Thanks to digital initiatives along with a strong list of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher is increasing its business, despite increasing competition from outside traditional publishing.
Once we hear from Kogan Page’s leadership today in regards to the rights landscape in this independent house’s business and management specialty, we’ve got several titles the organization is presenting for rights sales. You can find those at the end of this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China has grown to be Kogan Page‘s most efficient 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 business recently made industry headlines with the timely acquiring two cyber-attack titles, announced within the same week since the global ransomware attack. These two titles are scheduled for spring 2018:
Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the entire world is as simple as former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and may go through the dramatic inside stories of many of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks like the Clinton election campaign along with recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is as simple as Richard Benham with the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and may, in accordance with promotional copy, offer “vital tips on the way 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 organization has were able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and exactly how the field of Best Business Books publishing has been evolving.
‘Discoverable In the World’
Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, how’s business?
Helen Kogan: We’re using a great year. We’re almost at the end 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 as well as 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 online courses. It’s been a really exciting breakthrough year following 4 years of refocus and growth and development of our value proposition.
PP: Is there a particular focus on your rights activity?
HK: The growth and additional development of Beijing Book Fair has become particularly best for us, as well as the sale of Chinese rights is now our best territory.
However, we have our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just restricted to our more popular general business titles. We’ve had success with a few in our more specialist titles too, in logistics and recruiting.
We’ve been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being The united states, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Australia, India, and China.
We have offices in america and India along with a wide network of agents globally. We’re fortunate to write in English-the international language of business-and that business and management is really a global subject. We’ve really rooked global supply chains recently and, with the growth and development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, now have the great power to make our titles discoverable around the globe.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: Do you know the main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: A significant issue is that we’re now surrounded by content producers.
It’s merely 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 must consider. However, we’ve spent the final 3 years defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we still need a compelling and competitive business with significant chance for further growth.
PP: How much of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge should be free’ camp can be extremely persuasive. Will it create a place through which students tend to be unwilling to pay for content?
HK: I do think it’s tough to persuade students to cover content when they’ve been accustomed to ‘free’. Really require educational institutes to aid us in this and to make the case that at the end of the fishing line is definitely an author who’s created the book and will be compensated accordingly.
Around “free” is really a challenge I additionally think that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re considering the way you may offer a much more three-dimensional and interactive experience in the longer term to contend with changing consumer reading habits.
PP: How has Kogan Page were able to stay independent?
HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those ideas plus much more.
PP: How many employees are you experiencing and what’s your turnover?
HK: We have 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.6 000 0000) in the subsequent financial year this may grow to over ?5.5 million (US$7.Two million) through organic growth as well as the addition of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. There were to take a winner on the top line in the last few years as we refocused part of our activity on specialist areas however year we’re seeing the fruits of the work and have 12-percent growth.
Benefitting From a Weak Pound
PP: What effect do you think Brexit will have?
HK: It’s tough to say at this time. We have to hope that individuals won’t have to endure tariffs simply because this will clearly involve some impact. Costs of materials may also be a concern and we’ll must monitor this. We hold English-language world and digital rights towards the vast majority of our list so this should mitigate the need to contend with US editions in Europe (an expanding concern amongst other publishers).
I hope that sanity will prevail as well as the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ right to remain in america will probably be addressed swiftly as opposed to deploying it as being a bargaining chip.
For the plus side, we’ve certainly took advantage of the weakness with the pound up against the dollar.
PP: Where would you sell most of your books?
HK: 70 % in our sales still go through the traditional supply chain-bookshops, trusted online retailers, wholesalers, etc. However, our Web site sales are growing and that we have 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 25 % of revenue with 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 about 8 percent of overall revenue.
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