Westchester Publishing Services

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Data Visualization in White Papers and Books for Policy Programs

Services

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Why do policy groups partner with US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services on their books and white papers?  We provide a wider breadth of offerings than most individual editorial and design freelancers – or even competing vendors – are capable of.

One of the trickier aspects of any policy or analysis publication can be data visualization.  Get it right and your book or paper really stands out, delivering meaningful content visually and with impact. Get it wrong and you’ve got a mess on your hands that looks like a PowerPoint done by a high school student.

To really get data visualization right in the first place is often quite expensive – and something that requires having the right resource available to start work as soon as your publication is set to go to design, and in turn publication.  Many policy publications are time sensitive, making this approach a risky gamble from scheduling and cost perspectives. This is where Westchester can help.

We are a US employee-owned company with US-based designers, offshore typesetters that span 3 shifts, and hundreds of staff and freelancers ready to go at a moment’s notice.  If you have a publication that is time sensitive but also requires high impact visuals, we are your most affordable and reliable option.  In many instances, the policy publications we work on are embargoed or at the very least fall under copyright, so it would be improper of us to share examples of our work.  This past year, though, we worked on an open access title with Brookings Institution Press – the CEQ Handbook – which, as it is open access, is available to be viewed online.  This link brings you to the CEQ Institute’s page, where you can view sections of the publication online at no cost.  For publishers that handle economics content, or any other type of content that needs to be presented with high-quality data viz, it’s worth flipping through the PDF to see the great work that Brookings and its author, Nora Lustig, did on the title.  We were pleased to be selected by Brookings to provide the editorial and production services that resulted in the final printer and online files.

I also encourage you to visit our services page to learn about the complete array of high-quality, reliable pre-press services we provide for policy groups, think tanks, and foundations. Rely on Westchester – we have the expertise your projects require, whenever you need it.

 

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Many year in review pieces come out in December, which means anything that happens the last few weeks of the year runs the risk of getting overlooked. That’s why I decided it might be better to wait a bit before sharing some of Westchester’s 2018 highlights with you:

Client Portal Enhancements

We continue to add capabilities to the Client Portal, our project management system that helps put more productivity and time back in the hands of our clients. Take a brief tour of the different ways the Client Portal gives you visibility to your projects while they’re with Westchester.

 

Prepress services whitepaper

Published and distributed by Publishers Weekly, Westchester sponsored this comprehensive report that provides in-depth analysis on why using the right third-party vendor to take care of editorial and composition services for your publication projects not only makes fiscal sense, but also frees up valuable resources within your company to focus on growing your business.

 

Westchester K-12 opens an office

2018 began with the opening of our K-12 division’s office in Dayton, Ohio. It’s an ideal central base for our team, given its proximity to several of our K-12 publisher clients who have offices in the Midwest region, combined with the large pool of educational publishing talent that calls the area home.

Westchester UK opens an office

After careful analysis and the strong reception we received in the market, we officially opened the doors to our Westchester UK office in Stratford upon Avon in September  – an apropos location given that it’s the birthplace of the Bard himself. Tim Davies, who was appointed as our UK Managing Director, has signed on a number of new clients who have been very pleased with the quality and the cost savings they can achieve when we provide editorial and typesetting services on their projects.

Expanded partnership with Dropbox

Our partnership with Dropbox continued to grow stronger throughout 2018. We collaborated on a case study about how we use Dropbox within our workflow processes with clients, and have integrated the Dropbox API into our Client Portal to further improve the UX, and deliver efficiencies for clients using this project management tool. We also had a discussion with George Baier to better understand how Dropbox envisions the ways media and technology will continue to intersect.

K-12 Familiarity

In the October newsletter I shared with you that our Dayton-based K-12 Publishing Services division was working on some special projects in front of the camera. One of the video projects the team focused on is about a graphic novel titled Unfamiliar. Take a look behind the scenes to see how our content and art teams created this graphic novel that addresses the themes of diversity and inclusivity in a format that students can engage with and see themselves in.

We built a new website!

The Dayton team was very busy this fall with a number of projects, including the updated and expanded Westchester K-12 website. Providing a complete overview of all the capabilities our K-12 team can execute on for educational publishers, it’s a great way to learn more about Westchester K-12. Click the image on the right to take a tour, and let us know what you think about it,

Our following grows

The number of people following us on LinkedIn nearly doubled in 2018. It’s a great way to stay in the know about what’s happening at Westchester, along with our website, blog, and other social media channels. If you’re not already connecting with us through at least one of these outlets, you should check them out so you can always be up to date!

On the road again…

The Westchester team was very busy in 2018, attending conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, including London Book Fair, Book Expo, ILA (International Literacy Association) NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Math), AUP (Association of University Publishers), IPG (Independent Publishers Guild), Frankfurt Book Fair, and many more. Be sure to visit our Conferences & Events page to see where we will be this year, and make an appointment to meet with us.

This is a very special year for Westchester Publishing Services, as 2019 marks 50 years since the company was founded. While some of the faces and much of the technology has changed over the past half-century, the one constant is the pride every employee has in delivering excellence on every job they work on for every client. We thank everyone who has been a part of this amazing journey, and are looking forward to celebrating this special milestone throughout the year!

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

As announced last summer, Westchester Publishing Services partnered with Dropbox to use its Dropbox API as part of the architecture of our Client Portal. Since then, we’ve been hard at work to bring you even more enhancements, resulting in the release of Version 2018.C.03, late last year.

To start off the new year, I thought I’d take a few minutes to give you a relatively concise tour of all the great features the Client Portal has to help you streamline management on your Westchester projects.  Want to learn more about how you can use the Client Portal to easily submit editorial and production projects to Westchester, track the assets and status of your project at each pass, customize dashboards and reports, email your rep at Westchester, and more?

If you’ve got about 9 minutes, you can learn more about the core editorial and production features as well as our newest enhancements to the Client Portal.

After you’ve toured the Client Portal, contact Westchester to learn how you can use it to help you trim costs and condense schedules on your publications projects.

 

Keeping costs in check on publication projects may mean you need to rely on outside editorial and production resources. If you decide to work with a production facility that is located offshore, how can you be certain that your expectations for high-quality production values will be achieved while also maintaining trim budgets and tight schedules?

Meet Mona Tiwary, Director of Publishing Services, Westchester Publishing Services, India.

Mona possesses nearly two decades of distinguished experience in producing a multitude of print and digital products for top publishers like McGraw-Hill and Cengage. She joined Westchester Publishing Services in 2015 as the business head of the New Delhi Business Unit. Her strong understanding of the publishing needs/goals of publishers in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia and her knowledge of the K-12, higher education, professional, trade, and academic markets make her a valuable asset for WPS.

Mona leads a highly skilled team of editorial and production resources at our wholly-owned and US-managed production facility, in New Delhi. This team includes project managers with expertise in end-to-end project management services, each with approximately a decade of experience in working for major publishers. She has cultivated a vast network of editorial resources across disciplines – there are more than 400 editorial staff (freelance as well as in-house) located in the United States, United Kingdom, and other international destinations, ensuring the editor who is assigned to your project possesses the requisite subject matter knowledge. No matter how specific your content is – science and technology, humanities, math, life sciences, fiction to name just a few – Mona is able to pair it with an editor who can adhere to your standards and deliver a quality product.

Mona’s team can capably execute on a complete menu of full-service pre-press services, including, but not limited to, content creation, developmental editing, copyediting, project management, complex composition layout, cover and book design, proofreading, indexing, artwork, photo research, and alt-text content creation.

Michael Burggren, Senior Director of Production for National Geographic Learning, shared this feedback about working with the team at the Westchester Publishing Services New Delhi office:

“We recently had the Westchester New Delhi operation handle the Wonderful World 2E Lesson Planner adaptations and to say these were messy and complicated is underselling the challenges these presented. Westchester Publishing Services was excellent and able to meet program expectations, as well as schedule and budget requirements.”

Clients including Blue360 and Twelve Tables also shared testimonials about working with our New Delhi operation, which you can read on this page of client feedback.

When you consider the knowledge and experience that Mona and her team of professionals bring to publication projects, it is beyond what is traditionally considered full-service because they act as a partner to publishers, becoming a trusted, reliable extension of the publishers’ internal team and practices. Publishers who work with Westchester’s New Delhi team are confident in the quality of the finished product due to the consistency and consultative approach they receive at every stage of their projects. They are also impressed with the responsiveness and solutions that are utilized to address challenges which can happen as a project progresses. If you have been looking for the balance between cost-effectiveness and high-quality production values for your projects, the search is over. Download these workflow overview charts, which are customizable to your specific requirements, and contact us to learn how you can benefit from the expertise of Mona and the New Delhi team.

 

Many vendors say that they can handle your editorial and production needs, but what do they actually mean? Who owns the process, and how are they ensuring quality and consistency from project to project?

Meet Susan Baker.

Susan joined Westchester in 2002 – from Greenwood Publishing Group where she was Vice President of Production – to launch our editorial services division that is based in Danbury, CT. Over the past sixteen years, Susan has led the team and continues building it out to serve an expanding client list that includes Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, Brookings Institution Press, and dozens of other clients. In all, Susan’s team currently provides editorial services for more than 600 titles every year.

Why do such prestigious clients rely on Susan’s staff and processes?  In a word, care.

Susan’s team of production editors ensure that each book, white paper, or journal is handled with the attention to detail that the publishers themselves would ideally provide. From the beginning of a project, reviewing a manuscript prior to pre-edit tagging, organizing art logs and pre-flighting art, engaging with authors to launch projects, testing and assigning copyeditors specific to a project’s domain area, checking copyedited pages, engaging with designers and our composition team on steps from castoff to sample pages, checking first pass pages, reviewing pages with the publisher, checking printer proofs and epubs, all the way through to ensuring that assets have been received and processed by printers and platforms, the editorial services team looks after everything.

Wow, that’s a long list of items to care about!

Based on what clients have shared with us, there are few vendors or freelancers in the marketplace who possess the level of attention to detail that Susan and her team of editors provide on every project. Download copies of our workflow documents, providing examples of full-service and digital production workflow options. We know each client has different needs, schedules, and approaches to handling their projects, and we work with you to adhere to your workflows, ensuring your projects are completed accurately, on-time, and within budget. Contact us to discuss the ways Susan’s team of production editors can put their expert care and attention to detail into your projects.