the creative and business sense to develop and implement new ideas. Hence, for example, in recent years it has been able to develop ambitious online educational resources - such as the Macmillan English Campus – and to invest in growing its list of scientific journals ambitiously, extending the Nature philosophy and brand to a number of new ventures.

Macmillan is particularly unusual in the publishing world in its commitment to service. It is one of the only large publishing groups that serves third party clients and its own companies with services including typesetting and data capture, web design and development in India, print sourcing facilities in the Far East, and warehousing and fulfilment in the UK, USA and Australia.  Its clients include many other publishers, from Reed Elsevier through Bloomsbury to Yellow Pages.

Internationally, the group consists of five main operational units:

• Nature Publishing Group (NPG): scientific, technical and medical journals and reference
• Palgrave Macmillan: academic publishing in Humanities, Social Sciences and Business
• Pan Macmillan: fiction and non-fiction for adults and children
• Macmillan Education: English Language Teaching and general curriculum learning materials for international markets
• Publishing Services: book and journal order fulfilment, warehousing and distribution, printing and electronic production, web development and information processing

In the USA, the US activities of Macmillan and Holtzbrinck in the fields of literature and non-fiction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt, St Martin’s Press, Tor Books, Picador, Audio Renaissance) and college publishing (Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group) have been brought together under the umbrella of  Holtzbrinck Publishers.

Chapter 4: Present Ownership >