Because of digital initiatives plus a strong list of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher is increasing its business, despite increasing competition from outside traditional publishing.
Even as we hear from Kogan Page’s leadership today concerning the rights landscape with this independent house’s business and management specialty, we also have 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 now Kogan Page‘s best rights territory, because the UK publisher marks its 50th anniversary.
Founded by Philip Kogan in 1967, they have remained independent throughout its half-century, and it’s run today by Philip’s daughter Helen Kogan, who’s managing director.
The company recently made industry headlines using the timely buying of two cyber-attack titles, announced from the same week because the global ransomware attack. These two titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the planet is actually former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and definately will glance at the dramatic inside stories of a number of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks such as Clinton election campaign as well as recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is actually Richard Benham from the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and definately will, in accordance with promotional copy, offer “vital help with how you can evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security strategy to assist in preventing the trillions of dollars which are lost globally annually.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how precisely the company has managed to remain independent, its current rights activity, and the way the world of Best Business Books publishing has been evolving.
‘Discoverable Anywhere in the World’
Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, bed not the culprit business?
Helen Kogan: We’re having 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 and also the Chartered Institute of Banking both for 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 courses. It’s been a really 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 development and further growth of Beijing Book Fair has become particularly best for us, and also the sale of Chinese rights is currently our best territory.
However, we’ve got our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just limited to our very popular general business titles. We’ve had success with many of our own more specialist titles too, in neuro-scientific logistics and human resources.
We’ve 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 now have offices in the usa 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 really a global subject. We’ve really cheated global supply chains in recent times and, through the progression of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, have the fantastic ability 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 significant concern is that we’re now in the middle of content producers.
It’s no longer just traditional publishers that disseminate business content, and it’s an extremely crowded marketplace. Training companies, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies a few of the intense non-traditional competition we have to think about. However, we’ve spent the past several years defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we still have an engaging and competitive business with significant chance of further growth.
PP: The amount of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge needs to be free’ camp can be be extremely persuasive. Can it create a place by which students are more not wanting to spend on content?
HK: I do think it’s tough to persuade students to purchase content when they’ve been used to ‘free’. We really need the educational institutes to aid us with this also to result in the case that after the road is an author that has created the book and really should be compensated accordingly.
Just as much as “free” is really a challenge Also i believe the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re investigating the way you will offer a much more three-dimensional and interactive experience in the long run to compete with changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page managed to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those ideas and even more.
PP: How many 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.Six million) but in the following financial year this may grow to over ?5.5 million (US$7.2 million) through organic growth and also the addition of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We had to consider a success on our top line during the last few years even as refocused portion of our activity on specialist areas but this year we’re seeing the fruits of that work and have a much 12-percent growth.
Benefitting From a Weak Pound
PP: What effect think Brexit could have?
HK: It’s challenging to say at this stage. We must hope that we won’t experience tariffs since this will clearly have some impact. Costs of materials can be a concern and we’ll have to watch this. We hold English-language world and digital rights to the majority of our list this should mitigate having to compete with US editions in Europe (an expanding concern amongst other publishers).
Hopefully sanity will prevail and also the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ right to live in america will likely be handled swiftly instead of making use of it as being a bargaining chip.
On the plus side, we’ve certainly took advantage of the weakness from the pound from the dollar.
PP: Where does one sell your main books?
HK: Seventy 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 growing and now we possess 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 is the reason for 25 % of revenue using 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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