Westchester Publishing Services

Excellence Delivered

2022 Year in Review

Services

compiled by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

While the publishing industry continues to contend with various challenges in the marketplace, it also has a deep foundation of resiliency and collaboration to draw upon that provides us with the ability to adapt and thrive. Here are some ways we partnered with our industry colleagues throughout 2022 to help them identify and implement effective solutions:

Sharing Industry Knowledge

PW article about Impacts on Accessibility and Sustainability webinar.In 2022, we continued our successful partnership with Publishers Weekly, hosting two highly attended and informative webinars. In the spring, panelists Michael Jacobs, Lorraine Shanley, Jessica Ryan and Jim Fetherston discussed how each of their respective areas of the publishing industry were “Driving Business Forward”, and in the fall, Bill Kasdorf, Kristen McLean, and Rachel Martin provided steps publishing businesses could easily implement to have positive “Impacts on Accessibility and Sustainability”.

Also in the fall, consultant Jay Diskey was a panelist for the Westchester Education Services webinar, “2023 K-12 Education Funding and Policy Outlook”. The hour-long session was geared towards helping businesses developing materials for the K-12 education market better understand the various legislative and funding initiatives at both the federal and state level, and how these will impact the market during the next year.

 

A Fresh Look (and more great info!) for the Westchester Education Services website

WES homepageThis fall we improved the functionality and features on the Westchester Education Services website to provide you with a better user experience. With a mega-menu to help you quickly get to the specific subject areas you’re interested in, along with expanded content throughout including downloadable case studies, it’s packed with helpful information. Check it out and make sure to subscribe to our blog and our mailing list so you’re always up to date on what we’re doing.

 

Westchester UK and International Grows

world globeOur colleagues in the UK expanded their ranks to continue serving the growing client base Westchester works with beyond the North American market. Joining the education team throughout the year were Thomas Storr, Emma Hudson, and Adam Wilkinson. In June, Rebecca Durose-Croft was promoted to the position of Managing Director, Education. In the fall, she took some time to discuss what led her into a career in education publishing in this blog post.

 

Within the River Editorial team (a division of Westchester Publishing Services UK), Grace Peterson has recently joined as project manager, to provide support for their increased full-service client roster.

 

Promotions within our US editorial and production teams

woman climbing penciled stairsAs our client base inside the United States has continued to experience stellar growth, several of our US-based editorial and production staff received well-deserved promotions during the year. Some of the long-time employees who are bringing their vast experience into new roles are Terry Colosimo, Scott Keeney, Wendy Muto, Celeste Bilyard, Amanda Montes de Oca, Melody Negron and Erin Davis. Congratulations and continued success!

 

Westchester Education Services Expands its Staff

colorful group of peopleIt was also an exciting spring and summer of growth for the Westchester Education Services team as they welcomed several new people. Content Directors, Jennifer Cole and Laura Cunningham, Senior Editor, Tara Hlavinka, and Director of Client Solutions, Kevin Schroeder all arrived at Westchester in the spring, as shared in this press release. Later in the year to continue supporting client growth, we welcomed Christina DeYoung as Director of Client Solutions, Jada Bradley as Senior Editor, Culturally Responsive Education, Sheyla Lucas as Editorial Project Manager, and Jordan Orfitelli as Project Manager.

 

Scholarly and Academically Speaking

Table with dark blue tablecloth and WPS logoIn June, Hugh Shiebler, Director of Client Solutions was busy on the conference circuit, representing Westchester Publishing Services for the Society for Scholarly Publishing Conference, in Chicago. Later in the month, he joined Bill Foley, in Washington, DC, for the in-person return of the Association of University Presses Conference. Both enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with fellow publishing industry colleagues, to discuss workflow solutions to help publishers. Hugh also conducted an information session for AUP attendees about accessibility, which you can view and download here.

Westchester UK Spring Events

Westchester UK teamMembers of the Westchester Education UK & International, and Westchester Publishing Services UK teams participated in several publishing industry events during the spring, including sponsoring the Independent Publishers Guild Awards in April, the star-studded British Book Awards (known by its nickname, the Nibbies) in May, both of which were held in-person. Rounding things out in June was the hybrid Independent Publishers Guild Spring Conference. You can read more about it in these blog posts.

Westchester Education Conferences

WES 2022 BETT UK boothOur Westchester Education Services colleagues were busy attending several industry conferences in-person, including BETT UK in late winter, ASU-GSV in the spring, and several events in late fall, including sponsoring the EdWeek Market Brief Summit in November (Christina DeYoung shares 3 Key Takeaways), as well as attending the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) regional conference, and the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), which you can read about in this overview from Kevin Schroeder. You can read more about our 2023 conference plans later in this message.

 

Have you heard Westchester Words?

Westchester Words podcast logoOur podcast episodes are an efficient (15 minutes on average) way to learn about various topics that matter to the publishing, education and ed tech sectors on both sides of the Atlantic. You can find the Westchester Words and Westchester Words UK podcasts on your favorite streaming platform as well as on our websites, where we provide additional content related to the episodes along with downloadable transcripts. New episodes will be premiering in January, so now is the perfect time to get caught up!

 

What are we reading at Westchester?

man and woman browsing in bookstoreThe staff of Westchester are fortunate to be involved in working on thousands of book projects every year and on the other side of it, we enjoy doing our fair share of reading the finished product! See our Summer 2022 selections along with our recently published blog post Books We Want to Read or Gift Holiday 2022, to find out what books we’ve been reading this year.

 

Where Will Westchester be in 2023?

We are excited to have preparations underway for several industry conferences in the New Year, some of which we plan to attend in-person, including:

 

  • Digital Book World (January 16)
  • Future of Education Technology Conference (January 23)
  • BETT Show (March 29)
You can learn more about our event plans in this blog post, with more opportunities to connect online or in-person being added as the year moves forward.

 

Speaking of connecting online, we will continue to host informative webinars, starting with the Westchester Education Services session, “Best Practices for Engaging with a Vendor Partner Network” taking place on Thursday, January 19.

 

Let us know what conference and industry events are on your radar in the year ahead. We look forward to meeting with you at some point in 2023!
Employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services is honored to support more than 500 publishers globally, providing a wide variety of editorial, production, and digital conversion services, to help them prepare their publications for the print and digital formats their customers most desire. We look forward to continuing to serve publishers across all segments of the industry in 2023 with their frontlist releases, updates to backlist content, adapting materials for print on demand platforms, and conversion of assets into ePubs to help them get them content to market more efficiently and cost-effectively. As a Benetech Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA) Vendor, we have the expertise you can rely on to produce materials that are in accordance with accessible ePub accessibility standards.
Let us know how we can help you optimize your workflow in the year ahead, using the full array of customizable services we have to help you reduce or eliminate the project bottlenecks you don’t have time to deal with.

With best wishes for a happy holiday season and a healthy, prosperous New Year.

The Benefits of Sending Pre-Press Production Work to a Vendor

A question which regularly comes up for discussion in our management meetings is, “What is a publisher’s point of view to justify keeping pre-press production in-house?”

Each of our U.S.-based production editors employed by Westchester handles thousands of manuscript pages per year which are received directly from the author. With such a large flow of client projects, we have systems and procedures in place which ensure our PEs work at peak productivity and are not distracted by non-project related tasks. As a result of the high volume of work we receive, we can negotiate extremely competitive rates with our network of over 300 copy editors, who are thoroughly tested, and specifically selected so their copyediting skills match the project content and style.

On the typesetting side, the publishing industry embraced an off-shore business model nearly 20 years ago, putting most U.S. typesetting companies out of business. In 2008, Westchester purchased a composition shop in Chennai, India, which ensures we’re able to keep our composition (typesetting) production costs competitive. Our employees in India are compensated at the high end of the compensation range compared to our India-based competitors, however, it is certainly not what a U.S. based typesetting position would pay. Other vendors won’t hesitate to outsource your work to third-party shops where the oversight may be lacking, resulting in delays and/or poor quality in the final product. All Westchester client composition work is performed at our 100%-owned Chennai composition shop, with significant U.S. management oversight and U.S. quality control checks. As an employee-owned company, we take prudent measures to keep overhead low across our operations in the U.S. and India – allowing us to pass those savings on to our customers in the form of lower prices.

Given these factors, I don’t see how a publisher could match our pre-press production quality or costs by using in-house resources. An explanation I’ve heard from time to time is, “Based on our production editors/project managers working on projects 60% of their time, our cost per page or project are X”. While this is the purest direct project cost, it doesn’t consider the 40% of the time which isn’t spent working on projects, or the overhead necessary to maintain in-house staff including managers and facility costs.

There are certainly other factors related to outsourcing pre-press production, including vendor quality versus in-house quality, and the perceived cost-savings when using a flock of U.S.-based freelance typesetters, which given the requirements of freelance management, brings the image of herding cats to mind.

Click here, to read the next post in this series.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

headshot of Tyler CareyUsually, the Autumn weeks leading up to Halloween and Thanksgiving have been times when Westchester’s clients were heads down on projects, aiming to hit end of year deadlines, and we found ourselves in a more transactional mode on projects. This Fall has been different though, with a lot of discussions between our clients and our sales, editorial, and production teams about changes to workflows and ways we can help address additional challenges our clients are having in getting their work on titles completed and getting their books to market.

The lunch meetings I’ve been having with clients during the past few months suggest that in some ways, we’re all finally settling into a bit of a more active ‘new normal’, and this also seems true about how we’re bringing our books to market. The seasonal rhythms in our businesses still continue to adapt and evolve as we move from a time of reactive behavior, where our clients were trying to adapt to the news of paper shortages and crowded windows at the printers. A year on, everyone is more cognizant of those challenges and better prepared for the schedules books are requiring now.

In another indicator of this more active normal, instead of focusing on supply chain challenges like we have in previous sessions, our recent Publishing Now webinar, in partnership with Publishers Weekly, looked at how publishers can pivot to better embrace industry trends for accessibility and sustainability. You can view the webinar here on YouTube, to see Kristen McLean (NPD Books), Bill Kasdorf (Publishing Technology Partners), and Rachel Martin (Elsevier) discuss these topics and share their insights.

Something else I’ve noticed in my recent in-person meetings with clients is how casual and ‘normal’ having in-person meetings is again. No one is being cavalier about the lingering risks of the pandemic, but declining infection numbers and the increased level of comfort many people have about conducting in-person meetings has made them a viable alternative for vendors and our clients to use to advance as many key topic areas as possible, rather than engaging in a series of Zoom meetings, countless cycles of emails, or Slack messages.

These recent discussions I have been having with clients have me feeling very upbeat and emboldened about the path the publishing industry is taking, with exploring new ways of doing things, doubling down on growth, and further embracing change. Here at Westchester, our teams are busy supporting clients in areas of their workflows that hadn’t been part of our “traditional” role in the past. Specific areas include the growth of our program for Ingram ebook distribution clients, through which we provide ebook conversion services for an affordable rate, to managing client assets in CoreSource and other platforms, and taking on more specific production and manufacturing tasks to free more time up for our clients’ staff. To me, that underscores how the industry is working together to find innovative ways to improve the speed with which books are being produced, and with less cost.

To make sure I wasn’t applying a Boston-New York-DC corridor perspective to the wider industry goings on, I reached out to Tim Davies, the CEO of Westchester’s UK operation, to see if he found the in-person uptick in activity was holding true for him – especially with his recent attendance at the Frankfurt Book Fair representing Westchester’s UK book and education units.

“From my perspective,” Tim shared regarding Frankfurt, “it was smaller and quieter than pre-pandemic but a ‘quiet’ Frankfurt is still busy and buzzy by the standards of any other trade event. Definitely fewer attendees, with several people commenting to me that they’d noticed US visitor numbers were well down. That said, it was great to spend time with old friends and colleagues and compare notes on our current experience of our respective publishing sectors, and international markets. Everyone I spoke to said they were really pleased that they’d come and that they expected next year’s numbers and vibe to be much more akin to how it used to be. I’ve already booked my hotel!”

This article in Publishers Weekly and this article in The Bookseller profile the scale of attendees at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year vs. prior to the pandemic, supporting Tim’s points above. PW also shared highlights of other recent regional conferences for booksellers, while Frankfurt was underway, demonstrating the uptick in interest in in-person events, and the opportunities that brings about for publishers and booksellers. It certainly feels like we’re returning to a time where more business may be done at places like the Javits Center in New York and the Olympia in London, as well as numerous smaller conferences around the country and the globe, where specialists meet to cover their products and areas of expertise. It’s invigorating to see this trend underway again.

So, let Westchester know what’s changing for you: What’s been keeping you busier than ever? What’s working well? What partners are helping save the day? What can US employee-owned Westchester be doing to help you? As we all continue adapting together, I welcome a conversation about ways your team is changing how you do your work, and exploring the additional ways our teams can help you.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

This past year has been a good opportunity for a lot of us to re-set and reevaluate things, as workplaces, industry events, and more begin to open back up to a ‘typical’ that is more like the pre-pandemic typical. From what it means to work in an office (and why that may not be as important as it once was), to which conferences are worth the flight and disruption to our personal and professional lives, to what we want to accomplish during in-person meetings, this reevaluation and re-set is affecting all aspects of how we work and live.

Meetings I had with clients late last year and early this year tended to focus on “What will it be like when things open back up?” My most recent spate of meetings with some of Westchester’s trade clients in New York City seemed to focus more on, “OK, well, we’re ‘open’ now. We’re back in the office X days a week (or not at all). And here’s what we want to change instead of resume with business as usual…”

This openness to change has been good for both us and our clients. Our discussions with clients over the past several years – but especially since early 2020 – have become less about our what can be seen as commoditized offerings (copyediting, typesetting, and digital conversion) and more about what our clients’ challenges are with trying to get their books to market quickly and within budget. Westchester’s client base now tops 500 clients, and our global staff footprint tops 400 employees and countless freelancers that play specialized roles with everything from developmental edits and permissions management, to managing assets in CoreSource, to writing alt text entries for accessible epubs, and more.

So, rather than pinning down and committing to what ‘the next normal’ looks like, many of our clients are pivoting, trying things, assessing successes and failures, and trying other things. It’s a great time to be in publishing with so much renewed emphasis on topics that may have been seen as “nice to haves” in the past, but are now things publishers have the motivation and bandwidth to address. From changing how publications are created and distributed, to a renewed emphasis on sustainability, to finally defining workflows for accessibility that are baked into the editorial and production processes – rather than tacked on at the end – we’re seeing our clients take on bold, new initiatives that might have seemed like back-burnered projects during the last decade.

You can learn more about what US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services has been up to in this article featuring our Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, Deb Taylor. In this profile in Publishers Weekly, Deb shares information about the technology, workflow, and marketplace initiatives Westchester has been focused on over the past year.  It’s a good read if you want to get a handle on our view of the industry, and how we’re approaching accessibility, educational content, and more.

To get a sense of what the overall industry is up to, join us for our next Publishing Now webinar, cohosted with Publishers Weekly on September 29, at Noon Eastern. Panelists including Bill Kasdorf, Rachel Martin, and Kristen McLean will provide an update on what’s happening across various parts of the publishing landscape, and share ideas about how your business can prepare for the changes accessibility and sustainability requirements will bring.

P.S. – Will your plans bring you to the New York City area on Saturday, September 10? The New York Book Forum is organizing an in-person event for publishing industry staff that promises to be fun and provide books for children in need. This event calendar provides more details. We hope to see you there!

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

I had the great fortune to participate virtually on a panel at PubWest 2022 with Rachel Noorda (Director of Book Publishing, Portland State University) and Suzanne Norman (Publishing Program, Simon Fraser University) entitled “Getting your Book into Readers’ Hands”. One of the Intensives at this year’s PubWest conference, we met with a small group of publishers to discuss the industry trends affecting book availability, supply chain, purchasing practices, equity in content, inclusive marketing, and the challenges publishers and readers have getting access to content.  Rachel Noorda deserves applause for the effort she invested in hosting and facilitating this panel in-person at the conference while Suzanne and I joined in via Zoom.

The overview Rachel and Suzanne provided on the above topics helped the attendees understand the impacts of global factors on launching new titles, keeping books in print, considerations for Print on Demand, and also how to consider accessibility in your books.  As we discussed with the attendees, over 20% of the world’s population has a print disability, and some numbers suggest at least 5-10% of the population has dyslexia.  Best practices with fonts, colors, and alt text were covered during our session, and we showed how to crack open an ebook you’ve released and check it using Ace by DAISY and Thorium.

Westchester will be covering supply chain concerns in our next webinar that we’re co-hosting with Publishers Weekly, Publishing Now ’22: Driving Business Forward, on Tuesday, March 22. I hope you can join us for that! My colleagues and I at Westchester would also welcome the chance to speak with you about your thoughts around accessibility and your content.  If you want to spend some time reviewing an ebook or two from your list to talk about best practices, the team at Westchester would be happy to have a brief Zoom.  Contact us to schedule some time to talk about your editorial, production, and digital needs.