Westchester Publishing Services

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Meet Celeste Bilyard

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Celeste Bilyard, Production Manager, Journal Services
Celeste Bilyard, Production Manager, Journal Services

Who’s minding your journals at your current vendor? Do they play a proactive role to ensure editorial and production requirements are being handled as efficiently as possible?  Westchester Publishing Services has provided high-touch, high-quality support of journals for over a decade, and is more of a partner than a vendor to our clients.  How?

Meet Celeste Bilyard.  Celeste, like several members of our management team, is a veteran from Greenwood Publishing. Celeste began her career in publishing as an apprentice to the production manager, where she learned the ropes on book production, reprints, copyright, engaged with printers and vendors, and much more.  In between Greenwood and Westchester, Celeste added extra skills to repertoire, including freelance design, coding, and customer service. All of these skills helped her to understand a client’s products and processes to help resolve bottlenecks and challenges.  “Clients expect us to be knowledgeable in these areas and to use that knowledge throughout production to deliver a quality product in a timely manner.  They depend on us, trust us,” she says.

At Westchester, Celeste rapidly became one of the leaders within our then developing journals program.  Her approach to different journal cycles and shorter run times made her a very valuable asset to our clients as we worked collaboratively to address expanding needs, including open access, continuous publishing, onshore and offshore editing, and more. “Clients enjoy the copyediting choices and are extremely satisfied.” she noted.

Celeste relishes the fast-natured pace of the journal department. “Each day is exciting. Every staff member brings different strengths to the department. Some are very technical, some excel at file analysis, some at troubleshooting, resolutions, scheduling tight turnaround times, understanding of coding, and older systems knowledge. This allows us to pair a project to team members who will best suit the journal’s needs, and information is shared to make the team stronger. We help each other in maintaining a well-rounded department.”

Due to this versatility, each client – and for some clients, each journal – has unique workflows. Clients are not expected to select a set workflow for their journal production; rather, Celeste, Terry, and other members of our team collaborate with new clients, working closely and tirelessly to discuss expectations and create custom procedures and profiles in our Client Portal.

This free consulting that is applied to each project and partnership is valuable for both us and our clients.  Wouldn’t you like to know more about how we can help you?  Contact us.

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.

Tim Davies, Managing Director
Tim Davies, Managing Director

Tim Davies was appointed Managing Director of our new, UK operation in 2018.

Tim is well-known in the British publishing industry, with a strong reputation and an excellent network of industry contacts. His previous roles include Managing Director at The History Press and multiple senior management positions at Oxford University Press, HarperCollins UK, Faber & Faber and others. He is also an executive coach and a mentor on the Independent Publishers Guild’s Mentor Scheme.

Why is Tim so good at being consultative with our UK-based customers?  Well, he began his career as a trainee sales representative at Granada Publishing, later acquired by William Collins. From the start, he was aware how fortunate he was to be in the industry, and enjoyed the enthusiasm and passion the professionals around him brought to their positions. Over the subsequent decades, he honed and developed his industry knowledge.  Through his volunteer position as a mentor in the IPG, he has returned the favour by helping many start-up ventures with consultation on how best to launch or grow their businesses.  It was through our network of British publishers and other industry figures, that a resounding call came back with “Tim Davies”, when we asked who would be a good fit to run our burgeoning UK operation.

In early 2018, Tim came on board in an interim role to help formalise our UK office and grow Westchester’s UK business, which offers editorial and production services to publishers as large as Bloomsbury and as small as those with only a few titles per year. After the 2018 London Book Fair, Tim realised there were significant opportunities to expand in the market, and came on in a full-time role. “I always understood that there is a lot of competition for our services in the market, but that our value proposition is different from the others. Specifically, we’re employee-owned, we’ve been trading for 50 years, we wholly-own our operation in India, and we have an ethical and conscientious approach with both our clients and our staff.” The fact that each client starts with a “kick off” launch meeting with members of Westchester’s senior management team, to essentially freely consult about how best to address their pre-press needs, was very consistent with Tim’s ethos and approach.  “We adapt to our clients’ workflow and processes in the early stages, so there are as few surprises as possible during each project.”

Here’s what one of our UK clients says… “Lion Hudson has partnered with Westchester on a content re-purposing programme for our new Lion Scholar imprint and I have been extremely impressed by Westchester’s professionalism and high-quality services. Working with their UK, US, and India-based senior managers on the workflow at the initiation of the projects has been fluid and productive, with conference calls and video meetings arranged as and when needed. Once the workflow was agreed and the individual projects set up, the India-based project management team has consistently delivered high-quality services – providing proofs to the agreed timeframes, and flagging and working with me to resolve any content or file-based issues. Any initial reservations I had on communication challenges and time zone differences were very soon dispelled. We also use Westchester’s India-based proofreading and indexing services, which are also of a high standard. I look forward to working with Westchester on future projects.”

“It’s this approach that resonates well with publishers in the UK looking for a consultative vendor relationship, coupled with the cost savings of using an Indian typesetting or editorial operation. We are growing rapidly and are very proud to have been given the opportunity to support the publishers with whom we work.”

Photo of ISA world events timeline since 1959
Timeline of world events since ISA’s founding, 60 years ago.

Hot on the heels of my trip to London for the London Book Fair, I visited another country in the Commonwealth, heading up to Toronto, Canada for the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention. For those of you not familiar with the ISA, it’s the world’s premier membership organization for researchers on topics of political science, globalization, international research, and more.  Their mission is to connect “scholars, practitioners, and students across the globe,” and based on the diversity and representation within the panels and attendance of over 6,000 researchers at this year’s convention, the ISA delivers on this mission very effectively as they celebrate their 60th anniversary.  Sessions and presentations covered topics related to specific current affairs issues, emerging methodologies in research and technology, diversity in research coverage as well as inclusivity within the research community, challenges to democracy, and much more.  From my attendance, I can see a very interesting collection of new white papers coming from these policy groups in the months to come.

Dozens of Westchester’s editorial and production clients were represented in the list of presenters and at stands in the Exhibit Hall, including Columbia University Press, Brookings Institution Press, Cornell University Press, The MIT Press, Macmillan Publishers, Princeton University Press, the United States Institute of Peace Press, W.W. Norton, The Cato Institute, and other policy groups and academic publishers. For Westchester, it was an opportunity to connect with a number of our clients and prospective partners to discuss how best our editorial and production services for the policy group and academic markets can help their publications programs, including the expansion of data visualization capabilities.

For our clients, the ISA Convention provided a few different opportunities. For some of our clients and partners, attending was a branding exercise, as their international studies lists have grown in recent years and they wanted to highlight that to researchers in the fields covered by the conference presentations. For other publishers and policy groups, the convention allowed them to pursue acquisitions of new titles, papers, and projects by meeting with some of the most noted scholars in the foreign affairs and policy areas about potential projects. For other publishers, sales were brisk at their booths, where their lists of scholarly and policy related titles were in high demand by researchers and institutions looking to expand their reference libraries.

Next year’s ISA Convention will be held in Hawai’i, a destination that can sometimes be difficult for researchers to get included in their budget, but due to the impact of the conference on the global study of international relations and current affairs there is no doubt turnout will continue to be strong.

Are you a publisher of academic or policy content, looking to explore ways you can expand your editorial, design, and production capacity, or reduce costs to produce your white papers, books, and journals?  Contact us to learn more about how Westchester can help.

Once again, Westchester exhibited at the London Book Fair at the Olympia in Kensington, London, UK. This year, Dennis Pistone (Chairman) and Tim Davies (Managing Director, UK) were in attendance at our stand, and I joined them for the three days of the Fair to meet with our UK clients, as well as other partners from the US and Europe that were in attendance.

Cecil Court Sign

I arrived to London before the Fair, to adjust to the jet lag prior to commencing the three busy days at the Olympia. To pass the time in a literary way on the day before the Fair, I visited Cecil Court. This tiny, one-block street in Central London is known as the city’s – and perhaps the world’s – best collection of antique book dealers, print makers, and more. Photos are below, and a much better researched and detailed overview is available on Atlas Obscura, but suffice it to say that any book lover’s visit to London should include a brief stop by this Diagon Alley of literature.

With the Book Fair underway on Tuesday the 12th, Tim, Dennis, and I were off to three solid days of meetings with customers, potential customers, partners, and friends. Leading up to the Fair, Publishers Weekly had covered Westchester’s 50th anniversary in an article in the March 4, 2019 issue.  During the Fair, the coverage continued with an article in the Publishers Weekly London Book Fair Daily highlighting our expansion in the UK market through opening our office in Stratford-upon-Avon and hiring Managing Director Tim Davies.

To cap off the observation of Westchester turning a half century old, Founder and Chairman Dennis Pistone joined Tim and me in our stand – along with our customers and partners attending the Fair – to toast our 50th. With friends from the IPG, Stationers’ Company, the media, and our growing UK client list in attendance, we were fortunate and happy to mark this milestone with well wishes all around for another half century.

After a busy few days at the Fair and in other meetings around London with our partners, I had one last stop to make. As covered extensively in the media last year, Westchester’s partnership with Dropbox has helped our clients have faster file transfers with Westchester, increased internal speed and expanded capabilities within Westchester itself, and serves as the platform for our Client Portal. At the tail end of my trip to London, I was able to meet up with our partners from the UK Dropbox office at the London Library, to film a short overview of our work together. Stay tuned for footage from this conversation, coming this Spring, sharing more insights about the ways the Client Portal is expanding to help our clients better interact with their editorial and production projects at Westchester.

London Library

Are you a UK-based publisher looking to learn more about how Westchester can help you with your editorial and production needs? Visit our new UK website and contact us to connect with Tim Davies and discuss your publishing program.