Because of digital initiatives plus a strong report on titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher is 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 business is presenting for rights sales. You can find those after this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China has grown to be Kogan Page‘s most productive rights territory, because 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 company recently made industry headlines with all the timely acquiring two cyber-attack titles, announced from the same week because 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 can glance at the dramatic inside stories of a few of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks like the Clinton election campaign in addition to recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is actually Richard Benham in the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and can, as outlined by promotional copy, offer “vital help with the way to 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 regarding how the business has were able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and how the field of Busines Books Online publishing is changing.

‘Discoverable Around 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 with all the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and also 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 classes. It’s been an incredibly exciting breakthrough year following 4 years of refocus and progression of our value proposition.

PP: Exactly what is the particular focus on your rights activity?

HK: The development and additional expansion of Beijing Book Fair continues to be particularly beneficial to us, and also the sale of Chinese rights is currently our greatest territory.

However, we’ve our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just restricted to our very popular general business titles. We’ve had success with many of our own more specialist titles too, in the area of logistics and hours.

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 now have offices in america and India plus a wide network of agents globally. We’re fortunate to create in English-the international language of business-and that business and management is a global subject. We’ve really rooked global supply chains recently and, with the progression of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, now have the truly great capability 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 major problem is that we’re now in the middle of 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 are a few of the serious non-traditional competition we should instead think about. However, we’ve spent the past 36 months 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 should be free’ camp can be be extremely persuasive. Can it create a breeding ground in which students are more unwilling to pay for content?

HK: I think it’s hard to persuade students to purchase content when they’ve been accustomed to ‘free’. We actually require the educational institutes to compliment us in this and also to make case that after the queue is definitely an author who’s made the book and really should be compensated accordingly.

As much as “free” is a challenge Also i believe the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re investigating how you can provide a lot 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 activities plus more.

PP: How many staff members 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) however in the next financial year this can grow close to ?5.5 million (US$7.2 million) through organic growth and also the inclusion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We’d to adopt a hit on the top line within the last few years even as refocused a part of our activity on specialist areas however year we’re seeing the fruits of that work and have a much 12-percent growth.

Benefitting Coming from a Weak Pound

PP: What effect you think Brexit can have?
HK: It’s challenging to say at this point. We have to hope that we won’t have to deal with tariffs as this will clearly incorporate some impact. Costs of materials can be an issue and we’ll have to keep an eye on this. We hold English-language world and digital rights for the majority of our list so this should mitigate being forced to contend with US editions in Europe (an increasing concern amongst other publishers).

Hopefully sanity will prevail and also the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ right to stay in this country is going to be handled swiftly as an alternative to using it as a bargaining chip.

About the plus side, we’ve certainly taken advantage of the weakness in the pound from the dollar.

PP: Where would you sell most of your books?

HK: 70 % of our own sales still feel the traditional supply chain-bookshops, trusted online retailers, wholesalers, and the like. However, our Website 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 with your business?

HK: Digital accounts for 25 percent of revenue with all 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 around 8 percent of overall revenue.
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