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.
