Thanks to digital initiatives plus a strong listing of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher is growing its business, despite increasing competition external to traditional publishing.
Once we listen to Kogan Page’s leadership today about the rights landscape in this independent house’s business and management specialty, we’ve got several titles the corporation is presenting for rights sales. You will find those following this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is now Kogan Page‘s best rights territory, since 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 corporation recently made industry headlines together with the timely acquisition of two cyber-attack titles, announced in the same week since the global ransomware attack. Both of these titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the World is by former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and definately will go through 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 from the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and definately will, as outlined by promotional copy, offer “vital tips on how to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security tactic to help prevent the trillions of dollars that are lost globally every year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how the corporation has been able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and exactly how the world of Business Books publishing is beginning to change.
‘Discoverable Any place in the World’
Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, bed not the culprit business?
Helen Kogan: We’re using 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 together with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and the Chartered Institute of Banking either way academic and professional development titles.
We’re going to launch a searchable digital platform for B2B customers and we’re also going to launch our first web based classes. It’s been an incredibly exciting breakthrough year following 4 years of refocus and development of our value proposition.
PP: It is possible to particular focus to your rights activity?
HK: The growth and additional expansion of Beijing Book Fair may be particularly great for us, and the sale of Chinese rights has become our best territory.
However, we’ve our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just confined to our very popular general business titles. We’ve had success by incorporating individuals more specialist titles too, in logistics and recruiting.
We’ve forever been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the very center East, Australia, India, and China.
We have offices in the united states 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 cheated global supply chains lately and, through the development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, are in possession of the fantastic power to make our titles discoverable anywhere in the world.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: Which are the main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: A serious dilemma is that we’re now surrounded by content producers.
It’s no longer just traditional publishers that disseminate business content, and it’s an incredibly crowded marketplace. Training companies, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies some of the serious non-traditional competition we have to consider. However, we’ve spent the past 36 months defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we still need a powerful and competitive business with significant potential for 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 in which students tend to be hesitant to pay for content?
HK: I do think it’s very difficult to persuade students to fund content when they’ve been employed to ‘free’. We need the educational institutes to aid us in this also to result in the case that following the fishing line is definitely an author who’s came up with book and may be compensated accordingly.
Just as much as “free” is a challenge I also think that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re looking at the way you may offer a much more three-dimensional and interactive experience in the long run to tackle changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page been able to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those actions and much more.
PP: What number of workers do you have and what’s your turnover?
HK: We have 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.6 000 0000) in another financial year this will grow close to ?5.5 million (US$7.2 million) through organic growth and the inclusion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We’d to look at a winner on our top line over the last few years once we refocused part of our activity on specialist areas however this year we’re seeing the fruits of that work and expect to have 12-percent growth.
Benefitting Coming from a Weak Pound
PP: What effect do you consider Brexit may have?
HK: It’s difficult to say now. We must hope that we won’t have to endure tariffs since this will clearly incorporate some impact. Costs of materials are often an issue and we’ll have to keep close track of this. We hold English-language world and digital rights for the majority of our list and this should mitigate the need to tackle US editions in Europe (an increasing concern amongst other publishers).
Hopefully sanity will prevail and the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ to certainly remain in this country will probably be handled swiftly instead of utilizing it as being a bargaining chip.
On the plus side, we’ve certainly took advantage of the weakness from the pound against the dollar.
PP: Where can you sell the majority of your books?
HK: 70 percent individuals sales still go through the traditional supply chain-bookshops, online stores, wholesalers, etc. However, our Site sales are increasing so we have 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 is the reason 25 % of revenue together with the balance with this being delivered from digital licensing to academic library suppliers, aggregators, and company content suppliers. Our ebook business has stayed fairly stable at about 8 percent of overall revenue.
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