Due to digital initiatives and a strong report on titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher continues to grow its business, despite increasing competition externally traditional publishing.

Even as listen to Kogan Page’s leadership today about the rights landscape with this independent house’s business and management specialty, we have several titles the business is presenting for rights sales. You will find those after this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China is becoming Kogan Page‘s best 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 md.

The organization recently made industry headlines with the timely acquiring two cyber-attack titles, announced inside the same week because global ransomware attack. These two titles are scheduled for spring 2018:

Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the entire world is by former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and may look at the dramatic inside stories of a few of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks like the Clinton election campaign as well as recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is by Richard Benham of the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and may, as outlined by promotional copy, offer “vital help with the best way to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security technique to help prevent the trillions of dollars which can be lost globally each and every year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan regarding how the business has was able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and exactly how the concept of Cheap Business Books publishing is changing.

‘Discoverable Anywhere in the World’

Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, bed not the culprit business?
Helen Kogan: We’re creating 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 the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and the Chartered Institute of Banking for both 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 courses. It’s been an extremely exciting breakthrough year following four years of refocus and development of our value proposition.

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

HK: The growth and further development of Beijing Book Fair continues to be particularly good for us, and the sale of Chinese rights has become our greatest territory.

However, we’ve our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just restricted to our widely used general business titles. We’ve had success with a few of our more specialist titles too, in logistics and human resources.

We’ve been internationally-focused and currently sell our titles into 90 countries with key territories being United states, Europe, Southeast Asia, the very center 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 share in English-the international language of business-and that business and management is a global subject. We’ve really rooked global supply chains in recent times and, through the development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, will have the great capacity to make our titles discoverable all over the world.

‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’

PP: Do you know 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 specifically 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 serious non-traditional competition we have to take into consideration. However, we’ve spent the last 36 months defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we continue to have an engaging and competitive business with significant chance of further growth.

PP: How much of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge needs to be free’ camp can be quite persuasive. Should it create an atmosphere in which students tend to be reluctant to pay for content?

HK: I do believe it’s very difficult to persuade students to cover content when they’ve been accustomed to ‘free’. We really require educational institutes to compliment us with this also to increase the risk for case that after the line is definitely an author that has came up with book and 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 taking a look at the way you will offer a lot more three-dimensional and interactive experience in the long run to contend with changing consumer reading habits.

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

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

PP: How many staff members are there and what’s your turnover?

HK: We’ve 35 staff and growing. Our turnover is ?4.5 million (US$5.6 000 0000) however in the following financial year this can grow close to ?5.5 million (US$7.2 million) through organic growth and the addition of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. There was to take a success on the top line over the last several years as we refocused portion of our activity on specialist areas however 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 difficult to say at this stage. We must hope that people won’t suffer from tariffs since this will clearly incorporate some impact. Costs of materials may also be a worry and we’ll need to monitor this. We hold English-language world and digital rights for the majority of our list and this should mitigate the need to contend with US editions in Europe (an evergrowing concern amongst other publishers).

I hope that sanity will prevail and the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ directly to stay in america will likely be addressed swiftly rather than deploying it as being a bargaining chip.

On the plus side, we’ve certainly took advantage of the weakness of the pound from the dollar.

PP: Where would you sell your main books?

HK: 70 % of our sales still have the traditional supply chain-bookshops, trusted online stores, wholesalers, and the like. However, our Site sales are increasing and we have a very thriving B2B sales activity for member organizations, author networks, and corporates.

PP: What’s the split between digital and print within your business?

HK: Digital is the reason A quarter of revenue with the balance on 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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