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(Virtual) Travels with Tyler: UP Redux, AUP, and more

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by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

virtual conferenceUniversity Presses have been key partners of Westchester Publishing Services for decades, and were a primary impetus for us to launch our Domestic Full Service operation in Danbury, Connecticut, our India Direct Full Service operation in Noida, India, and our UK operation in Stratford upon Avon.  From Cambridge, Massachusetts to London, England to the campuses of small state universities and large research, land grant private universities, Westchester works with each partner to identify the right editorial and production options to support our partners with books and journals ranging from simple monographs to complex, 4-color textbooks.

Usually, this time of year, I’d be just wrapping up my Spring travels to England for the London Book Fair and ALPSP’s biennial UP Redux conferences, where the university presses we support gather globally to discuss the state of the industry, efforts to improving diversity at presses and within the voices represented in their lists, considerations for printing and distribution, and more.

With the pandemic impacting travel and business, many of our partner organizations are innovating and re-purposing content that had been intended for presentation at conferences as virtual meetings or webinars.  Last week, ALPSP debuted the first in a series of free webinars to substitute for the canceled UP Redux conference, with the first session focused on Open Access, titled “Monographs, open access and public policy: UKRI OA consultation 2020.”  Speakers included: Sarah Faulder (Chief Executive, Publishers’ Licensing Services), Richard Fisher (Vice Chair, Yale University Press), and Helen Snaith (Senior Policy Advisor, Research England).  A recording of the session is provided here, and key topics included the current state of the UK open access policy, trends around open access at university presses and in scholarly publishing, and the general state of affairs for university presses at this time.  I highly recommend checking out the above recording and the pending Q&A info that will be posted at the same link soon.  Upcoming webinars will cover balancing a press’ mission and money, as well as more topics on open access following the UK’s review period of its open access policies.

AUP also wisely chose to move its annual conference to a virtual model.  Keep your eyes on this page for news about the format of the virtual event to be held in June.  We’ll miss the chance to visit our friends and colleagues in person in Seattle, but are confident the program will be as engaging as the typical AUP annual conference.

Other organizations have been putting together compelling virtual meetings, including recent sessions from the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Copyright Clearance Center about how publishers and content organizations are looking beyond the current crisis to new opportunities around their content, Digital Book World’s “DBW.fm” session tomorrow about the “three-headed monster” of audiobooks, podcasts, and voice assistants, and other industry groups’ state of the union types of sessions about how the pandemic is impacting segments of our industry from printing to distribution and more.

Westchester will also soon be launching a new video about our Client Portal – and how it can help you manage your Westchester projects while you work from home.  We also have webinars planned for the next two months about the topics our clients are raising not just about our services but about the industry in general.  Stay tuned!

What virtual meetings have you found useful?  How are you considering the impact of the pandemic on the university press space?  Contact us to talk about trends you’re seeing, and any thoughts you have on how our industry is evolving.  My colleagues and I look forward to hearing from you.

Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Like so many of you reading this, in mid-March the entire staff at Westchester’s offices around the world transitioned to a work from home setup. For most of our team, this was a significant change from the office environment we’re accustomed to and for some of us, there was the added factor of guiding our children through establishing their own routine so they could continue their education remotely.

We also kept our clients informed as we were making this necessary transition, detailing the steps we were taking and to making sure the changes would have minimal to no impact on the jobs we were working on for them.

Additionally, we knew how important it is for everyone within our team to maintain the social connections we have as colleagues while we are physically dispersed.  To address this, along with the department meetings each manager conducts with their individual reports, we periodically gather together as a large group for a virtual Happy Hour. We use this time both as an opportunity to get caught up on what is happening around the company as well as have some virtual water cooler talks that help our mental well-being by sharing our experiences about what working from home is really like. Based on this article from Society for Human Resource Management, we’re on to something here!

 

 

 

 

 

Many of us have shared stories about our newest officemates during these Happy Hour gatherings. We’ve discovered some are enthusiastically jumping into their new roles, while some are lazy slackers that lay around sleeping all day. A few are even downright cattish, while others just bark out their demands. We’ve discussed appropriate remediation strategies to encourage better behavior, but these co-workers sure have a mind of their own! Thankfully, some are thrilled that we almost never leave but a few seem to be annoyed that we are around pretty much all the time. Maybe we just need to give them a little more time to understand our work habits.

 

Shifting to a way of life that is keeping us at home nearly all the time has meant different things for everyone, including spending more time with family, taking up new activities or renewing hobbies that had been forgotten due to competing demands for limited free time. Some of us are doing a really great job of maintaining our distance while communing with nature, too.

Tyler Carey Bookmask

We are also trying to help out our industry by participating in the Publishers Weekly Books Are Essential campaign and you can join in, too. Simply post a picture with a book up to your face like a facemask, then using the hashtag #Booksareessential, tag Publishers Weekly on Instagram at @pwpics, Twitter at @publisherswkly, or Facebook at @Publishers Weekly. Pictures can also be submitted to PW’s Picture of the Day portal, for potential inclusion in the magazine or newsletters. Our Chief Revenue Officer, Tyler Carey, shows us his bookmask in the picture to the left.

What are some of the ways you and your team are staying connected while you are in multiple locations? Send us a message and let us know!

Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

We are only four months into the year, but it’s clear that 2020 will be profoundly transformative. The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching impacts on the way our clients and colleagues conduct business that was unimaginable a few months ago. Westchester’s global workforce has transitioned to a distributed model in order to fully support our clients’ needs as they respond to rapidly evolving changes within the supply chain.

Below are several ways that we have worked with our clients and the industry, prior to and during the crisis.

Publishing transitions to working from home

In mid-March, recognizing the seismic relocation every company was experiencing at nearly the same time, we hosted a webinar that gathered together several publishing industry professionals to share their insights and useful ideas about ways publishers could help their staff – some who had never before worked from home – transition to a distributed workforce. You can watch the video presentation or download the slide deck and a printout of all the questions that were answered during and after the webinar. We have also curated a resources page with links to a variety of informational and educational content for you and your family.

Westchester K-12 gets a new name

In early January, we shared the exciting news that Westchester K-12 Publishing Services had changed its name to Westchester Education Services. This new name is a more accurate reflection of the expanded range of product development areas that our team is able to provide support in for educational publishers and ed tech companies. Along with the updated name comes a new and improved website.

BETT 2020

Tim Davies, Kevin J. Gray, and Walter J. Henderson, Jr., at the WES BETT BoothLater in January, Westchester Education Services attended the BETT Show which took place at London’s ExCeL Convention Centre. Our team members from the US and UK enjoyed having the opportunity to meet with education publishers and ed tech companies from across the globe and share information with them about the various ways we could help them conceptualize and bring their projects to market. Kevin Gray, President and Chief Content Officer, prepared this blog post of conference highlights.

West Margin Press

West Margin Press logoMint Editions is a recently launched imprint that is part of Ingram’s West Margin Press, and one of the newest client publishers Westchester has begun working with. As we do with all of our more than 200+ clients, we listened to the needs the Mint Editions team expressed and worked with them to customize an effective production approach that met their requirements. As West Margin’s publishing director Jennifer Newens shared, “It has been a wonderful experience working with Westchester on our book production needs for these titles!” Let us know how we can help you with the editorial and production phases of your publication process.

Denise Hart appointed at Westchester Education Services UK

In early March, we announced the appointment of Denise Hart as Operations and Project Lead at Westchester Education Services UK. Denise has extensive experience and expertise in UK educational publishing, having previously been Content and Operations Director at Rising Stars / Hodder Education; latterly advising UK educational publishers in her role as an independent Publishing Operations Consultant. Working with Tim Davies, Westchester’s UK Managing Director, Denise will be supporting Westchester Education Services UK in its continued growth in both the UK and international educational and ELT publishing sectors, as well as its work with EdTech companies worldwide. Contact Tim to arrange a convenient time to discuss your product objectives and how we can help.

Westchester Education Services DEI Mission

Nilofer and Jalen at UD Career Fair Winter 2020Nilofer Ali, Westchester Education’s Resources Manager has been very busy during the past few months. February brought the announcement of a partnership with Dayton Young Black Professionals, intended to increase awareness of career paths for publishing in the Greater Dayton area. Shortly after that, Nilofer and Jalen Turner, a University of Dayton student who also interns with Westchester, participated in the campus Career and Internship Fair to bring attention to the opportunities in educational publishing. If you haven’t visited our website recently, I encourage you to see the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion section and review the resources that Nilofer has compiled with the intention to foster a dialogue within the educational publishing industry about this important topic.

Westchester Supports UK Book Trade Awards

Further expanding its extensive sponsorship programme, Westchester Education Services UK announced its sponsorship of a key category in both of the two most prestigious 2020 UK book trade awards programmes:

  • The Independent Publishers’ Guild Award for ‘Education Publisher of the Year’.
  • The British Book Award for ‘Academic, Professional, and Education Publisher of the Year’

Keeping you informed with relevant content

We host webinars periodically, including our next one on April 28 that will be moderated by Walter J. Henderson, Jr., Senior Supervising Editor of ELT at Westchester Education Services, about supporting the needs of ELT students while they are out of school. Complete this 1 minute survey to tell us what topics you would like Westchester to provide more information on.

 

All of us at Westchester hope you, your family, and your colleagues will continue to be safe and in good health. As a business that has worked alongside publishers on their evolving publication needs for more than fifty years, we remain ready to help our industry partners. Our entire team is available to help our customers — along with anyone else in the industry with editorial, production, or other tasks related to your publishing program or online content. We invite you to give us a call, send an email, visit our website, or follow us on LinkedIn to remain connected during these unprecedented times.

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.