Jon Yaged to succeed Don Weisberg as Macmillan CEO

NEW YORK -- The CEO of Macmillan Publishers, Don Weisberg, will step down at the end of the year. Jon Yaged, currently the company's president, will succeed him.

"I can, without hesitation, say that there could be no better time for me to step aside," Weisberg, 67, said in a statement Tuesday. “We are coming off two record-breaking years of unprecedented growth and profit; we have improved every facet of our operation at a time when the world has faced an existential crisis, and we have done it with grace, intelligence, and dedication.”

Weisberg has been in publishing for more than 40 years, starting at Bantam in 1980. He joined Macmillan as president in 2016 and has been CEO since early 2021, presiding the entire time during the pandemic. Macmillan authors range from the prize-winning novelists Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen to Oprah Winfrey and “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff. Imprints at Macmillan, owned by the German media company Holtzbrinck, include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Flatiron Books and St. Martin's Press.

Yaged, 52, joined Macmillan in 2011 as president of Macmillan Children's Publishing Group and was promoted to president of the overall trade division a decade later.

“We will retain the individual identities among our publishers that unquestionably distinguish us from our competitors,” Yaged said in a statement. “We will continue to build upon our progress to make our staff, the books we publish, and the authors we work with more reflective of our society. We will explore new tactics and use new technology to increase discoverability of the books we publish.”