Westchester Publishing Services

Excellence Delivered

Why selecting the right typesetting partner for your legal, accounting, or professional content is important

Services

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.

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!