Services

July 26, 2019

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

We’re halfway through our 50th year in business, and Westchester Publishing Services has continued to be very productive in several areas! Here are a few of the highlights from this past spring:

The Westchester K-12 Team Welcomes Walter

Walter Henderson, Jr., Senior Supervising Editor, English Language Training In April the Westchester K-12 Product Development team grew when Walter Henderson, Jr., joined the team as Senior Supervising Editor for ELT (English Language Training). Walter has an impressive professional background as a classroom instructor both in the United States and overseas, as well as working with academic institutions and publishers to develop suitable course materials for English Language Learners (ELL). Having Walter and his extensive professional network as a part of Westchester K-12 allows us to provide educational, academic, and professional publishers with a wide range of product offerings, including bilingual and translation content to support the specific needs of English Language Learners in educational and business settings.

Westchester Publishing Services UK profiled

Coverage about Westchester’s 50th anniversary continued into the spring, with a comprehensive profile in The Bookseller (may require login to read) about our company and the factors that brought us to further expand the business into the UK market, under the guidance of Managing Director of Westchester UK, Tim Davies. More coverage about Westchester’s anniversary can be found in these articles.

K-12 Catalog

This spring the Westchester K-12 art and design team produced a comprehensive catalog that showcases the capabilities and services the Product Development team is able to provide educational and ed-tech publishers for new curriculum content or product updates. Download your complimentary copy and let us know how the Westchester K-12 team can help you.

Client Portal Nominated for Innovation Award

Stationers Company Shortlisted Innovation Excellence Awards 2019 In May, we were excited to learn that our Client Portal had been nominated for the Stationers’ Company 2019 Innovation Excellence Awards in the Customer Experience category. To receive this recognition from the Stationers’ Company – a London-based guild with a more than 600-year history of serving members of the publishing and media industries – was a particularly special acknowledgment of the work our technology team has invested into building a project management platform that serves the specific requirements of publishers. This article provides additional information about the newest features we’ve added to the Client Portal to make it even more user-friendly.

British Book Awards

Westchester was proud to be the sponsor for the Academic, Education, and Professional Publisher of the Year category at this year’s British Book Awards which took place in London on May 13. The awards program is also known as The Nibbies, and draws a veritable Who’s Who of the British publishing industry to recognize the successes of authors and publishers in the previous year. Additional information about the Books of the Year shortlists and winners is available here.

Association of University Presses

In mid-June, members of Westchester’s sales and editorial teams traveled to Detroit to attend and exhibit at the Association of University Presses annual conference. We always enjoy meeting with our clients at conferences to discuss the latest developments that are having an impact within the industry, and sharing with publishers who may not be familiar with our product offerings the many ways that Westchester’s services can help them to improve their workflows.

In the Community

In the last edition of the Westchester Wrap-up, I shared with you that the Westchester K-12 team had begun an initiative to make a positive difference one classroom at a time. Learn more about the projects that Anne Riccio and Laura Rolfe selected, and how you can help a classroom in your community.

Summer Reading

If you’re looking for a new title or two to add to your reading list, the Westchester staff have some interesting recommendations that you probably won’t find everywhere else. Check out the variety of fiction and non-fiction titles that we’re planning to read this summer, and let us know what you think!

We’ll be on the road at a few key conferences during the remainder of 2019, and planning is well underway for the trade shows Westchester will be attending and exhibiting at next year. The Conferences and Events page will continue to be updated as we confirm our commitments, so check back regularly to see where you can meet with us in person.

You can also keep up with the latest news from Westchester by following us on LinkedIn, and subscribing to our blogs (Westchester and Westchester K-12). C ontact us any time to learn how our editorial, typesetting, design, and project management services can help you reduce production time and expense in your publication program.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!
Best,

Nicole Tomassi
Marketing & Conference Manager

June 4, 2019

$LaTeX composition typesetting example image$ LaTeX is one of the most powerful typesetting platforms for publishers of mathematics, economics, and other content requiring the presentation of equations. But, if you’re a publisher of that type of content, let’s just admit something else about LaTeX – it’s infuriatingly complex and can make any project bloat in schedule and cost.

Through our work in the journal and academic publishing markets over the years, we have handled hundreds of books and thousands of articles with LaTeX content. Every time a new ‘easy button’ for LaTeX appeared in the market, we too were optimistic that it would get easier to work with TeX content. But, since authors all like their own versions, plug-in’s, macros, and templates, most ‘easy buttons’ for LaTeX break the second you pour any content through them.

Sara, Kannan, Dilip from Westchester Publishing Services Instead of trying to bypass the problem, we invested. In our people. Meet US employee-owned Westchester’s offshore management team. Dilip, Sara, and Kannan scoured the industry to find the best of the best in LaTeX typesetting and consulting and hired them, and asked them to train other members of our staff. Through hiring and training over the years, Westchester has assembled an A-Team of LaTeX operators and engineers, who help The MIT Press, Princeton University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Mary Ann Liebert, and other book and journal publishers with their complex LaTeX content. We have helped Princeton and Johns Hopkins develop LaTeX templates for their authors to use, for Princeton and MIT we provide LaTeX consulting for authors, and we ensure that all of these books with critical math content are published quickly, affordably, and without issue.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you with your LaTeX publications.

May 20, 2019

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.

May 13, 2019

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.

May 6, 2019

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.

Westchester Wrap-up – Spring 2019