Thanks to digital initiatives plus a strong report on titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher keeps growing its business, despite increasing competition externally traditional publishing.
Even as hear from Kogan Page’s leadership today about the rights landscape within this independent house’s business and management specialty, the ways to access several titles the company 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 efficient rights territory, as 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 using the timely purchase of two cyber-attack titles, announced from the same week as the global ransomware attack. Those two titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the entire world is actually former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and will consider the dramatic inside stories of a few 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, as outlined by promotional copy, offer “vital guidance on how you can evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security tactic to help alleviate problems with the trillions of dollars which are lost globally each and every year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how exactly the company has been able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and how the joy of Best Business Books publishing is evolving.
‘Discoverable Any place in 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 after 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 along with 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 web based courses. It’s been an extremely exciting breakthrough year following four years of refocus and progression of our value proposition.
PP: Exactly what is the particular focus on your rights activity?
HK: The expansion and further growth of Beijing Book Fair has been particularly beneficial to us, along with the sale of Chinese rights has become 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 some of our own more specialist titles too, in the area of logistics and hours.
We’ve been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the very center East, Australia, India, and China.
We have offices in america and India plus a wide network of agents globally. We’re fortunate to publish in English-the international language of business-and that business and management is a global subject. We’ve really taken advantage of global supply chains lately and, through the progression of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, are in possession of the extraordinary capacity to make our titles discoverable from any location.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: What are the main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: A major dilemma is that we’re now flanked by content producers.
It’s no longer just traditional publishers that disseminate business content, and it’s an incredibly crowded marketplace. Coaches, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies a few of the serious non-traditional competition we must think about. However, we’ve spent the past several years defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we still have a compelling and competitive business with significant opportunity for further growth.
PP: The amount of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge ought to be free’ camp can be very persuasive. Can it create an environment through which students will be more reluctant to purchase content?
HK: I do believe it’s difficult to persuade students to cover content when they’ve been employed to ‘free’. Really require educational institutes to aid us within this also to make case that after the fishing line is an author who may have come up with book and may be compensated accordingly.
Up to “free” is a challenge I also think that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re considering the way we can offer a more three-dimensional and interactive experience of the longer term to compete with changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page been able to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those activities and much more.
PP: How many personnel 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 in the following financial year this may grow to over ?5.5 million (US$7.2 million) through organic growth along with the inclusion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We had to consider a success on the top line over the last number of years even as we refocused section of our activity on specialist areas however year we’re seeing the fruits of the work and have a much 12-percent growth.
Benefitting Coming from a Weak Pound
PP: What effect do you consider Brexit may have?
HK: It’s challenging to say at this point. We must hope that we won’t have to endure tariffs because this will clearly have some impact. Costs of materials can also be a problem and we’ll should monitor this. We hold English-language world and digital rights on the majority of our list so this should mitigate needing to compete with US editions in Europe (an expanding concern amongst other publishers).
Hopefully sanity will prevail along with the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ to stay in america will be managed swiftly instead of utilizing it as a bargaining chip.
About the plus side, we’ve certainly taken advantage of the weakness of the pound against the dollar.
PP: Where do you sell the majority of your books?
HK: 70 % of our own sales still go through the traditional supply chain-bookshops, trusted online stores, wholesalers, etc. However, our Website sales are growing and we use a thriving B2B sales activity for member organizations, author networks, and corporates.
PP: What’s the split between digital and print inside your business?
HK: Digital accounts for 25 % of revenue using the balance on this being delivered from digital licensing to academic library suppliers, aggregators, and company content suppliers. Our ebook business has stayed fairly stable at approximately 8 percent of overall revenue.
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