Due to digital initiatives plus a strong list of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher keeps growing its business, despite increasing competition external to traditional publishing.
Once we hear from Kogan Page’s leadership today concerning the rights landscape in this independent house’s business and management specialty, we have several titles the corporation is presenting for rights sales. You can find those after this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is becoming Kogan Page‘s best rights territory, as 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 managing director.
The corporation recently made industry headlines with all the timely purchase of two cyber-attack titles, announced in the same week as the global ransomware attack. Both of these titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the globe is as simple as former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and will 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 as simple as Richard Benham with the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and will, as outlined by promotional copy, offer “vital help with how to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security process to aid the prevention of the trillions of dollars that are lost globally each year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how the corporation has been able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and how the world of Cheap Business Books publishing is evolving.
‘Discoverable 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 with all the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development along with the Chartered Institute of Banking both for academic and professional development titles.
We’re about to launch a searchable digital platform for B2B customers and we’re also about to launch our first web based classes. It’s been a really 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 expansion and further development of Beijing Book Fair has become particularly good for us, along with the sale of Chinese rights has become our greatest territory.
However, we’ve got 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 some of our own more specialist titles too, in the field of logistics and hours.
We’ve forever 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 now 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 often a global subject. We’ve really cheated global supply chains lately and, from the development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, will have the fantastic ability to make our titles discoverable anywhere in the world.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: What are the main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: A serious dilemma is that we’re now in the middle of 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 are just some of the intense 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 an engaging and competitive business with significant opportunity for further growth.
PP: How much of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge must be free’ camp can be extremely persuasive. Can it create an atmosphere by which students tend to be more reluctant to buy content?
HK: I believe it’s very difficult to persuade students to pay for content when they’ve been utilized to ‘free’. We require the educational institutes to support us in this and to increase the risk for case that after the fishing line is an author who’s created the book and may be compensated accordingly.
Around “free” is often a challenge I additionally believe the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re taking a look at how you will offer a more three-dimensional and interactive experience in the near future 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 plus much more.
PP: The amount of personnel are you experiencing and what’s your turnover?
HK: We now have 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.6 000 0000) but also in the subsequent financial year this may grow to over ?5.5 million (US$7.Two million) through organic growth along with the inclusion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. There were to consider a winner on the top line over the last several years even as refocused portion of our activity on specialist areas but this year we’re seeing the fruits of this work and expect to have 12-percent growth.
Benefitting From the Weak Pound
PP: What effect do you think Brexit may have?
HK: It’s tough to say now. We must 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 have to monitor this. We hold English-language world and digital rights for the majority of our list this should mitigate being forced to compete with 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’ to certainly stay in america will likely be handled swiftly as opposed to utilizing it as being a bargaining chip.
On the plus side, we’ve certainly taken advantage of the weakness with the pound up against the dollar.
PP: Where does one sell most of your books?
HK: Seventy percent of our own sales still feel the traditional supply chain-bookshops, online stores, wholesalers, and so on. However, our Web site sales are increasing and 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 25 percent of revenue with all the balance with this being delivered from digital licensing to academic library suppliers, aggregators, and corporate content suppliers. Our ebook business has stayed fairly stable at approximately 8 percent of overall revenue.
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