As a result of digital initiatives plus a strong set of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher continues to grow its business, despite increasing competition from outside traditional publishing.
Even as hear from Kogan Page’s leadership today regarding the rights landscape on this independent house’s business and management specialty, we have several titles the corporation is presenting for rights sales. You can find those at the conclusion of this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is becoming Kogan Page‘s best rights territory, because 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 managing director.
The business recently made industry headlines with the timely buying of two cyber-attack titles, announced inside the same week because global ransomware attack. Both of these titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the entire world is by former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and will go through the dramatic inside stories of a few of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks including the Clinton election campaign along with recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is by Richard Benham in the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and will, based on promotional copy, offer “vital tips on the best way to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security process to assist in preventing the trillions of dollars which are lost globally each year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how the corporation has was able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and the way the field of Best 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 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 with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development along with the Chartered Institute of Banking for both 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 4 years of refocus and continuing development of our value proposition.
PP: Is there a particular focus for your rights activity?
HK: The growth and additional expansion of Beijing Book Fair has become particularly beneficial to us, along with the sale of Chinese rights is our greatest territory.
However, we now have our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just limited to our popular general business titles. We’ve had success with many of our own more specialist titles too, in neuro-scientific logistics and recruiting.
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 very center East, Australia, India, and China.
We’ve 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 a global subject. We’ve really rooked global supply chains in recent years and, from the continuing development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, will have the great ability to make our titles discoverable around the globe.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: What are the main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: A serious issue is that we’re now in the middle of content producers.
It’s merely traditional publishers that disseminate business content, and it’s an incredibly crowded marketplace. Training companies, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies a few of the serious non-traditional competition we must take into consideration. However, we’ve spent the final several years defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we have a powerful and competitive business with significant chance for further growth.
PP: How much of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge ought to be free’ camp can be quite persuasive. Can it create a breeding ground in which students tend to be reluctant to pay for content?
HK: I believe it’s tough to persuade students to fund content when they’ve been utilized to ‘free’. Really require the educational institutes to aid us on this also to make the case that at the conclusion of the fishing line is surely an author who has created the book and should be compensated accordingly.
Up to “free” is a challenge I also feel that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re investigating how we may offer a much more three-dimensional and interactive experience in the longer term to tackle changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page was able to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those activities and much more.
PP: The number of staff members are you experiencing and what’s your turnover?
HK: We’ve 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 along with the addition of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. There were to adopt popular on our top line in the last number of years even as refocused portion of our activity on specialist areas however year we’re seeing the fruits of the work and have a much 12-percent growth.
Benefitting From a Weak Pound
PP: What effect you think Brexit could have?
HK: It’s hard to say at this point. We need to hope that people won’t have to deal with tariffs as this will clearly involve some impact. Costs of materials are often an issue and we’ll must watch this. We hold English-language world and digital rights towards the vast majority of our list which means this should mitigate being forced to tackle US editions in Europe (an expanding concern amongst other publishers).
I hope that sanity will prevail along with the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ directly to live in this country will probably be dealt with swiftly instead of making use of it being a bargaining chip.
Around the plus side, we’ve certainly taken advantage of the weakness in the pound against the dollar.
PP: Where does one sell the majority of your books?
HK: 70 percent of our own sales still go through the traditional supply chain-bookshops, online stores, wholesalers, and the like. However, our Internet site sales are increasing and we use 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 is the reason 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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