Thanks to digital initiatives along with a strong listing of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher is growing its business, despite increasing competition externally traditional publishing.
Even as we listen to Kogan Page’s leadership today regarding the rights landscape in this independent house’s business and management specialty, we have several titles the business is presenting for rights sales. You’ll find those after this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is becoming Kogan Page‘s most productive rights territory, since the UK publisher marks its 50th anniversary.
Founded by Philip Kogan in 1967, it’s remained independent throughout its half-century, and it’s run today by Philip’s daughter Helen Kogan, who’s managing director.
The business recently made industry headlines together with the timely purchase of two cyber-attack titles, announced within the same week since the global ransomware attack. Both of these titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the entire world is actually former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and can consider the dramatic inside stories of many of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks such as Clinton election campaign in addition to recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is actually Richard Benham with the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and can, as outlined by promotional copy, offer “vital guidance on how to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security tactic to assist in preventing the trillions of dollars which can be lost globally each year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan regarding how the business has were able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and the way the world of Cheap Business Books publishing is changing.
‘Discoverable Anywhere in the World’
Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, bed not the culprit business?
Helen Kogan: We’re creating a great year. We’re almost after our financial year and we’re seeing double-digit growth across all revenue streams. We’ve also won two transformational publishing contracts together with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and the Chartered Institute of Banking both for academic and professional development titles.
We’re gonna launch a searchable digital platform for B2B customers and we’re also gonna launch our first web based classes. It’s been an extremely exciting breakthrough year following four years of refocus and continuing development of our value proposition.
PP: Exactly what is the particular focus for your rights activity?
HK: The development and additional growth of Beijing Book Fair may be particularly beneficial to us, and the sale of Chinese rights is our best territory.
However, we now have our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just restricted to our more popular general business titles. We’ve had success with some in our more specialist titles too, in logistics and human resources.
We’ve always been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the center East, Australia, India, and China.
We have offices in america and India along with a wide network of agents globally. We’re fortunate to share in English-the international language of business-and that business and management is often a global subject. We’ve really cheated global supply chains in recent times and, over the continuing development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, have the truly great capability to make our titles discoverable around the globe.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: What are 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 very crowded marketplace. Training companies, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies a few of the intense non-traditional competition we should instead think of. However, we’ve spent the last 36 months defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we still need an engaging and competitive business with significant potential for further growth.
PP: How much of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge ought to be free’ camp can be very persuasive. Will it create a breeding ground in which students tend to be more hesitant to buy content?
HK: I do think it’s tough to persuade students to purchase content when they’ve been employed to ‘free’. We really require educational institutes to support us in this also to make the case that after the fishing line is surely an author who has made the book and really should be compensated accordingly.
Up to “free” is often a challenge I also feel that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re considering the way we can provide a much more three-dimensional and interactive experience of the long run to compete with changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page were able to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those actions plus much more.
PP: The number of workers are there and what’s your turnover?
HK: We have 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.6 000 0000) but also in another financial year this will grow to around ?5.5 million (US$7.2 million) through organic growth and the inclusion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We had to consider popular on our top line over the last several years even as refocused portion of our activity on specialist areas however year we’re seeing the fruits of these work and have a much 12-percent growth.
Benefitting From a Weak Pound
PP: What effect do you consider Brexit may have?
HK: It’s hard to say at this time. We have to hope that individuals won’t experience tariffs since this will clearly have some impact. Costs of materials are often an issue and we’ll must keep close track of this. We hold English-language world and digital rights towards the majority of our list which means this should mitigate the need to compete with US editions in Europe (an evergrowing concern amongst other publishers).
Hopefully sanity will prevail and the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ to remain in america will be dealt with swiftly rather than using it being a bargaining chip.
About the plus side, we’ve certainly took advantage of the weakness with the pound from the dollar.
PP: Where do you sell most of your books?
HK: 70 percent in our sales still feel the traditional supply chain-bookshops, online retailers, wholesalers, etc. However, our Internet site sales are increasing 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 in your business?
HK: Digital makes up about A quarter of revenue together with the balance of this being delivered from digital licensing to academic library suppliers, aggregators, and corporate content suppliers. Our ebook business has stayed fairly stable around 8 percent of overall revenue.
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