Westchester Publishing Services

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Work from Home (WfH) webinar

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by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

We are all learning to adapt to a new, temporary normal during the COVID-19 Pandemic.  In publishing, specific issues arise for publishers that are not used to working in a distributed Work from Home (WfH) environment.  And even for those publishers that built their operations as WfH from the bottom up, the general disruptions of COVID-19 like having the kids home from school for an extended period are making this less of a typical WfH experience.

On Thursday, March 19th, Westchester Publishing Services gathered a panel of our partners in the industry to share about what they’re seeing in their markets, methods for successfully adapting to working from home, and more.  Speakers and Panelists included:

  • Nicole Tomassi, Westchester Publishing Services, Marketing & Conference Manager
  • Michael Jensen, Westchester Publishing Services, Director of Technology
  • Terry Colosimo, Westchester Publishing Services, Director of Operations
  • Kevin J. Gray, Westchester Education Services, President & Chief Content Officer
  • Cev Bryerman, Publishers Weekly – Publisher and Executive Vice President
  • Cathy Felgar, Princeton University Press – Publishing Operations Director
  • Rich Portelance, CareerPath Mobile – Founder and CEO
  • Andy Wilson, Dropbox – Global Director, Media Technology

Over the course of the webinar, we covered practical measures like how to handle tasks that were rote in the office but now need new solutions remotely, technology solutions for file sharing and communications, and the empathy needed when working and managing remotely in our current environment to adapt to different challenges than we might normally encounter in the office or WfH.

Key considerations covered in depth in the below links include the following practices and ideas:

  • Take Inventory of your associates at home computer equipment – don’t assume all have appropriate equipment – PC, printer, etc.
    • Quite likely they do not have all the software they need to work from home, so consider IT support that will be needed
    • Follow up with your associates as their needs may change as they become settled into their new routine
  • Take Inventory of your associates’ internet connectivity from home – be sure to consider impact on bandwidth of school age children doing classes from home
  • How do your associates connect to the company’s email system from home?
    • Get your associates’ phones set up with company email access
  • Be sure to collect cell phone numbers for all associates –  and circulate the list
    • Confirm with each that they receive text messages – for urgent communications
  • Centralize Documentation like the above phone numbers and processes —critical information should be centralized in a common location. Consider Dropbox Paper so comments can be made as procedures may change
  • Consider how associates will access documents on company servers/systems which they must print at home
    • Small size documents can be transferred via company email from the server to the local machine
    • Large documents (i.e. <3mb) can be transferred via file sharing services such as DropBox
  • Consider how your associates will mark-up and communicate edits/comments to manuscripts/documents
  • Schedule regular (perhaps daily, but at least every other day) team conference calls – video conferencing if possible – so your associates stay and feel connected
    • Remember this is physical distancing not social distancing. Use video conferences for social interactions like lunch together with your team. Those watercooler interactions you’re used to in the office are on hiatus, and video can help fill that void.
  • Show Understanding and Be Flexible – Empathize – many of your associates are doing this, work from home, for the first time – and this is a foreign experience – they need time to adjust
  • Good News – the publishing business can continue and be successful without everyone being in one physical office location – a period of adjustment, yes – but will quite likely lead to real and permanent changes in how we do business, and cost savings

Here are the links for: the Webinar recording, the Presentation in PDF format, and a PDF of Questions & Answers from the webinar.

We have also compiled this list of articles and videos with helpful information about working remotely. Please use the Contact Us form to reach out with any feedback, needs we can help with, or ideas for working from home during these times. Westchester Publishing Services will provide further webinars in the coming weeks and months, and welcomes your input.  

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Usually, these “Travels with Tyler” blog posts on the Westchester Publishing Services and Westchester Education Services websites are post-conference or post-road-trip recaps of topics that are coming up in my offsite discussions with customers, partners, and industry figures.  For the past several years, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend London Book Fair and share a bit about the events, topics, and key needs that our clients and partners were sharing at one of the world’s most active publishing events in past blog posts.

This year, as you’ve likely seen, The London Book Fair was canceled. (Links: Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller, Publishing Perspectives, The Guardian) This is unfortunate on a lot of levels, due to the amount of rights work that is transacted at the Fair each year as well as the networking and business traded in other aspects of our industry.

For Westchester, the London Book Fair has been a key piece of our marketing strategy from year to year allowing us to engage with publishers about our content development, editorial, and production capabilities on a larger scale than the rest of the year, and also to meet and work with partners like Dropbox on initiatives together.  It’s also served as a venue for us to mark milestones like the launch of Westchester Education Services in 2017 (originally Westchester K-12) and our 50th anniversary, last year.

With the absence of the London Book Fair, this year, and with the increasing concern companies have about the risks of the Coronavirus for their employees and their families, we are seeing our clients begin to engage using different channels to substitute for travel, for the time being.  Many of the London Book Fair meetings in our calendars have been replaced with scheduled calls or Zoom video conferences, already.

Use the Contact Us button below to schedule a brief call with Westchester’s experts on educational, academic, trade, think tank, and professional content. While some of this year’s conferences or companies’ travel plans may be impacted in the short term, we want to talk with you and meet – or virtually meet – to discuss your 2020 publications and how we can best help. Our management and staff – spread across three continents – are committed to helping all publishers have the best possible experience creating and producing their content.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

In November 2019, Amazon released updated epub3 accessibility guidelines and now officially recommends using the ACE Accessibility Checker from the DAISY Consortium for epub3 files that are available through their website.

Westchester has been utilizing the ACE Accessibility Checker for several years and is well prepared for this upgrade. ACE, which includes checking conformance of various HTML and epub accessibility rules, performs the following functions:

  1. Runs automated accessibility tests on epub content documents
  2. Extracts the publication metadata, and checks accessibility-related metadata
  3. Extracts various document outlines (the ToC, headings, and HTML structure) for side-by-side comparison
  4. Extracts all the epub images and graphics and their associated accessibility descriptions in a consolidated table, for easier review
  5. Extracts other various content features to facilitate human-driven accessibility audits

In addition to ACE, Westchester also includes these additional accessibility checks as part of our standard workflow:

  1. Setting the Language attribute (Daisy). Most non-Latin languages will be automatically marked (Daisy)
  2. Setting Page Title – Meaningful titles allow users to find and navigate documents without having to first read them (Daisy)
  3. Mark context breaks, aka space breaks or scene breaks (Daisy)
  4. Mark ornaments/purely decorative images with an empty alt attribute and ARIA “presentation” role (Daisy)

Along with the accessibility checks that Westchester provides as part of our standard workflow, we are able to incorporate the following features to give your epubs additional functionality:

  1. Alt text for image descriptions
  2. Semantically tagged italic and bold text
  3. Language changes when the Latin alphabet is used
  4. Color contrast errors can be corrected with supplied instructions/parameters (i.e., convert failing gray text to default, replace failing gray background with a border, etc.)
  5. Use SVG to render vector images (as long as reading systems display the image properly)
  6. Use MathML with image fallbacks whenever not cost-prohibitive

In addition to our full array of customizable editorial and composition services, Westchester is able to deliver epub files that include the accessibility features your publications require in order to meet the needs of your customers. Contact us today to learn how we can help your publications program be fully accessible.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

If you were fortunate enough to be in Central London, tonight, you would have had the opportunity to attend another great BookMachine event, this time focused on book production.

Our friend and partner, Andy Wilson, Principal of Media at Dropbox, spoke at the BookMachine Unplugged session tonight as one of the panelists presenting on how publishers can use new technology tools to improve their production processes. He discussed how publishers are working with Dropbox to accelerate their workflows, and shared case studies – including one about Westchester’s Client Portal, which integrates the Dropbox API and platform.

We were grateful for this opportunity for our friends at Dropbox to highlight the benefits of cloud collaboration, and talk about our use case in particular.  In case you haven’t seen the Client Portal before, it is a secure, web-based project management tool that helps publishers obtain real-time status updates about their projects in production and share project assets securely between authors, publisher staff and other key project stakeholders.  Westchester Publishing Services provides this platform at no cost to our clients on projects managed through Westchester’s editorial or production operations around the globe.  Contact Us to learn more about how the Client Portal can help you minimize your effort in managing your projects, and give you greater transparency into where each project is at each step in its workflow with Westchester.

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

The calendar is winding down to the final days of the year, the decade, and Westchester’s 50th anniversary in business. It has been a really exciting year on many fronts, so join me to revisit some of the special moments during these past twelve months:

WESTCHESTER TURNED 50!

There was definitely a golden glow here at Westchester because, throughout the year, we were celebrating the significant achievement of being in business for half a century. The anniversary celebrations began with our appearance on the cover of Publishers Weekly’s February 18th issue, a profile article in the March 4th issue that helped us build a strong momentum heading into the London Book Fair, along with an article about our UK expansion in the Publishers Weekly Show Daily on March 12. We also hosted a stand party to toast our milestone anniversary with our friends and colleagues in the publishing community, where a wonderful time was had by all in attendance.

WESTCHESTER UK PROFILED IN THE BOOKSELLER

We have counted several UK-based publishers as loyal clients across the years, and realized we could do a better job of serving them and other UK and European-based publishers by having a more physical presence within the market. The Bookseller took note of our successful expansion efforts in this article (may require log-in to view) that was published in May, shortly before the British Book Awards.

NEW AGREEMENT SIGNED WITH MACMILLAN

In March, we signed a new agreement with Macmillan to continue the productive relationship our companies have enjoyed for more than a quarter-century. While Macmillan is no longer based in the iconic Flatiron building, we will always have fond memories of visiting the staff at their famous headquarters. Shortly before relocating to their new downtown digs this past summer, CEO John Sargent penned this article for Publishers Weekly about what it was like to work in this unique building.

 

UNFAMILIAR WINS AWARD

Great things were happening in our K-12 division as well in 2019. In the first quarter, the hi-lo graphic novel reader Unfamiliar, which was conceived, written, designed, and produced by our talented team received the Silver Hermes Creative Award from the Dayton, Ohio chapter of the American Advertising Federation. This video takes you behind the scenes to learn how the project went from concept to publication.

CLIENT PORTAL RECEIVES ACCOLADES

Unfamiliar was not the only award-winning initiative for Westchester this year. Our Client Portal, the secure, user-friendly, functional project management platform publishers want to incorporate into their pre-press production workflow was also receiving its fair share of positive attention. In May, The Stationers Company, the London-based guild for the media and publishing industry, shortlisted the Client Portal for their Innovation Excellence Awards, and in October, we presented about our Client Portal at the Rutgers Design Thinking program board meeting. In November, our partnership with  Dropbox – who worked with us to enhance the Client Portal’s capabilities – was recognized with a first-place win at the Bookbuilders of Boston NEPCo (New England Publishing Collaboration) Awards.

The video below, which was produced in partnership with Dropbox explains how we were able to incorporate the functionality our clients required into a beautifully designed platform that is easy for publishers to use.

CONFERENCES AND CLIENT MEETINGS

In addition to London Book Fair mentioned above, in 2019, members of the Westchester staff were busy criss-crossing North America and Europe meeting with clients and prospective partners at numerous trade shows and events, engaging in productive discussions with our think tank, university press, and legal clients. Westchester attended events as varied as SXSW EDU, ASU/GSV, the International Studies Association, British Book Awards, Association of University Presses, Frankfurt Book Fair, and FutureBook.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Last spring, the Westchester K-12 team started a program, where each month, one staff member funds a public school project that is trying to secure donations through the DonorsChoose website. Each selection is truly personal, and they have funded classrooms from New York, to California, and cities in between.

YEAR IN REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE WESTCHESTER K-12 TEAM

Recently, I asked members of the Westchester K-12 team to share some insights with me about a project or event that they were involved with during this year that was particularly meaningful for them. You can read their thoughtful responses in this blog post.

TIME FOR 2020 VISION

As we get ready to welcome both a new year and decade, we’re looking forward to several exciting events. In January, Westchester K-12’s Walter Henderson, Jr., begins his two-year term on the ETIN (Education Technology Industry Network) Board of Directors, and he will also be representing Westchester K-12 at the BETT Show in London.

We also have plans to exhibit or sponsor at several conferences, including London Book Fair, and the ASUGSV Summit. Visit our Conferences and Events page to learn where we will be and if you’re planning to attend one or more of these shows, be sure to make an appointment to meet us to discuss how we can be your trusted partner in publishing.

We look forward to seeing you in 2020, and talking about the many effective solutions we have to help you with your content development, editorial, and production needs. From everyone here at Westchester Publishing Services, best wishes for a happy holiday season and a wonderful start to the 20s!

Always be up to date with everything that’s happening at Westchester by following us on our LinkedIn pages for Westchester Publishing and Westchester K-12, watching Westchester on YouTube, and subscribing to our blogs for the latest information about us. We would love to hear from you, too! Drop us an email at any time with your questions or to discuss your publication requirements.