Carlsen Verlag is a subsidiary of the homonymous Danish publishing house which in turn belongs to the Swedish media company Bonnier.

The publisher's program focuses on books for children, i.e. Harry Potter, Rugrats, Naruto, Twilight, and The Adventures of Tintin.

The program was expanded to include traditional Franco-Belgian series such as Alix, Blake and Mortimer, Valerian and Veronique, and The Smurfs.

Under lecturer Eckart Sackmann the Edition ComicArt was founded in the early 1980s, a type of comic meant for mature readers.

Carlsen took a shot at publishing booklets series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Godzilla und The X-Files.

Knigge's successor was Joachim Kaps, whose time triggered a manga-boom with the publication of the Dragonball manga with Japanese reading format (right-to-left).

The Danish Carlsen Verlag, from which the publisher had originally come, belonged to Bonnier earlier as well, and has gotten more income since becoming part of the Egmont Foundation in 2007.

Barbara König took over the leadership of the sub-publisher, who had taken responsibility of the narratival hard cover program in children's and young adult literature.

At the end of September 2017, Carlsen Verlag announced that they were discontinuing the *Königskinder* due to the sales figures; after that 42 titles were released in Spring 2018.

Carlsen Verlag absorbed Lappan Publishing in January 2015, which had previously belonged to Salzer Holding GmbH.

In 2021, Carlsen founded the label Hayabusa, focusing on the Boys Love genre as well as queer stories, with young women as the target group.

On March 5, 2021, Carlsen Verlag apologized for "how readers' feelings were hurt by the phrasing", stopping the sales of the books with immediate effects.