Because of digital initiatives along with a strong report on titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher is increasing its business, despite increasing competition from the outside traditional publishing.
Even as we hear from Kogan Page’s leadership today concerning the rights landscape on this independent house’s business and management specialty, the ways to access several titles the corporation is presenting for rights sales. You will discover those following this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is now Kogan Page‘s most efficient rights territory, because 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 business recently made industry headlines with the timely acquiring two cyber-attack titles, announced in the same week because 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 will 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 of the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and will, based on promotional copy, offer “vital guidance on the best way to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security technique to assist in preventing the trillions of dollars that are lost globally each and every year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how exactly the corporation has were able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and how the world of Buy Business Books publishing has been evolving.
‘Discoverable Any place in the World’
Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, bed mattress business?
Helen Kogan: We’re creating a great year. We’re almost following 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 either way academic and professional development titles.
We’re going to launch a searchable digital platform for B2B customers and we’re also going to launch our first online courses. It’s been a very exciting breakthrough year following four years of refocus and continuing development of our value proposition.
PP: What is the particular focus for your rights activity?
HK: The growth and additional growth of Beijing Book Fair has become particularly best for us, as well as the sale of Chinese rights is our most successful territory.
However, we’ve got our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just limited to our widely used general business titles. We’ve had success with some of our more specialist titles too, in the field of logistics and hr.
We’ve always been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being United states, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Australia, India, and China.
We’ve got 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 often a global subject. We’ve really cheated global supply chains lately and, with the continuing development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, are in possession of the truly great capacity to make our titles discoverable anywhere in the world.
‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’
PP: What are main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: A major issue 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 incredibly crowded marketplace. Training companies, member organizations, business schools and management consultancies are a few of the serious non-traditional competition we have to consider. However, we’ve spent the final several years defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we still need an engaging and competitive business with significant chance for further growth.
PP: The amount of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge ought to be free’ camp can be quite persuasive. Will it create an environment by which students are more reluctant to buy content?
HK: I do think it’s hard to persuade students to fund content when they’ve been accustomed to ‘free’. Really require the educational institutes to compliment us on this and to make case that following the line is definitely an author who may have created the book and should be compensated accordingly.
As much as “free” is often a challenge Furthermore, i believe that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re considering the way you will offer a much more three-dimensional and interactive experience with the 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 actions and even more.
PP: What number of personnel have you got and what’s your turnover?
HK: We’ve got 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.6 million) in the next financial year this will likely grow to in excess of ?5.5 million (US$7.2 million) through organic growth as well as the addition of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We’d to consider a success on the top line during the last few years even as we refocused section of our activity on specialist areas but this year we’re seeing the fruits of these work and have a 12-percent growth.
Benefitting From the Weak Pound
PP: What effect do you think Brexit can have?
HK: It’s tough to say at this stage. We must hope that people won’t suffer from tariffs because this will clearly possess some impact. Costs of materials can be a concern and we’ll have to keep close track of this. We hold English-language world and digital rights towards the majority of our list this should mitigate needing to compete with US editions in Europe (an increasing concern amongst other publishers).
Hopefully sanity will prevail as well as the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ to certainly live in america will be dealt with swiftly rather than making use of it as a bargaining chip.
For the plus side, we’ve certainly took advantage of the weakness of the pound up against the dollar.
PP: Where do you sell most of your books?
HK: Seventy percent of our sales still have the traditional supply chain-bookshops, online stores, wholesalers, and so forth. However, our Site sales are increasing and that we use 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 is the reason for 25 % of revenue with 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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