Due to digital initiatives plus a strong list of titles, the 50-year-old UK publisher continues to grow its business, despite increasing competition from outside traditional publishing.

Even as hear from Kogan Page’s leadership today about the rights landscape within this independent house’s business and management specialty, we also have several titles the company is presenting for rights sales. You will find those at the conclusion of this story.-Porter Anderson
Chinese Rights Sales Now Leading
China has become Kogan Page‘s most efficient rights territory, since 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 company recently made industry headlines with all the timely buying of two cyber-attack titles, announced within the same week since the global ransomware attack. Both these titles are scheduled for spring 2018:

Cyberwars: The Hacks that Shook the globe is actually former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and may consider the dramatic inside stories of many of the world’s biggest cyber-attacks such as the Clinton election campaign along with recent global events.
Cyber Risk Management, is actually Richard Benham with the UK’s National Cyber Skills Centre and may, in accordance with promotional copy, offer “vital help with the best way to evaluate threats and communicate a cyber-security tactic to help prevent the trillions of dollars which are lost globally every year.”
Publishing Perspectives spoke to Helen Kogan about how exactly the company has been able to remain independent, its current rights activity, and the way the field of Buy Business Books publishing is changing.

‘Discoverable In the World’

Publishing Perspectives: As Kogan Page enters its sixth decade, how is business?
Helen Kogan: We’re creating a great year. We’re almost at the conclusion of 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 both for 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 web based classes. It’s been a really exciting breakthrough year following 4 years of refocus and continuing development of our value proposition.

PP: Is there a particular focus in your rights activity?

HK: The increase and further development of Beijing Book Fair has been particularly great for us, and also the sale of Chinese rights is currently our greatest territory.

However, we now have our titles translated into 50 different languages now and, interestingly, this isn’t just limited to our more popular general business titles. We’ve had success by incorporating of our more specialist titles too, in the field of logistics and recruiting.

We’ve always 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 got offices in america and India plus a wide network of agents globally. We’re fortunate to write 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 years and, from the continuing development of digital bibliographic and marketing feeds, have the extraordinary capacity to make our titles discoverable anywhere in the world.

‘A Very Crowded Marketplace’

PP: What are the main issues facing business and professional publishers?
HK: An important dilemma 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 just some of the intense non-traditional competition we must consider. However, we’ve spent the very last 3 years defining our value proposition and points of difference and think we continue to have a powerful and competitive business with significant chance for further growth.

PP: How much of a threat is open access? The ‘knowledge ought to be free’ camp can be very persuasive. Will it create an environment where students tend to be hesitant to buy content?

HK: I do think it’s hard to persuade students to pay for content when they’ve been used to ‘free’. Really require the educational institutes to compliment us within this and increase the risk for case that at the conclusion of the fishing line is an author who has made the book and may be compensated accordingly.

Up to “free” is a challenge Also i think that the threat to non-linear narrative, through other media formats, is problematic. We’re investigating the way you will offer a more three-dimensional and interactive expertise in the future to compete with changing consumer reading habits.

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

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

PP: The amount 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$5.6 000 0000) however in the subsequent financial year this will grow to in excess of ?5.5 million (US$7.Two million) through organic growth and also the addition of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development’s list. We had to look at a hit on our top line within the last number of years even as we refocused a part of our activity on specialist areas however this year we’re seeing the fruits of the work and have a 12-percent growth.

Benefitting From your Weak Pound

PP: What effect you think Brexit could have?
HK: It’s hard to say now. We have to hope that we won’t have to endure tariffs simply because this will clearly possess some impact. Costs of materials may also be a worry and we’ll must monitor this. We hold English-language world and digital rights towards the majority of our list and this should mitigate having to compete with US editions in Europe (an increasing concern amongst other publishers).

Hopefully sanity will prevail and also the threat hanging over our European colleagues’ to live in the united states will probably be dealt with swiftly as an alternative to utilizing it as a bargaining chip.

About the plus side, we’ve certainly benefited from the weakness with the pound up against the dollar.

PP: Where can you sell your main books?

HK: 70 % of our sales still go through the traditional supply chain-bookshops, trusted online stores, wholesalers, and the like. However, our Internet site sales are increasing 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 for A quarter of revenue with all the balance of this being delivered from digital licensing to academic library suppliers, aggregators, and corporate content suppliers. Our ebook business has stayed fairly stable at approximately 8 percent of overall revenue.
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