Westchester Publishing Services was grateful for the opportunity to sponsor the annual New York Book Forum’s Presidents Night event. Hosted by Macmillan at their downtown Manhattan offices, Presidents Night attracted a crowd of attendees from across the literary world including authors, avid readers, vendors, manufacturers, and staff from publishing houses, ranging from people new in the field to the C-Suite. Part of what makes the New York Book Forum’s events so vibrant is the ability to reach across our own personal disciplines and get to know people in other aspects of our industry.
Authors Equity CEO Madeline McIntosh was the keynote speaker for the evening, and talked about her journey within Penguin Random House (PRH), over to Amazon, back to PRH and rising to the role of CEO there, and ultimately leaving to found Authors Equity with former Macmillan CEO Don Weisberg and Nina von Moltke (also formerly of PRH – and a panelist on our last Publishing Now webinar with Publishers Weekly). McIntosh’s keynote unpacked her career path, with roles including overseeing nascent digital formats at PRH as EPUBs were just about to take off, and how her different roles helped her be an effective CEO.
With an emphasis on curiosity about our industry, McIntosh talked about how her decision to co-launch Authors Equity was based on an openness to bringing authors into the decision-making process at every stage of the life cycle for their book; including reviewing P&L’s, and understanding the potential risks and ROI of decisions regarding the book itself and its distribution and marketing plans. McIntosh shared how authors with an established brand or readership have a genuine understanding of their readers and what makes their books work. This has attracted key authors and projects, including top titles by Joseph Nguyen (The Overthinker’s Guide to Making Decisions), JL Collins’ The Simple Path to Wealth, top puzzle title Puzzlemania by The New York Times Games, and a forthcoming title from Seth Godin.
Has it worked? Numbers don’t lie:
By focusing on core staff and a network of trusted partners and freelancers, Authors Equity is able to provide a lot of support and options for their authors and their publications. With a list currently numbering in the dozens, it’s a very different model than the Big Five’s approach to publishing, which McIntosh used as an opportunity to answer questions from the room regarding different approaches to acquisitions, manufacturing, and marketing. With bespoke solutions for each book that allow authors to propose unique marketing strategies they know will be effective in reaching the audience they’ve worked hard to develop, Authors Equity gives its authors greater transparency and control of the process, and as shown above, at this scale it’s very successful.
How are you looking at your business differently? Are you considering different manufacturing options or custom editions for your titles? Are you thinking about how to get books to market more quickly? While Westchester’s focus is on the editorial, design, production, and digital phases, we’re always open to talking about ways we can help solve individual pieces of the puzzle, and we certainly know many players in the market who can help with pieces outside our realm of expertise. Contact Us to discuss your publications program and explore any ways we can help you better control schedules, costs, and options for your most important publications.
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person. Summerscale dives into the archives to shed new light on this chilling case, and I can’t wait to read her perspective and discoveries.
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As always, the 
Dan’s conversations with our clients and prospects opened up a lot of dialogue about EPUB accessibility. “Westchester’s hosting the panel on accessibility drove booth traffic and dialogue about our processes for remediating and converting ePubs. As a Benetech GCA-certified vendor, we are externally audited each year to ensure we’re providing as high a level of quality and service in creating accessible EPUB files as possible. Discussions about alt text, language shift tagging, and speed of conversion and remediation were plentiful, as well as our ability to scale up for larger batches of titles to be made accessible. I give a lot of credit to our panelists for being transparent about their successes and struggles on this front, and for the ongoing discussions about making sure there’s a plan for key backlist and more.”
