As a result of digital initiatives and a strong report on titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher keeps growing its business, despite increasing competition from outside traditional publishing.


As we listen to Kogan Page’s leadership today concerning the rights landscape on this independent house’s business and management specialty, we have several titles the corporation is presenting for rights sales. You will discover those after this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is becoming Kogan Page‘s most productive rights territory, as the UK publisher marks its 50th anniversary.
Founded by Philip Kogan in 1967, it’s got 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 within the same week as the global ransomware attack. Both these titles are scheduled for spring 2018:

Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the entire world is simply by former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and will glance at the dramatic inside stories of a few of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks including the Clinton election campaign along with recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is simply by Richard Benham of 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 tactic to help alleviate problems with the trillions of dollars which are lost globally every year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how exactly the corporation has were able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and exactly how the field of Cheap Business Books publishing is evolving.

‘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 using the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development as well as the Chartered Institute of Banking either way 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 online courses. It’s been a really exciting breakthrough year following 4 years of refocus and growth and development of our value proposition.

PP: It is possible to particular focus to your rights activity?

HK: The increase and further development of Beijing Book Fair continues to be particularly best for us, as well as the sale of Chinese rights is now our most successful territory.

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

We’ve been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Australia, India, and China.

We’ve offices in the united states and India and a wide network of agents globally. We’re fortunate to publish in English-the international language of business-and that business and management can be a global subject. We’ve really cheated global supply chains in recent years and, over the growth and development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, have the truly great ability to make our titles discoverable from any location.

‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’

PP: What are the main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: An important 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 extremely crowded marketplace. Coaches, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies are a few of the serious non-traditional competition we need to consider. However, we’ve spent the final three years defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we continue to have a compelling and competitive business with significant chance of further growth.

PP: The amount of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge should be free’ camp can be quite persuasive. Does it create an atmosphere where students tend to be unwilling to buy content?

HK: I believe it’s hard to persuade students to fund content when they’ve been accustomed to ‘free’. We actually require the educational institutes to guide us on this and make the case that after the road is surely an author that has came up with book and may be compensated accordingly.

Around “free” can be a challenge I additionally believe that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re taking a look at how we may offer a more three-dimensional and interactive experience in the near future to compete with changing consumer reading habits.

PP: How has Kogan Page were able to stay independent?

HK: Bloody-mindedness, resilience, opportunism-all those ideas plus more.

PP: What number of personnel do you have and what’s your turnover?

HK: We’ve 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.Six million) in the subsequent financial year this can 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. We had to consider popular on the top line during the last couple of years as we refocused section of our activity on specialist areas however, this year we’re seeing the fruits of that work and expect to have 12-percent growth.

Benefitting From your Weak Pound

PP: What effect do you think Brexit can have?
HK: It’s challenging to say at this point. We will need to hope that people won’t have to endure tariffs because this will clearly have some impact. Costs of materials can also be a worry and we’ll have to monitor this. We hold English-language world and digital rights towards the majority of our list which means this should mitigate the need to compete with US editions in Europe (an evergrowing concern amongst other publishers).

Hopefully sanity will prevail as well as the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ directly to live in the united states will be dealt with swiftly as opposed to making use of it like a bargaining chip.

On the plus side, we’ve certainly benefited from the weakness of the pound against the dollar.

PP: Where would you sell much of your books?

HK: 70 percent of our own sales still go through the traditional supply chain-bookshops, online stores, wholesalers, and so forth. However, our Internet site sales are growing and now we have 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 % of revenue using 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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