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| Kuo-Yu Liang | |
Industry veteran Kuo-Yu Liang has formed Ku Worldwide, a global pop-culture publishing consultancy focused on helping publishing, gaming, comic and other media companies with business development and strategy, product distribution, event production and strategy, publishing and sales.
Liang said, "After 30-plus years in this industry that have given me so much, I wanted to take my passion and expertise and partner with companies to help them grow and develop new business. In a nutshell, I can help companies make money, save money, and save time."
He began his publishing industry career as a sales rep for Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, and worked his way up to associate publisher at Del Rey. Among the authors Liang published were Terry Brooks, Anne McCaffrey, Philip Pullman, R.A. Salvatore and J.R.R. Tolkien. In his position as director of licensing and business development, Liang acquired licenses to publish original IP for Star Wars, Halo, Major League Baseball, and Peanuts. (Incidentally, while at Random House, he met with Jeff Bezos to discuss a new Internet bookstore Bezos was building called Amazon.com.)
Liang joined Diamond Comics in 2003 to launch a division called Diamond Book Distributors. As v-p, sales, marketing and business development, he built a new business from the ground up to distribute books, collectibles, comics, games, graphic novels and manga into bookstores, e-commerce, libraries and schools, and launched an international division with teams in Australia, Canada, China, Japan and the U.K., with customers in 71 countries. In 2006, he launched the Diamond Kids Group to develop a new market for middle-grade and young adult graphic novels.
In 2018, he joined ReedPOP, a division of Reed Exhibitions, as global director, business development, and worked on BookExpo, Comic Con Africa, Comic Con Seoul, Emerald City Comic Con, MCM, PAX West and Singapore Comic Con. When Covid-19 devastated the event industry in 2020, he added global director of sales to his role and led the team to transition to selling digital media for the ReedPOP portfolio of websites, including Dicebreaker, Eurogamer, Nintendo Life and Rock Paper Shotgun.
He is a new board member of the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) and is an adviser to Shelf Awareness and the Sharjah International Book Fair. He is also a past advisory member to the Bertelsmann Synergy Board, Lucasfilm Licensing and ReedPOP Global Strategy Group.
He may be reach via e-mail or at 917-769-6595.