Thanks to digital initiatives plus a strong set of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher is increasing its business, despite increasing competition external to traditional publishing.
Once we listen to Kogan Page’s leadership today concerning the rights landscape on this independent house’s business and management specialty, the ways to access several titles the business is presenting for rights sales. You’ll find those at the conclusion of this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is now 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 organization recently made industry headlines using the timely acquisition 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 globe is by former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and can consider the dramatic inside stories of some of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks such as the Clinton election campaign in addition to recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is by Richard Benham with the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and can, based on promotional copy, offer “vital tips on how to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security technique to help prevent the trillions of dollars which are lost globally annually.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how the business has been able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and just how the concept of Busines Books Online publishing is changing.
‘Discoverable Around the World’
Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, how is business?
Helen Kogan: We’re developing a great year. We’re almost at the conclusion of our financial year and we’re seeing double-digit growth across all revenue streams. We’ve also won two transformational publishing contracts using the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and the Chartered Institute of Banking for both 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 web based classes. It’s been an incredibly exciting breakthrough year following four years of refocus and development of our value proposition.
PP: What is the particular focus in your rights activity?
HK: The increase and further expansion of Beijing Book Fair has become particularly best for us, and 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 very popular general business titles. We’ve had success with a few in our more specialist titles too, in 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 center East, Australia, India, and China.
We’ve got offices in the usa 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 really a global subject. We’ve really rooked global supply chains lately and, through the development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, are in possession of the fantastic ability to make our titles discoverable from any location.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: What are main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: A significant problem is that we’re now surrounded by content producers.
It’s specifically traditional publishers that disseminate business content, and it’s an extremely crowded marketplace. Coaches, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies a few of the serious non-traditional competition we should instead think of. However, we’ve spent the past 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: The amount of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge needs to be free’ camp can be very persuasive. Does it create a breeding ground in which students will be more unwilling to purchase content?
HK: I believe it’s tough to persuade students to pay for content when they’ve been employed to ‘free’. We actually require educational institutes to guide us on this and result in the case that at the conclusion of the road can be an author who’s created the book and really should be compensated accordingly.
Around “free” is really a challenge Furthermore, i feel that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re investigating the way we can offer a lot more three-dimensional and interactive experience with the longer term to tackle changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page been able to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those ideas plus much more.
PP: What number of employees do you have and what’s your turnover?
HK: We’ve got 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.6 million) but also in another financial year this will grow to around ?5.5 million (US$7.Two million) through organic growth and the addition of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We’d to adopt a hit on our top line in the last number of years even as we refocused part of our activity on specialist areas but this year we’re seeing the fruits of that work and have a 12-percent growth.
Benefitting From the Weak Pound
PP: What effect think Brexit may have?
HK: It’s difficult to say at this time. We have to hope that people won’t experience tariffs since this will clearly possess some impact. Costs of materials can also be an issue and we’ll should monitor this. We hold English-language world and digital rights for the majority of our list which means this should mitigate being forced to tackle US editions in Europe (a growing concern amongst other publishers).
Hopefully sanity will prevail and the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ to be in this country is going to be dealt with swiftly as an alternative to deploying it as being a bargaining chip.
On the plus side, we’ve certainly took advantage of the weakness with the pound contrary to the dollar.
PP: Where does one sell your main books?
HK: 70 % in our sales still have the traditional supply chain-bookshops, online retailers, wholesalers, and the like. However, our Internet site sales are growing and that we have a very 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 for 25 % of revenue using 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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