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Westchester’s Client Portal Shortlisted for The Stationers’ Company Innovation Excellence Awards

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Stationers Company Shortlisted Innovation Excellence Awards 2019

Wow! We’re all really excited at Westchester Publishing Services about the news we just received that The Stationers’ Company, London’s guild for the publishing and media industries, has shortlisted Westchester’s Client Portal for its annual Innovation Excellence Awards. The Innovation Excellence Awards are an annual event honoring solutions in the following categories: Business Process, Communications, Customer Experience, Product Design, Product Performance, and Service Development. Competitors are firms that provide solutions in the printing, printing supplies, publishing, packaging, office products, promotion and communication verticals of our shared industries. Westchester’s Client Portal, which allows publishers real-time online access to each of their editorial and production projects in process at Westchester, is a no-cost project management platform developed in-house and built using the Dropbox API.

This news comes just as Westchester preps to roll out version v2019.C.05 of the Client Portal, with new features and enhancements we will announce in coming days.

The awards competition will be held at the historic Stationers’ Hall on Ave Maria Lane, near St. Paul’s Cathedral in Central London, on 25 June 2019. Stay tuned to hear how we fare, but it truly is an honor just to be nominated!

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

This past Friday, the W3C announced the final specification for EPUB 3.2 files. What does this mean for you? Well, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) acts as the industry body for evaluating and advancing new digital file formats for use online and in devices. As part of their continual vetting of new frontiers for EPUB files, iterations over the years have supported features ranging from embedding fonts, to embedding or streaming video files, accessibility options, tracking the corresponding page numbers in print editions of titles, and more. The EPUB 3.2 standard opens up more options for using web-based content within an EPUB, as well as advances in accessibility.

Are you taking full advantage of the options available for your digital publications? Contact Westchester Publishing Services today to talk about your goals for your EPUB, mobi, XML, and other digital files. Over 150 publishers use Westchester to help them craft perfect print and digital products. Let’s talk about your EPUBs and how we can help you maximize the functionality of your digital editions.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

I joined Wolters Kluwer’s Aspen Publishing imprint in 2001 as a sales rep. At the time, law books (and they were almost solely physical books at that time) were sold by outside sales reps, direct mail, and inside telecom sales reps.  During my time at Aspen, our website became a growing channel for sales, and we launched a series of digital products to compete with LexisNexis to ensure we got as much money for our online content as possible. Ironically, at the same time, Westchester Publishing Services – then only typesetting books in the US – was one of Aspen’s typesetters, only to be replaced by offshore typesetting operations, much the way sales jobs like the one I had held in a phone sales operation were ultimately eclipsed by online and other channels for selling law books that differed from how business had been done in the 90s.

In the intervening years, I’ve held other jobs in publishing and communications, but my roots were always in legal publishing. As US-based Westchester Publishing Services grew by buying an offshore company and recruiting key talent from other typesetters, Westchester maintained its roots in professional publishing as well – but with a difference when compared to other offshore vendors for legal, accounting, and professional content.

While many typesetting companies – especially those that proffer XML-first workflows and online editing platforms – require you to adapt to their workflows and approaches, Westchester remains a consultative, bespoke partner keen on ensuring minimal disruption for you, your authors, and your readers. Westchester’s managers, including Terry Colosimo and Mona Tiwary engage in extensive onboarding discussions with each of our professional publishing clients, to best understand the format their assets are in, when XML is needed at different stages for online platforms and more, whether editing using Bluebook, MLA, or other styles is needed, the schedules and requirements for each product or series, and the most efficient – and inexpensive – ways to getting your publications ready for print and digital release as quickly as possible. This level of effort minimizes the amount of time our professional publishing clients have to invest in adapting to a vendor, and also minimizes the amount of time they have to engage with each project once it has been sent to Westchester for editorial or production.

We have been on your side of the desk as publishers, and we want to ensure all the right questions are being asked.  Click here  to learn more about our capabilities for legal, accounting, and professional publishers, and contact us to discuss your program and how we can help you save money and ensure quality. 

There’s an often overlooked page on Westchester’s website called “Pre-Edit Services.” Pre-Edit services are not an in-demand service that publishers often shop for, the way they do copyediting, design, typesetting, or ePub conversion.  If you’re a publisher that uses a pre-editing template or system, you may feel you do not need to explore alternatives.  If you’re a publisher that doesn’t currently pre-edit your manuscripts before they go to copyediting, you may be missing out on a great way to save copyediting costs and time, as well as standardize your publications.

If you publish more than a handful of books each year, you have likely run into the types of issues where you have different copyeditors who each structure and tag manuscripts differently, or somehow strip out any styles or tags you or the author had inserted in the first place.  This is one of those problems where the ability to put a number on the cost for your staff’s time to address this problem is hard to grasp – but it’s not insubstantial as your publishing program grows and grows.

How does Westchester pre-edit titles for our clients?  We work with each client to best understand their content. This no-cost consultation helps ensure that your books are not just placed into a cookie cutter template that might be better suited to a totally different type of publisher.  Do you publish poetry, cookbooks, mysteries? Each of these needs to be set up differently for pre-edit services, and we’ll work with you to establish tags that are clean, make sense to you and your copyeditors – and best of all, translate into Westchester’s typesetting system to help keep your composition costs down too.

Want to know what else makes this great?  It’s free.  If you commit to sending an agreed upon volume of books to Westchester annually, after trying us out and making sure we’re for you, we’ll set the pre-edit tags and template up specifically for you, give you guidance for your copyeditors, and then typeset your books for as little as $1.75 per page.  Contact us to learn more.

 

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Westchester is proud to be celebrating 50 years of providing publishers with quality pre-press services. The ways that content can be delivered and accessed are more numerous now than at any other time since Gutenberg invented the printing press, but our primary mission continues to be ensuring that we consistently deliver excellent customer service and finished files to our clients on every project we handle. Read on to see some of the significant moments that began our golden anniversary year:

Publishers Weekly Westchester Publishing Services 50th Anniversary coverWestchester turns 50!

Westchester began operations in 1969, and during the past 50 years the company has grown and evolved into what is currently the only U.S. based firm whose exclusive business has always been as a provider of pre-press services for publishers. We shared the celebratory news in the February 18 edition of Publishers Weekly, which also included this letter from President and CEO, Paul J. Crecca.

 

Macmillan Publishers U.S. HeadquartersMacmillan U.S. extends contract with Westchester

In late March, after reviewing a number of options for handling their book composition requirements, Macmillan Publishers signed a new agreement with Westchester to continue providing U.S. managed book composition services for virtually all of their U.S. trade titles. We’re pleased that this long-term partnership which began nearly 30 years ago in 1992, will continue to grow stronger in the years to come.

 

Tim Davies, Tyler M. Carey and Dennis PistoneLondon Book Fair

Members of the Westchester management team from the United States and United Kingdom returned to the Olympia this past March for London Book Fair. It was a busy three days of appointments with clients, prospective customers, and publishing industry friends. London Book Fair also provided the ideal backdrop to raise a celebratory glass to 50 years of success. Take a minute to enjoy some of the highlights in this installment of Travels with Tyler.

 

Tyler M. Carey attends the International Studies Association 2019 Conference

International Studies Association Conference

The month of March had a double meaning for our international ambassador of publishing services, a/k/a Chief Revenue Officer, Tyler M. Carey. He received a few more stamps in his passport as he made his way from London Book Fair, to Toronto, Ontario, for the 60th Annual International Studies Association convention. Catch up on highlights of his Canadian trip in this bonus edition of Travels with Tyler.

 

Westchester UK website

The UK office in Stratford upon Avon is off to a very strong start. This past February, we launched the new Westchester Publishing Services UK website to help publishers based in the UK and Europe learn more about the various editorial and typesetting options we can provide for their publications. Take a look around and let us know what you think!

 

Tim Davies, Managing Director, Westchester Publishing Services UKMeet Tim Davies

If you’re a reader of our blog, you may be familiar with the profiles we publish periodically focusing on key personnel within the Westchester organization. In this recent post, we introduce you to Tim Davies, Managing Director of Westchester Publishing Services UK.

 

SXSW EDU 2019

In March, Westchester K-12’s Kevin J. Gray and Tim Cross attended the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, TX. Between appointments with clients and prospective customers, they had the opportunity to listen to sessions led by thought leaders and innovators in the education field. Read Kevin’s conference summary.to learn some of the conference highlights.

 

A positive ripple effect

A presenting sponsor of the SXSW EDU conference this year was Chevron, who is also a corporate partner of DonorsChoose.org, an online platform where public school teachers are able to submit funding requests for their classroom projects. Find out how receiving a gift card to DonorsChoose.org at the conference became the catalyst for a new initiative being led by our K-12 team.

 

Unfamiliar becomes familiar with award-winning

Westchester K-12 is now officially an award-winning team! The graphic novel Unfamiliar, an original work for middle grade readers that was conceptualized and created by our colleagues in Dayton, recently received an award from the Dayton area chapter of the American Advertising Federation. Take a look at this video, for a behind-the-scenes peek at some of the different steps involved in creating a graphic novel.

 

It’s easy to stay informed about the various conferences Westchester will be attending throughout the year, or learn more about our editorial and typesetting services by visiting our websites (westchesterpublishingservices.com, westchesterk12publishingservices.com, and westchesterpublishingservices.co.uk). You can also subscribe to our blog, or contact us to find out how we can become your trusted partner in publishing.