Westchester Publishing Services

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Travels with Tyler (and Tim!)

Conferences

IPG Spring Conference, and gearing up for the London Book Fair

By Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

IPG’s annual Spring Conference, held at the Crowne Plaza Heythrop Park in Oxfordshire, is an exceptionally well-organized event welcoming small-to-mid-sized publishers for an intensive two days of sessions and networking, to help address the pressures distinct to publishers of this size. The grounds of the Crowne Plaza are beautiful, looking a bit like a Downton Abbey manor house placed in the midst of a sylvan Tolkien tale.

There are truly few better places to have a conference!  A particular benefit is that it’s removed from the London trade publishing world, bringing Great Britain’s publishers to an area outside the city, thoughtfully disconnecting them from the day-to-day distractions that can pop up when you’re just a quick tube ride away from the office, or the sense of obligation to play tourist should you find yourself in London having come from a place far away.

Westchester’s Interim Director, UK – Tim Davies – and I were excited to exhibit at the conference. Tim came on board just prior to the conference, providing a great opportunity for him to meet with some of our existing clients as well as talk with other publishers in the industry about their current workflows for editorial and production on their publications. Tim has a longstanding history within the IPG and had been invited to host a very well received workshop with smaller publishers about managing growth and operations. He has also dived in to his new role at Westchester and has provided wise guidance on the resources we will continue to expand to support the particular needs of British publishers.

For Westchester overall, finally getting to attend an IPG event was very valuable. The sessions ranged from the topical (the BBC’s Amol Rajan discussing the trends of fake news and the trust in content), to the geopolitical (MP Ken Clarke providing a perspective on Brexit for the publishing industry), to specific publishing topics (workshops, presentations, GDPR and AI sessions, and a keynote by innovative designer Alan Moore). The feedback for IPG following the conference was very positive. You can read their post-conference wrap up here, which is like a mini-summary for those who missed it.

The footprint of IPG’s membership aligns quite closely with the size of clients Westchester typically supports, especially those that are in growth mode and are at the point where they need to evaluate the choice of hiring on a vendor to help support growth, or hiring on more staff and having enough work to keep them constantly busy.  Within the coming weeks, a white paper sponsored by Westchester Publishing Services will be released exploring that idea in greater detail.  Make sure you subscribe to this blog to stay up to date on that. While that paper has been in production for a while it was really valuable to revalidate that position in discussions with many publishers that are approaching that tipping point of growth.

In closing, the IPG conference also served as a great opportunity to meet with several of Great Britain’s independent publishers in advance of attending the forthcoming London Book Fair. It helped us to reaffirm the services that Westchester provides are in alignment with their requirements as we continue to expand our support for publishers in this important market.

Are you headed to LBF? You can find Westchester on Stand 6B107b.  Contact Us to arrange an appointment at the Fair, or just come by our Stand to meet some of our management team and discuss your particular publications needs.

 

Tim Davies, ALPSP UP Redux, Stationers’ Company – and more

By Tyler M. Carey – Chief Revenue Officer

Sign outside The British Library, site of the 2018 ALPSP UP Redux Conference

Westchester’s year is off to a great start, especially with the growth of our work in the UK market. As you may have seen a couple of weeks ago, we have brought on Tim Davies, formerly of The History Press and Oxford University Press, to help us grow our business in the UK.  Tim’s expertise running publishing companies, and his previous experience with American firms such as Baker & Taylor and Author Solutions has him uniquely positioned to help Westchester not just grow our client base, but also to identify any areas where we should grow. He is currently actively engaged in expanding our bench of copyeditors in Great Britain to help us stay ahead of the curve in our copyediting capacity as we grow.  And boy, are we glad Tim is doing that! At ALPSP’s UP Redux conference, there was a tremendous level of interest from the UK’s university presses about the work that Westchester does with many of their peers in the US, as well as more and more work with UK-based publishers.

Our friends at UCL Press hosted the recent ALPSP UP Redux, which was a well programmed conference for the university press and academic publishing spaces. The show had an international feel as a result of old friends from the States including Duke University Press and The MIT Press sending staff, giving the conference a set of contrasts to draw from for sessions and discussion. The US presses that came gave helpful, proven insights on where the US university press space has been and where it’s going; The MIT Press’ Amy Brand’s Keynote was particularly effective in exploring these areas. Timothy Wright (Edinburgh University Press), David Prosser (RLUK) and his panel, and Bloomsbury’s Richard Charkin also contributed quite a lot of perspective about where academic, university press, and library programmes have been headed. Andy Redman from Oxford also provided a very practical walkthrough of how a larger university press has embraced XML-first production to handle its large legal list, tying in nicely with the later panel on “buy vs. build” regarding tech platforms.

From the UK perspective, the use of Open Access as a mechanism to help grow presses rapidly was covered by UCL Press and other UK based presses, as well as JSTOR’s Frank Smith who added to the global perspective by talking about how Open Access has helped put scholarly content into the hands of scholars and consumers in emerging markets. There was some debate on this topic, but based on the successes of smaller start-up university presses in the UK – as well as those like UCL Press that have experienced growth fueled by open access – it was impossible to challenge the use of Open Access as a way to launch a program. The debate did continue though, as it pertains to the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) position that all UK monographs need to become open access in the near future. You can read more about publishers’ concerns regarding HEFCE’s stance in this article by The Bookseller.

Another highlight for me was once again visiting Stationers’ Hall for the New Members evening at The Stationers’ Company. While I’m still very much a new recruit myself, it was great to speak with other publishing professionals who are interested in joining the Company, as well as seeing old friends who have been members for years. Of special focus during the evening’s open presentation was a focus on the Stationers’ Academy and other charitable programmes run by the Company. It was inspirational to hear members speak of the mentoring work they do to help children better navigate their education and early professional development. There is truly a commitment at the Company to help others, while also ensuring that publishing continues to remain a viable path for young graduates, keeping up the Company’s more than 600 years’ worth of work growing the industry.

During the remainder of my trip to London, Tim and I took the opportunity to meet with existing partners. We also took time to plan for the upcoming IPG Spring Conference (if you haven’t registered yet, mention Westchester when you do) and the London Book Fair.  Westchester will have stands at both conferences and we’re eager to talk about all the great work we are doing with publishers in the US, and increasingly in the UK and Europe.  Please contact us to arrange a meeting to discuss your publications program and ways we can help.

By Nicole Tomassi, Marketing and Conference Manager

In 2017, Westchester Publishing Services enjoyed several significant accomplishments, and we’re already hard at work to build upon those successful initiatives in 2018.

These achievements are possible thanks to the efforts of our employees, along with the trust placed in us by our valued clients. Together, they made 2017 a year we look back on with pride, and we hope 2018 will be an equally successful year for all.

Conferences, tradeshows, and events, oh my!

In 2017, Westchester significantly increased our sponsorship and attendance at conferences and events in publishing, including  Council of Science Editors, Association of American University Presses, Publishers Weekly Star Watch, and National Council of English Teachers among others.

Increasing the growth of our client list

Throughout the year, Westchester Publishing Services became the provider of editorial or composition services to several more publishers, including signing multi-year agreements with prestigious publishers  The MIT Press and Rutgers University Press.

Meanwhile across the pond…

We further expanded our presence in the UK during 2017, sponsoring and attending conferences including London Book Fair, The Bookseller Children’s Conference and FutureBook. We also became a member of the Independent Publishers Guild, which has been an advocate for independent publishers for 55 years.

Expanding into new markets 

In May, we launched our  K-12 Publishing Services division, led by Managing Director, Kevin Gray, who has an experienced and talented team to meet the demand for high-quality content development our clients require.

PW Digital Solutions in India Special Report

Each year Publishers Weekly looks at the developments and innovations in digital production in their Digital in India supplement. We received significant coverage in the July 3rd issue and are proud of being the only US employee-owned company profiled who has full ownership and hands-on management of our production facilities in India.

Strategic partnerships

Shortly before the  EdNET conference this past September, we announced our collaboration with the well-respected digital content provider FableVision Studios. More exciting developments are on the horizon with FableVision Studios as well as other companies in the ed-tech industry, so stay tuned!

Better by design

In November, Westchester Publishing Services brought  Mark DaGrossa on board as our Director of Creative Services. Mark’s extensive knowledge and resources allow us to significantly increase the design capabilities we are able to provide publishers for their titles.

An updated website and Client Portal

On the digital front, we gave our website a makeover, which made it more functional and user-friendly. We also unveiled a new version of our Client Portal

New faces and milestone anniversaries

Westchester Publishing Services has been growing steadily in recent years, with approximately one-quarter of our team joining the company since 2014. We are also fortunate to have employees who have been with us for 20 years or longer, including Roger Mahaffey and Sue Shaw, who each recently celebrated 25 years with Westchester. Bill Foley joined the company in 1976, making his impressive tenure second only to our Founder and CEO Dennis Pistone. Congratulations to all on your careers with Westchester!

Lending a helping hand

Being involved in our local community is important to us at Westchester Publishing Services. In addition to providing a financial donation supporting the efforts of the Connecticut Food Bank, some of our employees also gave of their time to help fill backpacks of food for distribution to area schoolchildren. These backpacks ensure families in need have access to nutritious food when school-based resources are not available. Feeding America has information on how you can support a foodbank in your local area.

A look ahead: 2018 conferences and trade shows

In 2018 Westchester Publishing Services will be involved in more industry events than ever before. We have made sponsorship and attendance commitments for several conferences and tradeshows in the US and the UK, including:

Visit our events page for a complete list, and contact us to set up a convenient time to talk! We look forward to learning more about how we can help you resolve your editorial, design, or production challenges in the year ahead, so you can fully focus on growing your company in 2018 and beyond.

By Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Westchester returned to the UK a few weeks ago for meetings with customers, partners, and potential customers, this time with three tentpole events across our trip.

Friend and colleague Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International was granted her Freedom of the City of London on 30 November, and I was fortunate enough to attend as one of her witnesses at London’s famous Guildhall. The ceremony, which essentially grants honorary citizenship to the City of London to members of guilds and dignitaries, was administered by Laura Miller, a Deputy Clerk of the Chamberlain’s Court City of London. In addition to her role at Guildhall, Miller is also a member of London’s publishing and communications guild, the Stationers’ Company. (More on them in a bit!)  Here’s a photo of Laura Miller, Lorraine Shanley, and the Beedle / Clerk of the Chamberlain’s Court from the ceremony.

On 01 December, I represented Westchester at The Bookseller’s annual FutureBook conference, where we sponsored and exhibited. The conference itself was phenomenal, covering many aspects of innovation and technology in communications and publishing, with tracks for audiobooks, educational content, and the trade industry. The session that stood out the most for me was the ‘What can we learn from the video on demand business?’ panel, which included Molly Barton from Serial Box, Jeff Norton from Awesome Media & Entertainment, and speakers from Yodomo, The Artists Partnership, and Mammoth Screen. I found Serial Box’s model for distribution of serialized titles to be very compelling, and Norton’s comments about how not just younger generations – but our society in general – are once again rapidly embracing digital ingestion of content to be thought-provoking.

The attendees at FutureBook confirmed much of what I’ve been hearing on my last few trips to the UK on behalf of Westchester, as well as in sales meetings I had in the days leading up to FutureBook. There is a keen interest in Westchester’s expanding US employee-owned operation in Connecticut, and the work that we do to support publishers from both our world headquarters in the US, as well as our offices in India. Some UK publishers have readily embraced the Domestic Full Service model used by Harvard University Press and others, through which US Production Editors, and US or UK-based copyeditors, take a developed manuscript and bring it through to final printer and ebook files with our composition operation in Chennai, India. Additionally, other publishers in the UK have expressed an interest in liaising directly with our editorial office in Noida, India, or solely with our composition operation in Chennai, India – as Bloomsbury currently does.

Louise Cameron, who is Bloomsbury’s Group Production Director very generously shared this testimonial with me, regarding the work we’ve done for Bloomsbury over the years:

“Bloomsbury has been using Westchester Publishing Services for Trade typesetting for over a decade – not just because the service is excellent but also because the company has been willing to invest and flex to support Bloomsbury’s evolving XML-based workflows.”

With a spring in my step from the above feedback, and positive decisions from three publishers I met with on this and a previous trip to proceed with working with Westchester, I continued on to my final – and most inspiring – of the industry events which brought me to London for this trip.

The Stationers’ Company is a more than 600-year-old London Guild that helps advance the publishing, media, and communications industries. It is perhaps best known as the organization that tracked copyright on British literary works as far back as Shakespeare’s folios and continued to do so in one form or another until 2000. You can learn more about their work here. There are not many Americans who are selected to be members of the Stationers’ Company; Lorraine Shanley, referenced above, is one of my fellow US residents who has been invited over the years. Very graciously, Oliver Gadsby (CEO, Rowman & Littlefield International) and Tej Sood (Managing Director, Anthem Press) sponsored me for membership, and on 05 December I was accepted in as a Freeman, or member, of the Company. It was truly an honor to join the ranks of publishing and media luminaries who have been members over the centuries, and to attend my Freeman ceremony at Stationers’ Hall, which is located in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral.  My wife came across the pond to join me for the ceremony (and yes, waiting for her at Heathrow Airport was like the opening scene of Love Actually), and it was a great memory that we will share for years to come.  Our marketing manager decided my ceremony was worthy of a press release, and below is a picture from the ceremony. I am looking forward to participating in many other Stationers’ events and supporting this amazing organization which does so much to help our industry.

Westchester is proud of the growth we are continuing to experience within the UK publishing industry. We already have a number of trips planned for our Staff in the next few months, including:

If you are interested in meeting with us at the above shows – or speaking by phone or Skype in the interim – please Contact Us to arrange a conversation about your publishing program and the many ways that we can help you.

This is my final blog post of 2017, so I will close by wishing you the happiest of holidays, and to be on the look-out for more Travels with Tyler posts in the coming year.

Conference Observations and Highlights

By David Bailis, STEM Content Director, Westchester K-12 Publishing Services

SIIA 2017 Education Business Forum
PHOTO BY Jym Wilson

Kevin Gray and I recently attended the SIIA conference in Washington, D.C. It was my first time attending the conference, so I did not know what to expect. I was pleased to find the SIIA community is very tight-knit but also quite welcoming. The focus of the SIIA conference is to bring people in the Ed Tech industry together to learn more about what others in the industry are doing, and we were able to meet a lot of important players at this conference.

Fostering the idea of collaboration and building the industry as a whole, we participated in two engaging networking activities. The first was a Speed Networking session (sponsored by Westchester K-12), which was an excellent opportunity to break the ice with other conference attendees. Though the interactions were brief, we were paired with potential clients, partners, and resources, enriching our network and providing an expanded view of the ed tech publishing world. The second session was a curated networking opportunity hosted by Educational Systemics in which we were paired with like-minded companies, either in consulting or client-vendor roles. This session was helpful in facilitating conversations and finding intersection points that we might not have otherwise uncovered.

I thought many of the sessions we attended were both interesting and thought-provoking. There was such a wide variety of topics, including artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, the intricate process of founding an Ed Tech startup company, as well as many others.

One of the sessions we attended was led by Phaedra Boinodiris, the Senior Strategy Lead Ed Tech for IBM and the Watson system. The main topic of conversation was about how artificial intelligence is being implemented in many different ways in education technology projects. One use case Phaedra gave was about how a small school in Texas is using a Minecraft mod to teach the students about epidemiology and the human immune system. Using the game, the students were able to go inside the human body and fight diseases which the software spawned using AI. This amazing use of gaming education was just one of the ways that teachers across the country are using similar applications to teach content in more interesting ways for their students.

Another session on how augmented and virtual reality are being used in education was led by Lisa Casteneda, the co-founder and CEO of foundry10, and Jussi Kajala, the chairman and COO of 3DBear. They shared that many studies have been done which seem to indicate that AR and VR have a positive effect on student performance, as well as student engagement. While the cost of VR equipment is currently high, more and more teachers are using it in their classrooms. Lisa and Jussi also shared some of the many ways teachers are using AR to explore virtually, such as creating a more welcoming school environment or “visiting” a location that would be impossible to experience otherwise, such as the South Pole or Mars!

A third session covered the process through which a startup edtech company could be established. Santeri Koivisto founded MinecraftEdu, a system that helps teachers use Minecraft to teach students a variety of content in classrooms all over the world. He spoke about his experiences coming up with an idea, finding funding, and eventually selling his company to Microsoft. Most of my personal experience is based in creating or teaching content, so it was both interesting and exciting for me to learn how Santeri was able to take the steps needed to make his business dreams a reality.

Additionally, Kevin participated in a break-out session on investing in Content vs. Platform. He shared the stage with Blackboard, myON, and a teacher representative. Each shared their unique vantage points about the buy/build/partner decisions that major players in the market have to make with regards to content creation and online delivery. Having a teacher on the panel also helped ground the discussion in the end users in the classrooms.

Kevin and I found the tenor of the conference was rather collaborative, with the attendees seeking each other out to discover ways to work together to meet their business goals. We came away from the conference with many new connections and potential opportunities to work with companies we hadn’t previously known about, and are looking forward to attending next year!

If you attended the conference, what sessions did you find to be the most informative? Share your thoughts in the comment section below, or email me at David.Bailis@westchesterk12pubsvcs.com.