Westchester Publishing Services

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Learn More about the Latest Version of Westchester’s Client Portal

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Welcome to the Westchester Publishing Services Client Portal version 2019.C.05, now more user friendly and feature rich to improve your productivity as publications move through the workflow. And as always, our Client Portal is Free for Westchester client projects. Later this year, you will be able to use our Client Portal for publications you manage entirely in-house (certain conditions will apply).

Enhancements include:

  • Improved Dashboard Timeline
  • Enhanced UI Rollovers
  • Sortability
  • New Data Export Options
  • and added Upload/Download Capabilities

Contact us to learn more about how the Client Portal can help you better track and manage your editorial and production projects with Westchester.

Stationers Company Shortlisted Innovation Excellence Awards 2019

Wow! We’re all really excited at Westchester Publishing Services about the news we just received that The Stationers’ Company, London’s guild for the publishing and media industries, has shortlisted Westchester’s Client Portal for its annual Innovation Excellence Awards. The Innovation Excellence Awards are an annual event honoring solutions in the following categories: Business Process, Communications, Customer Experience, Product Design, Product Performance, and Service Development. Competitors are firms that provide solutions in the printing, printing supplies, publishing, packaging, office products, promotion and communication verticals of our shared industries. Westchester’s Client Portal, which allows publishers real-time online access to each of their editorial and production projects in process at Westchester, is a no-cost project management platform developed in-house and built using the Dropbox API.

This news comes just as Westchester preps to roll out version v2019.C.05 of the Client Portal, with new features and enhancements we will announce in coming days.

The awards competition will be held at the historic Stationers’ Hall on Ave Maria Lane, near St. Paul’s Cathedral in Central London, on 25 June 2019. Stay tuned to hear how we fare, but it truly is an honor just to be nominated!

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

This past Friday, the W3C announced the final specification for EPUB 3.2 files. What does this mean for you? Well, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) acts as the industry body for evaluating and advancing new digital file formats for use online and in devices. As part of their continual vetting of new frontiers for EPUB files, iterations over the years have supported features ranging from embedding fonts, to embedding or streaming video files, accessibility options, tracking the corresponding page numbers in print editions of titles, and more. The EPUB 3.2 standard opens up more options for using web-based content within an EPUB, as well as advances in accessibility.

Are you taking full advantage of the options available for your digital publications? Contact Westchester Publishing Services today to talk about your goals for your EPUB, mobi, XML, and other digital files. Over 150 publishers use Westchester to help them craft perfect print and digital products. Let’s talk about your EPUBs and how we can help you maximize the functionality of your digital editions.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

I joined Wolters Kluwer’s Aspen Publishing imprint in 2001 as a sales rep. At the time, law books (and they were almost solely physical books at that time) were sold by outside sales reps, direct mail, and inside telecom sales reps.  During my time at Aspen, our website became a growing channel for sales, and we launched a series of digital products to compete with LexisNexis to ensure we got as much money for our online content as possible. Ironically, at the same time, Westchester Publishing Services – then only typesetting books in the US – was one of Aspen’s typesetters, only to be replaced by offshore typesetting operations, much the way sales jobs like the one I had held in a phone sales operation were ultimately eclipsed by online and other channels for selling law books that differed from how business had been done in the 90s.

In the intervening years, I’ve held other jobs in publishing and communications, but my roots were always in legal publishing. As US-based Westchester Publishing Services grew by buying an offshore company and recruiting key talent from other typesetters, Westchester maintained its roots in professional publishing as well – but with a difference when compared to other offshore vendors for legal, accounting, and professional content.

While many typesetting companies – especially those that proffer XML-first workflows and online editing platforms – require you to adapt to their workflows and approaches, Westchester remains a consultative, bespoke partner keen on ensuring minimal disruption for you, your authors, and your readers. Westchester’s managers, including Terry Colosimo and Mona Tiwary engage in extensive onboarding discussions with each of our professional publishing clients, to best understand the format their assets are in, when XML is needed at different stages for online platforms and more, whether editing using Bluebook, MLA, or other styles is needed, the schedules and requirements for each product or series, and the most efficient – and inexpensive – ways to getting your publications ready for print and digital release as quickly as possible. This level of effort minimizes the amount of time our professional publishing clients have to invest in adapting to a vendor, and also minimizes the amount of time they have to engage with each project once it has been sent to Westchester for editorial or production.

We have been on your side of the desk as publishers, and we want to ensure all the right questions are being asked.  Click here  to learn more about our capabilities for legal, accounting, and professional publishers, and contact us to discuss your program and how we can help you save money and ensure quality. 

There’s an often overlooked page on Westchester’s website called “Pre-Edit Services.” Pre-Edit services are not an in-demand service that publishers often shop for, the way they do copyediting, design, typesetting, or ePub conversion.  If you’re a publisher that uses a pre-editing template or system, you may feel you do not need to explore alternatives.  If you’re a publisher that doesn’t currently pre-edit your manuscripts before they go to copyediting, you may be missing out on a great way to save copyediting costs and time, as well as standardize your publications.

If you publish more than a handful of books each year, you have likely run into the types of issues where you have different copyeditors who each structure and tag manuscripts differently, or somehow strip out any styles or tags you or the author had inserted in the first place.  This is one of those problems where the ability to put a number on the cost for your staff’s time to address this problem is hard to grasp – but it’s not insubstantial as your publishing program grows and grows.

How does Westchester pre-edit titles for our clients?  We work with each client to best understand their content. This no-cost consultation helps ensure that your books are not just placed into a cookie cutter template that might be better suited to a totally different type of publisher.  Do you publish poetry, cookbooks, mysteries? Each of these needs to be set up differently for pre-edit services, and we’ll work with you to establish tags that are clean, make sense to you and your copyeditors – and best of all, translate into Westchester’s typesetting system to help keep your composition costs down too.

Want to know what else makes this great?  It’s free.  If you commit to sending an agreed upon volume of books to Westchester annually, after trying us out and making sure we’re for you, we’ll set the pre-edit tags and template up specifically for you, give you guidance for your copyeditors, and then typeset your books for as little as $1.75 per page.  Contact us to learn more.