Westchester Publishing Services

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Westchester and Macmillan Publishers announce new agreement

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CONTINUING A PARTNERSHIP OF MORE THAN A QUARTER-CENTURY

From Westchester Publishing Services’ beginnings as a typesetting company exactly fifty years ago, trade publishers have relied on the pre-press services we provide. Case in point – the U.S. division of Macmillan Publishers, for which in 1992 we began providing composition services on selected titles. The partnership between our companies has strengthened over time, with Westchester handling virtually all of the trade titles that Macmillan Publishers U.S. division releases annually over the past decade. This includes many titles that have contributed to Macmillan’s continued critical and commercial success, including the award-winning children’s titles in their Roaring Brook Press imprint, Jonathan Franzen’s novels, and James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty.

Westchester realizes that publishers have myriad options when deciding on who will provide editorial and composition services for their publications. We feel particularly privileged that Macmillan Publishers has selected Westchester to continue to provide composition services on virtually all of their titles. Read about the factors Macmillan considered, and ultimately reaffirmed in deciding that Westchester Publishing Services remains the right pre-press services provider for their publications. You can also visit our U.S. serviced Composition Typesetting webpage for more information about the composition service Macmillan has been committed to for more than ten years.

Westchester customizes our full array of editorial and composition service offerings to the specific requirements of each of our clients. Contact us to schedule an exploratory discussion of how we can help you get your titles to market more efficiently and cost effectively than your current processes.

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing and Conference Manager 

The 4th Annual Publishers Weekly Star Watch event took place in New York City on September 12, 2018. Co-hosted by Publishers Weekly and Frankfurt Buchmesse – producers of the Frankfurt Book Fair, it shines a spotlight on the contributions and innovations of people making an exceptional impact in the US or Canadian book publishing industry.

This year the nominating committee received nearly 300 individual submissions that were carefully considered and narrowed down to a field of 40 individuals receiving PW Star Watch Honoree status. We were thrilled to learn our colleague, Westchester K-12 Publishing Services Managing Director, Kevin J. Gray, was one of the finalists. The achievements and qualities Kevin displays that were integral to his selection were profiled in the September 3, 2018 edition of Publishers Weekly.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Kevin about the significance of this recognition for him, and he shared these thoughts:

“It’s incredibly exciting to be nominated as a Publishers Weekly Star Watch top honoree. This recognition from Publishers Weekly is an affirmation of the dedicated focus on excellence that the managers and staff of Westchester Publishing Services K-12 demonstrate daily. Our success would not be possible without their contributions. I’m grateful to be part of a company that understands the needs of a changing market and that empowers its leaders to grow the business in directions that anticipate and respond to the needs of publishers and educators.”

Congratulations to Kevin and the entire Westchester K-12 team on earning this achievement!

All of us at Westchester Publishing Services are very excited to share this press release with full details about the launch of our UK office in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. With the opening of the office, Tim Davies, who initially joined on earlier this year as our Interim  Managing Director of Westchester Publishing  Services UK, has now taken on the role of Managing Director for the UK operation.

Westchester is proud of the work we have done for UK publishers for more than a decade, providing editorial and production support for Bloomsbury, UCL  Press, and many others. This next logical step of opening an office, which will provide a base to our UK division and resources, is part of Westchester’s intention to continue growing our footprint and presence in the UK  market and beyond, supporting UK  and European publishers for the long term.

Please contact us to learn more about Westchester’s UK operations and capabilities.

George Baier IV is Media Industry Principal at Dropbox, responsible for communicating the company’s unique perspective on how Dropbox can transform work and IT infrastructure for customers in the media vertical. George works closely with customers to deliver product features and solutions that meet specific media customer needs.

Westchester:  George, Westchester is excited about our partnership with Dropbox which has resulted in several positive developments including upgrades to our internal technology, and further enhancements on our Client Portal. Can you share with readers a little about your background in publishing, and how that led to your current role with Dropbox?

George: I’ve worked in the publishing and media industry for over a decade, across different leadership roles involving technology, content, and design. Prior to Dropbox, I served as a VP in IT at Macmillan, where I helped deploy tools that the organization’s teams and employees still use today. One of those tools was Dropbox, which consolidated the applications people organically brought to work, and gave teams the freedom to collaborate under a common platform. Seeing employees get excited about technology like Dropbox ultimately led me to the role I currently hold — Media Industry Principal — in which I help even more media customers deploy tools to help them do their best work. 

Westchester: What makes you so passionate about publishing in particular, and how does that inform the work Dropbox is doing with companies in the media sector?

George: Trade publishing continues to evolve but its business model still operates on the creation of content, and the consumption of that content by readers that are willing to pay for it. Unlike other forms of media, the straightforwardness of the relationship between publishers and audiences is something I’ve always found appealing. In this spirit, Dropbox helps creators move their process forward, and is designed for any author to use as a means to enable creativity at scale. It’s also part of the reason we continue integrating with tools that are industry-standard within publishing while seeing increased adoption overall.

Westchester: What is the potential Dropbox sees in the media space – specifically in publishing, during the next couple of years?

George: Teams and users in the publishing, media, and entertainment space created and saved more than a billion files in Dropbox last year. Every day those teams — especially in publishing — are under pressure to create more content in less time. As a result, there’s a growing need to manage complex projects at scale, as content often becomes trapped in silos and spread across teams, tools, and devices. We see an opportunity for Dropbox to continue serving as a home for content and the collaboration around it. 

In parallel, we see an opportunity to support authors through a platform that unifies documents, rich media, and the exchange of ideas. Those with talent and creativity should be enabled to tell stories with less friction, wherever and whenever inspiration may strike. I observed firsthand at Macmillan how unique tools like Dropbox can be additive to an author’s creative toolkit, which ultimately led me to Dropbox itself — I wanted closer involvement in helping other organizations benefit from our platform.

Westchester: We came to Dropbox with several situations we needed to resolve – including upgrading our own internal infrastructure, working with our operations teams around the globe, version control, handling large files, and the development of our Client Portal.  Walk us through the approach Dropbox took to evaluate our requirements and propose specific solutions.

George: We worked closely with several stakeholders at Westchester to offer guidance on a Team Folder system that met their needs and matched their investment in our product’s deployment, while ensuring no data loss occurred throughout the migration and deployment process. In general, our approach was to make a transition to Dropbox as seamless as possible, helping them maximize the full benefit of our platform to support large volumes of content and launch their Client Portal. This also involved listening to input from production, editorial staff, and ensuring we could follow through on the capabilities promised as part of our deployment. Interestingly, as we continued working together, we uncovered even more ways that Dropbox could support Westchester, whether it be handling large files, version control capabilities, or expanded Dropbox previews of file types like ePub. 

Westchester: Are the challenges that we brought to Dropbox consistent with what you see from other media firms? What other types of issues do you and your team help resolve for companies in the media industry?

George: Westchester is a great example of organizational vision and execution facilitating the full promise of Dropbox, from start to finish across migration and deployment phases — adoption, integration, workflow enablement and, ultimately, transformation. We weren’t surprised how quickly Westchester did it, given the strong leadership and cross-functional partnership, but it became clear that Dropbox was additive to Westchester’s holistic philosophy to technology, content management, and infrastructure migration. Our goal is help replicate the success of Westchester’s IT maturity model for other customers that want to mature their business through the capabilities of our collaboration platform. 

Westchester: Many publishers have their own in-house architecture or use other file transfer and archival systems. How does Dropbox differ in its ability to support the ways publishers handle projects with multiple stakeholders, versions, and large files?

George: Over the past few years, we’ve evolved from a place to store your files to a place where collaboration gets easier. We’ve released several new products and features like Paper, Smart Sync, Showcase, and Team Folders that have made it incredibly easy for publishers to adopt our platform, specific to projects involving multiple stakeholders, versions, and large files. These build upon our core product capabilities including best-in-class file sync/share, previews, and unlimited file size uploads. 

More specific to file transfer and archival systems, we see patterns of work that still rely on inefficient methods of content transfer — FTP, email, file attachments — across businesses today. The products and features I’ve mentioned, especially Showcase, can help modernize those legacy tools, the use of which can result in lost time and focus away from the content itself. In addition, Dropbox also integrates natively in digital asset management (DAM) tools like Widen, nicely complementing archival systems of record that store IP. This integration facilitates our larger platform strategy, in which Dropbox can work with tools and systems customers have already purchased, as opposed to creating another ‘walled garden’. 

Westchester: We’re excited about the new release of our Client Portal, because it uses the Dropbox API integrated with the DBX platform to provide clients with a secure, cloud-based file management, and communications hub for their projects (see video). How do you see our ability to extend the use of the Dropbox platform to clients as a change in the way publishers of all sizes are able to interact with their vendors?

George: The Client Portal is an impressive example of leveraging the power of DBX Platform to customize specific publishing workflows for both internal and external audiences. As more and more content is produced, it often goes through key stages of creation, feedback, and distribution — which can, unfortunately, lead to lost time searching for the latest versions, or “work about work” if not properly managed. Ultimately, we think our APIs can serve as the connective tissue for collaborative work among Dropbox, publishers, and vendors, facilitating a unified home for work across the entire content lifecycle.

Westchester: Tell us more about the new features that Dropbox has rolled out recently that would be of interest to our clients and publishing partners.  Are there additional developments on the horizon that you’re able to share with us?

George: Recently, Dropbox announced expanded partnerships with Canva, Final Draft, Frame.io, Getty Images, Shift.io, Marvel, and Widen to bridge content silos, in support of teams that continue creating content at an exponential rate. These integrations complement core Dropbox product capabilities like best-in-class file sync/share, no-download shared links to protect IP, expanded preview capabilities like EPUB, ZIP, RAR, and enhanced previews of PPT and PDF. Especially as rich media and visual assets become ingrained in traditional and digital publishing, we’re focused on giving authors and teams more flexibility to bring Dropbox closer to the tools they already use. In the future, we’ll be looking for more ways to expand our relationship with those seven partners, and other publishing-optimized tools like Scrivener, that integrate with our collaboration platform meaningfully.

Westchester: For publishers interested in exploring the solutions Dropbox can offer for their own particular challenges, what’s the best way to reach you?

George: You can always connect with me on LinkedIn (George Baier IV), or check out our Flow Together eBook if you’d like to learn more as well.  

Westchester: George, thank you for taking the time to share your insights about publishing and technology. For clients and prospective partners interested in learning more about our Client Portal, and our editorial and production services, please Contact Us.

by Kevin J. Gray, Managing Director, Westchester K-12 Publishing Services

We launched the K-12 division just over a year ago, debuting at the AAP Content in Context forum. Westchester K-12 was founded on the belief that educational publishers deserved a higher level of product development support than they were receiving, and I was confident this fledgling division could deliver on that promise.

Over the course of the past year, Westchester K-12 has grown from a group that highly leveraged the assets of our academic, journal, and trade group into a freestanding division that is a significant part of the company footprint. Our team of dedicated, experienced professionals built impressive careers with other successful publishers and vendors before joining Westchester K-12 to lead content development, art, design, and production in all subject areas for our clients. We’ve added processes and resources unique to the needs of educational publishers while retaining the best practices of our parent company.

Members of the Westchester K-12 team are located throughout the country, so last week, we brought our geographically dispersed workforce into our Dayton, Ohio K-12 headquarters for our first WPS K-12 Summit. The summit provided team members an open forum to review what’s working, while also determining how we sustain that model as we continue to grow. There were two full days of workshops with an emphasis on reflection and planning, examining who we work with, what seats we’ll need to fill, what processes need to be codified, and how we tend to the nascent culture we’ve established, ensuring its scalability and continued relevance. The meetings were collaborative and the team left energized, taking with them both a shared vision and concrete steps for implementation that will lead to continued success.

You may be wondering what it all means to you. I share news of this summit so that you have a better understanding of Westchester K-12’s commitment to the high quality work we create and to continuing the positive experiences of our customer base. As we grow, we expect to hold these summits regularly, allowing us to make conscious decisions about how we retain the core vision from which the organization sprung. I’m proud of what our division has accomplished in its first year and I look forward to what the next 12 months will bring.