Because of digital initiatives as well as a strong listing of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher is increasing its business, despite increasing competition from outside traditional publishing.
Even as hear from Kogan Page’s leadership today about the rights landscape with this independent house’s business and management specialty, we’ve got several titles the organization is presenting for rights sales. You can find those at the end of this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is becoming Kogan Page‘s best rights territory, as the UK publisher marks its 50th anniversary.
Founded by Philip Kogan in 1967, it has remained independent throughout its half-century, and it’s run today by Philip’s daughter Helen Kogan, who’s md.
The company recently made industry headlines with the timely purchase of two cyber-attack titles, announced inside the same week as the global ransomware attack. Those two titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the globe is actually former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and will consider the dramatic inside stories of a number of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks such as Clinton election campaign along with recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is actually Richard Benham of the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and will, according to promotional copy, offer “vital help with how you can evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security technique to help prevent the trillions of dollars which might be lost globally each and every year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan regarding how the organization has managed to remain independent, its current rights activity, and just how the concept of Best Business Books publishing is changing.
‘Discoverable Any place in the World’
Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, bed not the culprit business?
Helen Kogan: We’re developing a great year. We’re almost at the end of our financial year and we’re seeing double-digit growth across all revenue streams. We’ve also won two transformational publishing contracts with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and also the Chartered Institute of Banking for academic and professional development titles.
We’re planning to launch a searchable digital platform for B2B customers and we’re also planning to launch our first online courses. It’s been an extremely exciting breakthrough year following 4 years of refocus and continuing development of our value proposition.
PP: Is there a particular focus in your rights activity?
HK: The expansion and further growth of Beijing Book Fair continues to be particularly best for us, and also the sale of Chinese rights is now our most successful territory.
However, we’ve our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just confined to our popular general business titles. We’ve had success by incorporating of our more specialist titles too, in logistics and recruiting.
We’ve always been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Australia, India, and China.
We now have offices in the united states and India as well as a wide network of agents globally. We’re fortunate to write in English-the international language of business-and that business and management is often a global subject. We’ve really rooked global supply chains recently and, with the continuing development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, will have the great capacity to make our titles discoverable from any location.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: What are main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: An important dilemma is that we’re now encompassed by content producers.
It’s no longer just traditional publishers that disseminate business content, and it’s a really crowded marketplace. Training companies, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies are a few of the intense non-traditional competition we should instead think of. However, we’ve spent the final three years defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we have a persuasive and competitive business with significant opportunity for further growth.
PP: How much of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge must be free’ camp can be quite persuasive. Should it create a place in which students tend to be more reluctant to pay for content?
HK: I do believe it’s hard to persuade students to pay for content when they’ve been utilized to ‘free’. Really require educational institutes to support us with this also to make the case that at the end of the fishing line is surely an author that has come up with book and will be compensated accordingly.
Around “free” is often a challenge I additionally believe that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re considering how we may offer a more three-dimensional and interactive experience of the near future to take on changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page managed to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those activities plus much more.
PP: The amount of employees are you experiencing and what’s your turnover?
HK: We now have 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.Six million) in the next financial year this will likely grow to in excess of ?5.5 million (US$7.Two million) through organic growth and also the inclusion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We had to consider popular on our top line during the last several years even as we refocused section of our activity on specialist areas however this year we’re seeing the fruits of the work and have 12-percent growth.
Benefitting Coming from a Weak Pound
PP: What effect do you think Brexit could have?
HK: It’s hard to say at this time. We have to hope that people won’t experience tariffs because this will clearly have some impact. Costs of materials can also be an issue and we’ll must keep an eye on this. We hold English-language world and digital rights to the vast majority of our list and this should mitigate having to take on US editions in Europe (an expanding concern amongst other publishers).
Hopefully sanity will prevail and also the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ to certainly remain in the united states will be dealt with swiftly rather than using it like a bargaining chip.
For the plus side, we’ve certainly taken advantage of the weakness of the pound contrary to the dollar.
PP: Where would you sell your main books?
HK: 70 % of our sales still glance at the traditional supply chain-bookshops, trusted online stores, wholesalers, and so on. However, our Site sales are growing and now we possess 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 accounts for 25 % of revenue with the balance on this being delivered from digital licensing to academic library suppliers, aggregators, and corporate content suppliers. Our ebook business has stayed fairly stable at about 8 percent of overall revenue.
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