Westchester Publishing Services

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Are you ready for EPUB 3.2?

Westchester UK News

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.

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. 

Tim Davies, Managing Director
Tim Davies, Managing Director

Tim Davies was appointed Managing Director of our new, UK operation in 2018.

Tim is well-known in the British publishing industry, with a strong reputation and an excellent network of industry contacts. His previous roles include Managing Director at The History Press and multiple senior management positions at Oxford University Press, HarperCollins UK, Faber & Faber and others. He is also an executive coach and a mentor on the Independent Publishers Guild’s Mentor Scheme.

Why is Tim so good at being consultative with our UK-based customers?  Well, he began his career as a trainee sales representative at Granada Publishing, later acquired by William Collins. From the start, he was aware how fortunate he was to be in the industry, and enjoyed the enthusiasm and passion the professionals around him brought to their positions. Over the subsequent decades, he honed and developed his industry knowledge.  Through his volunteer position as a mentor in the IPG, he has returned the favour by helping many start-up ventures with consultation on how best to launch or grow their businesses.  It was through our network of British publishers and other industry figures, that a resounding call came back with “Tim Davies”, when we asked who would be a good fit to run our burgeoning UK operation.

In early 2018, Tim came on board in an interim role to help formalise our UK office and grow Westchester’s UK business, which offers editorial and production services to publishers as large as Bloomsbury and as small as those with only a few titles per year. After the 2018 London Book Fair, Tim realised there were significant opportunities to expand in the market, and came on in a full-time role. “I always understood that there is a lot of competition for our services in the market, but that our value proposition is different from the others. Specifically, we’re employee-owned, we’ve been trading for 50 years, we wholly-own our operation in India, and we have an ethical and conscientious approach with both our clients and our staff.” The fact that each client starts with a “kick off” launch meeting with members of Westchester’s senior management team, to essentially freely consult about how best to address their pre-press needs, was very consistent with Tim’s ethos and approach.  “We adapt to our clients’ workflow and processes in the early stages, so there are as few surprises as possible during each project.”

Here’s what one of our UK clients says… “Lion Hudson has partnered with Westchester on a content re-purposing programme for our new Lion Scholar imprint and I have been extremely impressed by Westchester’s professionalism and high-quality services. Working with their UK, US, and India-based senior managers on the workflow at the initiation of the projects has been fluid and productive, with conference calls and video meetings arranged as and when needed. Once the workflow was agreed and the individual projects set up, the India-based project management team has consistently delivered high-quality services – providing proofs to the agreed timeframes, and flagging and working with me to resolve any content or file-based issues. Any initial reservations I had on communication challenges and time zone differences were very soon dispelled. We also use Westchester’s India-based proofreading and indexing services, which are also of a high standard. I look forward to working with Westchester on future projects.”

“It’s this approach that resonates well with publishers in the UK looking for a consultative vendor relationship, coupled with the cost savings of using an Indian typesetting or editorial operation. We are growing rapidly and are very proud to have been given the opportunity to support the publishers with whom we work.”

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 

Late last month, I headed back across the Atlantic to visit with our growing customer base in the United Kingdom, as well as spend some time with Tim Davies, the Managing Director of our UK subsidiary. After spending another week visiting customers and attending conferences with him, I continue to be amazed at the depth of understanding of the strategic challenges facing publishers that Tim brings to even the most basic of engagements regarding editorial and composition services. Westchester, along with our clients are exceptionally fortunate to have Tim on board.

Lionel Bender speaking at The Bookseller Children's ConferenceOur first event of the week together was The Bookseller’s Children’s Conference, held at County Hall in South London in the shadow of the London Eye. We had meetings scheduled with a number of customers and prospective partners, and were elated with the amount of booth traffic from publishers who had never spoken with us before, wanting to learn more about how Westchester helps their peers. The opening session providing an overview of the industry stats (the state of juvenile publishing remains strong!) was reassuring and encouraging. Of particular interest to us in the sessions that followed were the comparisons between the US and UK markets provided by Hanna Otero (Lonely Planet Kids) and educational publishing luminary Lionel Bender. The Lonely Planet perspective largely dealt with how to package content for different markets, whereas the educational session dealt more with the trends in US supplemental educational publishing that could be considered within the British market. The former is of keen interest to Westchester as we do handle global editions for publishers, and the outcomes shared in the educational session bore some attention at our stand during the conference. Educational publishers came to take meetings and discuss the work being done by our stateside “K-12” division, which provides content development, editorial, and design services to US and UK publishers. The Bookseller continues to put together phenomenal conferences for the industry, and we look forward to seeing their staff again at FutureBook in November.

Tyler Carey and Tim Davies at the Westchester Publishing Services UK launch partyIn addition to being in town for the Children’s Conference and the monthly BookMachine meeting, Tim and I also had the opportunity to formally celebrate the opening of our UK office in Stratford-upon-Avon. Gathering with some customers, partners, and a few bottles of prosecco, we toasted this milestone in expanding our presence in the UK, and got to continue the week’s trend of meeting with publishers to better understand their particular take on the publishing landscape.

While I was in England, I also attended two events with the Stationers’ Company, the UK-based publishing guild that I joined last year. The Stationers’ Company plays an active role in the UK publishing industry, The plane tree at Stationer's Hall, Londondrawing members from all portions of publishing and media, from the paper industry to printers, writers, editors, publishers, typesetters, newspaper journalists, and more. The Sunday after I arrived, the historic Stationers’ Hall was opened to the public for tours as part of  Open House London. I volunteered to help, providing background about the hall to visitors who wanted to see the architecture or learn more about the Stationers’ as a livery company. The hall itself, built after the great fire, sits upon the prior hall used by the guild, where Shakespeare’s folio had been registered for copyright. While I knew enough of the history and trivia to welcome people into the hall for the Open House, my fellow publishing colleagues gave me even more interesting background about the building, including the fact that the King James Bible had initially been debated in committee in the original hall on that location.  The plane tree in the courtyard is also noted for having been planted on the ashes of burnt, pirated books, accounting for how it is one of the oldest and largest plane trees in London.

Tyler Carey at the 2018 London Bridge Sheep DriveI tacked on a few vacation days to this tripTyler Carey marching the flock of sheep across London Bridge to take in a West Ham soccer game, and for the last Stationers’ event of my trip. As shared in a blog post earlier this year, a privilege under guild membership is the annual marching of the sheep across London Bridge. A centuries-old tradition, guild members marching a flock of sheep into London is symbolic of the privilege of doing business within the city. I joined my fellow Stationers’ – and the members of other livery companies – to gather together and walk across the bridge with our sheep, documented by Guildhall in their records for eternity. Not a baaaaa-d way to end a trip to London. (Sheep-ish apologies)

Are you based in the UK and interested in learning more about how Westchester can help you with your editorial and production needs?  Contact us to arrange a discussion at the Frankfurt Book Fair, FutureBook, or at a meeting in between these next two conferences for the Westchester UK team.