Because of digital initiatives plus a strong listing of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher continues to grow its business, despite increasing competition from the outside traditional publishing.
Even as listen to Kogan Page’s leadership today about the rights landscape on this independent house’s business and management specialty, we also have several titles the company is presenting for rights sales. You’ll find those following this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is becoming Kogan Page‘s most efficient rights territory, because the UK publisher marks its 50th anniversary.
Founded by Philip Kogan in 1967, they have remained independent throughout its half-century, and it’s run today by Philip’s daughter Helen Kogan, who’s md.
The organization recently made industry headlines with all the timely buying of two cyber-attack titles, announced inside the same week because the global ransomware attack. These two titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the planet is by former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and can glance at the dramatic inside stories of some of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks like the Clinton election campaign along with recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is by Richard Benham with the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and can, in accordance with promotional copy, offer “vital help with how to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security tactic to assist in preventing the trillions of dollars which are lost globally each year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how exactly the company has were able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and the way the field of Cheap Business Books publishing is changing.
‘Discoverable Anywhere in the World’
Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, how’s business?
Helen Kogan: We’re having a great year. We’re almost following our financial year and we’re seeing double-digit growth across all revenue streams. We’ve also won two transformational publishing contracts with all the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development as well as the Chartered Institute of Banking either way academic and professional development titles.
We’re about to launch a searchable digital platform for B2B customers and we’re also about to launch our first web based courses. It’s been an extremely exciting breakthrough year following four years of refocus and progression of our value proposition.
PP: Is there a particular focus on your rights activity?
HK: The expansion and additional increase of Beijing Book Fair has become particularly best for us, as well as the sale of Chinese rights has become our most successful territory.
However, we now have our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just limited to our very popular general business titles. We’ve had success with many in our more specialist titles too, in the field of logistics and human resources.
We’ve forever been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being The united states, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Australia, India, and China.
We have offices in america and India plus a wide network of agents globally. We’re fortunate to share in English-the international language of business-and that business and management is a global subject. We’ve really taken advantage of global supply chains in recent times and, through the progression of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, will have the great power to make our titles discoverable all over the world.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: Which are the main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: A major issue is that we’re now encompassed by content producers.
It’s specifically traditional publishers that disseminate business content, and it’s a really crowded marketplace. Coaches, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies a few of the serious non-traditional competition we must think about. However, we’ve spent the very last 36 months defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we still need a powerful and competitive business with significant chance of further growth.
PP: The amount of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge needs to be free’ camp can be quite persuasive. Can it create an atmosphere where students will be more unwilling to pay for content?
HK: I believe it’s difficult to persuade students to cover content when they’ve been employed to ‘free’. Really need the educational institutes to support us on this also to make case that following the queue is definitely an author who may have come up with book and will be compensated accordingly.
Up to “free” is a challenge I additionally feel that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re investigating the way you may offer a more three-dimensional and interactive experience in the long run to take on changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page were able to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those ideas and even more.
PP: How many employees do you have and what’s your turnover?
HK: We have 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.6 million) but in the subsequent financial year this may grow to in excess of ?5.5 million (US$7.2 million) through organic growth as well as the inclusion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We had to consider popular on our top line over the last couple of years even as we refocused portion of our activity on specialist areas but this year we’re seeing the fruits of the work and have a much 12-percent growth.
Benefitting Coming from a Weak Pound
PP: What effect think Brexit may have?
HK: It’s tough to say now. We will need to hope that individuals won’t experience tariffs as this will clearly possess some impact. Costs of materials are often a problem and we’ll need to keep an eye on this. We hold English-language world and digital rights to the vast majority of our list and this should mitigate the need to take on US editions in Europe (an evergrowing concern amongst other publishers).
I hope that sanity will prevail as well as the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ to certainly remain in this country will be dealt with swiftly instead of utilizing it as being a bargaining chip.
Around the plus side, we’ve certainly benefited from the weakness with the pound up against the dollar.
PP: Where would you sell the majority of your books?
HK: Seventy percent in our sales still go through the traditional supply chain-bookshops, online retailers, wholesalers, and the like. However, our Site sales are growing and that we have a thriving B2B sales activity for member organizations, author networks, and corporates.
PP: What’s the split between digital and print within your business?
HK: Digital makes up about 25 percent of revenue with all the balance of the being delivered from digital licensing to academic library suppliers, aggregators, and corporate content suppliers. Our ebook business has stayed fairly stable at approximately 8 percent of overall revenue.
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