Westchester Publishing Services

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Westchester Wrap-up – Spring 2018

Services

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing and Conference Manager

Maybe it sped by due to how busy we are here at Westchester, but spring has bloomed into summer. Join me for a quick rewind of some of the key events that occurred during the months of April, May, and June at Westchester Publishing Services:

London Book Fair 2018, and Guildhall

Several members of our management team were in attendance at the 47th Annual London Book Fair in April. The Book Fair provided us with the opportunity to affirm our business growth in the UK, formally launching Westchester Publishing Services UK, with Managing Director, Tim Davies. It was a productive event for us, and our preparations are already underway to return next March.

While in London, our Chief Revenue Officer, Tyler M. Carey was bestowed the prestigious honor of the Freedom of the City of London by the Stationers’ Guild. A unique benefit granted by this recognition is that he can now legally drive a flock of sheep across London Bridge. If you don’t believe me, you can read more about it in this blog post.

An alphabet soup of conferences

In addition to London Book Fair, Westchester staff attended several conferences and trade shows this spring throughout the U.S., including NCTM(National Council for Teachers of Mathematics), CSE (Council of Science Editors), SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing), BEA (BookExpo),  SIIA(Software and Information Industry Association), AUP (Association of University Presses), and ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). We catch our breath in July and August but as you’ll see from our Conferences page, the pace picks up again in September with Publishers Weekly StarWatch, IPG Autumn Conference, and The Bookseller Children’s Conference.

Publishers Weekly Whitepaper, and Dropbox Partnership

Westchester sponsored production on a whitepaper that was published and distributed by Publishers Weekly in April, with in-depth analysis about how publishers of various sizes and types are able to effectively scale their programs through the use of prepress vendors. Following on this successful venture, Dropbox shared news last month about the work they do with companies in the media and entertainment vertical, including publishers and vendors. We also had an informative Q&A session with George Baier IV, from Dropbox, which provided a useful perspective on this topic.

Westchester continues to grow

By providing quality products and services to our valued clients, our business has grown and flourished over the past several years. To further ensure accounts continue to receive the high level of support we pride ourselves on, we recently welcomed Keri Goldberg to our sales and marketing team in the role of Business Development Manager. Current and prospective clients alike will find Keri’s background in publishing to be helpful as they consider prepress solutions for their particular needs. Westchester is also looking for editorial and production talent as various areas of the company expand, visit our Careers page for more information.

Westchester K-12 Summit

Our K-12 Services team held their annual summit at their Dayton, Ohio headquarters to strategize on how to build on the successes of the past year to achieve continued forward momentum. Having the entire team – who are located throughout the country – come together in one location was beneficial for all involved. It gave our staff an opportunity to discuss the student books, teacher’s guides, assessments, leveled readers, and other projects that the teams have been working on. It also allowed them to explore the expanded capacity and additional service offerings they are now able to provide clients as a result of hiring additional staff earlier in the year.

Summer Reading

Reading isn’t a seasonal pastime, but it seems especially enjoyable to read the latest bestseller or a book from the stack on your nightstand during the somewhat more carefree days of summer. My colleagues and I shared a few of the books we plan to read this summer, along with recommended reading lists in this recent blog post, in case you’re searching for ideas. Happy reading, and enjoy the rest of your summer!

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George Baier IV is Media Industry Principal at Dropbox, responsible for communicating the company’s unique perspective on how Dropbox can transform work and IT infrastructure for customers in the media vertical. George works closely with customers to deliver product features and solutions that meet specific media customer needs.

Westchester:  George, Westchester is excited about our partnership with Dropbox which has resulted in several positive developments including upgrades to our internal technology, and further enhancements on our Client Portal. Can you share with readers a little about your background in publishing, and how that led to your current role with Dropbox?

George: I’ve worked in the publishing and media industry for over a decade, across different leadership roles involving technology, content, and design. Prior to Dropbox, I served as a VP in IT at Macmillan, where I helped deploy tools that the organization’s teams and employees still use today. One of those tools was Dropbox, which consolidated the applications people organically brought to work, and gave teams the freedom to collaborate under a common platform. Seeing employees get excited about technology like Dropbox ultimately led me to the role I currently hold — Media Industry Principal — in which I help even more media customers deploy tools to help them do their best work. 

Westchester: What makes you so passionate about publishing in particular, and how does that inform the work Dropbox is doing with companies in the media sector?

George: Trade publishing continues to evolve but its business model still operates on the creation of content, and the consumption of that content by readers that are willing to pay for it. Unlike other forms of media, the straightforwardness of the relationship between publishers and audiences is something I’ve always found appealing. In this spirit, Dropbox helps creators move their process forward, and is designed for any author to use as a means to enable creativity at scale. It’s also part of the reason we continue integrating with tools that are industry-standard within publishing while seeing increased adoption overall.

Westchester: What is the potential Dropbox sees in the media space – specifically in publishing, during the next couple of years?

George: Teams and users in the publishing, media, and entertainment space created and saved more than a billion files in Dropbox last year. Every day those teams — especially in publishing — are under pressure to create more content in less time. As a result, there’s a growing need to manage complex projects at scale, as content often becomes trapped in silos and spread across teams, tools, and devices. We see an opportunity for Dropbox to continue serving as a home for content and the collaboration around it. 

In parallel, we see an opportunity to support authors through a platform that unifies documents, rich media, and the exchange of ideas. Those with talent and creativity should be enabled to tell stories with less friction, wherever and whenever inspiration may strike. I observed firsthand at Macmillan how unique tools like Dropbox can be additive to an author’s creative toolkit, which ultimately led me to Dropbox itself — I wanted closer involvement in helping other organizations benefit from our platform.

Westchester: We came to Dropbox with several situations we needed to resolve – including upgrading our own internal infrastructure, working with our operations teams around the globe, version control, handling large files, and the development of our Client Portal.  Walk us through the approach Dropbox took to evaluate our requirements and propose specific solutions.

George: We worked closely with several stakeholders at Westchester to offer guidance on a Team Folder system that met their needs and matched their investment in our product’s deployment, while ensuring no data loss occurred throughout the migration and deployment process. In general, our approach was to make a transition to Dropbox as seamless as possible, helping them maximize the full benefit of our platform to support large volumes of content and launch their Client Portal. This also involved listening to input from production, editorial staff, and ensuring we could follow through on the capabilities promised as part of our deployment. Interestingly, as we continued working together, we uncovered even more ways that Dropbox could support Westchester, whether it be handling large files, version control capabilities, or expanded Dropbox previews of file types like ePub. 

Westchester: Are the challenges that we brought to Dropbox consistent with what you see from other media firms? What other types of issues do you and your team help resolve for companies in the media industry?

George: Westchester is a great example of organizational vision and execution facilitating the full promise of Dropbox, from start to finish across migration and deployment phases — adoption, integration, workflow enablement and, ultimately, transformation. We weren’t surprised how quickly Westchester did it, given the strong leadership and cross-functional partnership, but it became clear that Dropbox was additive to Westchester’s holistic philosophy to technology, content management, and infrastructure migration. Our goal is help replicate the success of Westchester’s IT maturity model for other customers that want to mature their business through the capabilities of our collaboration platform. 

Westchester: Many publishers have their own in-house architecture or use other file transfer and archival systems. How does Dropbox differ in its ability to support the ways publishers handle projects with multiple stakeholders, versions, and large files?

George: Over the past few years, we’ve evolved from a place to store your files to a place where collaboration gets easier. We’ve released several new products and features like Paper, Smart Sync, Showcase, and Team Folders that have made it incredibly easy for publishers to adopt our platform, specific to projects involving multiple stakeholders, versions, and large files. These build upon our core product capabilities including best-in-class file sync/share, previews, and unlimited file size uploads. 

More specific to file transfer and archival systems, we see patterns of work that still rely on inefficient methods of content transfer — FTP, email, file attachments — across businesses today. The products and features I’ve mentioned, especially Showcase, can help modernize those legacy tools, the use of which can result in lost time and focus away from the content itself. In addition, Dropbox also integrates natively in digital asset management (DAM) tools like Widen, nicely complementing archival systems of record that store IP. This integration facilitates our larger platform strategy, in which Dropbox can work with tools and systems customers have already purchased, as opposed to creating another ‘walled garden’. 

Westchester: We’re excited about the new release of our Client Portal, because it uses the Dropbox API integrated with the DBX platform to provide clients with a secure, cloud-based file management, and communications hub for their projects (see video). How do you see our ability to extend the use of the Dropbox platform to clients as a change in the way publishers of all sizes are able to interact with their vendors?

George: The Client Portal is an impressive example of leveraging the power of DBX Platform to customize specific publishing workflows for both internal and external audiences. As more and more content is produced, it often goes through key stages of creation, feedback, and distribution — which can, unfortunately, lead to lost time searching for the latest versions, or “work about work” if not properly managed. Ultimately, we think our APIs can serve as the connective tissue for collaborative work among Dropbox, publishers, and vendors, facilitating a unified home for work across the entire content lifecycle.

Westchester: Tell us more about the new features that Dropbox has rolled out recently that would be of interest to our clients and publishing partners.  Are there additional developments on the horizon that you’re able to share with us?

George: Recently, Dropbox announced expanded partnerships with Canva, Final Draft, Frame.io, Getty Images, Shift.io, Marvel, and Widen to bridge content silos, in support of teams that continue creating content at an exponential rate. These integrations complement core Dropbox product capabilities like best-in-class file sync/share, no-download shared links to protect IP, expanded preview capabilities like EPUB, ZIP, RAR, and enhanced previews of PPT and PDF. Especially as rich media and visual assets become ingrained in traditional and digital publishing, we’re focused on giving authors and teams more flexibility to bring Dropbox closer to the tools they already use. In the future, we’ll be looking for more ways to expand our relationship with those seven partners, and other publishing-optimized tools like Scrivener, that integrate with our collaboration platform meaningfully.

Westchester: For publishers interested in exploring the solutions Dropbox can offer for their own particular challenges, what’s the best way to reach you?

George: You can always connect with me on LinkedIn (George Baier IV), or check out our Flow Together eBook if you’d like to learn more as well.  

Westchester: George, thank you for taking the time to share your insights about publishing and technology. For clients and prospective partners interested in learning more about our Client Portal, and our editorial and production services, please Contact Us.

by Kevin J. Gray, Managing Director, Westchester K-12 Publishing Services

We launched the K-12 division just over a year ago, debuting at the AAP Content in Context forum. Westchester K-12 was founded on the belief that educational publishers deserved a higher level of product development support than they were receiving, and I was confident this fledgling division could deliver on that promise.

Over the course of the past year, Westchester K-12 has grown from a group that highly leveraged the assets of our academic, journal, and trade group into a freestanding division that is a significant part of the company footprint. Our team of dedicated, experienced professionals built impressive careers with other successful publishers and vendors before joining Westchester K-12 to lead content development, art, design, and production in all subject areas for our clients. We’ve added processes and resources unique to the needs of educational publishers while retaining the best practices of our parent company.

Members of the Westchester K-12 team are located throughout the country, so last week, we brought our geographically dispersed workforce into our Dayton, Ohio K-12 headquarters for our first WPS K-12 Summit. The summit provided team members an open forum to review what’s working, while also determining how we sustain that model as we continue to grow. There were two full days of workshops with an emphasis on reflection and planning, examining who we work with, what seats we’ll need to fill, what processes need to be codified, and how we tend to the nascent culture we’ve established, ensuring its scalability and continued relevance. The meetings were collaborative and the team left energized, taking with them both a shared vision and concrete steps for implementation that will lead to continued success.

You may be wondering what it all means to you. I share news of this summit so that you have a better understanding of Westchester K-12’s commitment to the high quality work we create and to continuing the positive experiences of our customer base. As we grow, we expect to hold these summits regularly, allowing us to make conscious decisions about how we retain the core vision from which the organization sprung. I’m proud of what our division has accomplished in its first year and I look forward to what the next 12 months will bring.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Olympia, London

A week and a half following my return, and I have finally dug out from a very productive London Book Fair. Westchester once again exhibited at LBF, where last year as you may recall we had a prime location next to the scholarly publishing seminars at The Faculty. This year, instead of being in an independent stand, we relocated to The American Collective Stand which provides fantastic service to the publishers and vendors that use their collective area for meetings and exhibiting. We also were able to attend the IPG stand party (read their  LBF recap here) to network further with our clients and potential partners. This different approach was very effective, with Dennis, Tim, and I having about 40 meetings over the three days we were at the Fair. Those of you who caught the New York Times coverage of the Fair and the rights business may have even had the opportunity to play some Where’s Waldo (Where’s Wally to our British customers) – yes, that is me in my powder blue blazer in the lower left corner of the crowd shot.

It’s worth noting that while the London Book Fair is indeed a global event that allows us to meet with publishers from many countries, this year our emphasis was focused on the British publishing market. Over the past year, Westchester staff have returned many times to the United Kingdom, where we have continued to build out our presence, UK-based staff and freelance resources, and most importantly, our customer base. The level of interest in Westchester’s services from the British publishing market has been so substantial that earlier this Spring we brought on Tim Davies to helm our UK operation.

Tim Davies, at the London Book Fair Westchester stand

Tim’s engagement with publishers on behalf of Westchester at the London Book Fair was a big game changer for the company. Tim has an innate understanding of publishers’ needs having been a publisher himself, and is also quite attuned to the consultative nature of Westchester’s business (no two clients really have the same workflow). This both-sides-of-the-desk expertise, if you will, has allowed Tim to have meaningful dialogues with British publishers, to help them evaluate their publications programs, areas where they may need some assistance, and explore ways that Westchester can provide affordable, scalable solutions to help publishers with as few as 2-5 titles per year or as many as 500+ address their specific editorial and production needs. Publishers we spoke with found our consultative approach towards working with clients and their authors to be very compelling. Shortly after the Fair, our Director of Operations, Terry Colosimo, released a blog post that expands upon this, and echoes much of what was discussed with our partners at the Fair.

Receiving the Freedom of the City of London honor

Lastly, a trip to London for me is not complete without trying to attend an event with my colleagues from The Stationers’ Company, London’s publishing guild. While the Westchester team did indeed catch up with several of The Stationers’ at the Fair and at surrounding events, I was fortunate enough to be granted my Freedom of the City of London from the Company. For this second round of Where’s Waldo/Wally, eagle-eyed readers of the Westchester blog may recall seeing a similar photo from our friend Lorraine Shanley’s ceremony, last year. It was humbling to be one of the few Americans offered this tribute, and in joining the ranks of Morgan Freeman and Bill Gates, I’m quite confident that the wrong Tyler Carey was nominated. Nonetheless, I was happy and grateful to join my friends, family, and colleagues at Guildhall for this ceremony. I was also amazed to learn that I am now eligible, under the privileges bestowed by my Freedom of the City, to drive a flock of sheep across London Bridge.  (No joke, every Fall Freemen get to do this.)  Anybody based near London with an available flock of sheep that can be leased (option to buy, negotiable) is encouraged to contact me directly.

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Though it took a long time getting to the East Coast this year, I really enjoy the spring season because it’s a time of optimistic renewal that generates a positive attitude in almost everyone. As all of us at Westchester look ahead to the events that will be taking place over the next few months, I hope you’ll take a moment to catch up on a few of our highlights from the first quarter of 2018:

Westchester K-12 opens office in Dayton

The Westchester K-12 Publishing Services division began the year by completing their move into an office located in downtown Dayton, Ohio. As Kevin J. Gray, Managing Director, K-12 Publishing Services noted, “Dayton is a perfect location because of the deep well of educational publishing talent in this region and its proximity to the midwest offices of many of the publishing houses Westchester K-12 serves.”

Westchester and Learnosity form an alliance

In February, Westchester announced we’ve entered into an agreement with Learnosity, an assessment platform firm based in Ireland. Westchester K-12 Publishing Services is the first company to join Learnosity’s newly created Custom Content division, providing a beneficial resource for educational publishers who need content creation services along with a flexible assessment platform which can integrate with their current systems.

 

Hitting the road, Westchester style

The year got off to a busy start, as we headed out to sponsor and exhibit at conferences including ALPSP UP Redux, IPG Spring Conference, and PubTechConnect. If you’re wondering where Westchester will be this spring, keep reading…

 

Where in the world is Westchester going now?

Westchester recently attended the London Book Fair, and highlights from this trip can be found here. Other shows Westchester is sponsoring or attending in the coming weeks include NCTM (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics) at the end of April, in Washington, DC, the Council of Science Editors conference in New Orleans at the beginning of May, and the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference in Chicago later in May. Visit the Conferences and Trade Shows page on our website to see a complete listing, and subscribe to our blog so you can be up-to-date about all things Westchester!

 

Turning a new page

In March we bid a fond farewell to Lynn Taylor, who expertly led our Journals division over the last several years. Lynn decided to retire so she would have more time to enjoy with her family and friends. While Lynn will be missed at Westchester by colleagues and clients alike, the Journals division is now in the equally capable, and competent stewardship of Celeste Bilyard, Production Manager, Journals Services.

At Westchester, we welcome the opportunity to meet with clients and prospective partners throughout the United States, the UK, and beyond. If you’re interested in learning how we can help you more effectively manage editorial, design, and production requirements like we have done for your peers, please contact us to find out more.