Westchester Publishing Services

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Westchester Wrap-up: Spring 2020

Client Portal

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

The staff at Westchester’s locations around the world are continuing to work remotely for their health and safety as well as that of their families. During this time, they have also been providing additional guidance for our customers as phases at other points in the publication project lifecycle are being impacted as a result of world events.

Regardless of whether we complete our work in an office or our homes, what remains consistent is our unwavering commitment to provide our clients with excellent service on every project they send to us. Read on to learn how each of our business units worked in various ways to support the evolving needs of our clients and industry colleagues during Spring 2020:

English language learning webinar

As students around the world shifted to a home-based learning environment practically overnight, one group requiring extra support were English language learners. Students learning an additional language benefit from in-person instruction that helps them obtain important communication concepts. Westchester Education Services’ Walter Henderson, Jr., moderated a webinar with language teaching experts in April that focused on how to support the needs of these students, and shared quality online language-learning resources that students could use while continuing their studies remotely.

Conferences Transform into Virtual Events

Event organizers who had in-person conferences planned for the spring had to make quick decisions, shifting from physical meeting spaces for delivering keynotes and conference content to platforms like Zoom and Skype. Chief Revenue Officer, Tyler M. Carey, wrote a blog post detailing how conferences serving the academic and university press sectors, including ALPSP UP Redux and AUP adjusted their content and delivery methods to keep their members informed.

How Westchester Supports Publishers

Download Services Checklist

Over the last four months, you’ve likely had to adapt some of your publication processes as a result of your staff working from home. Westchester has experience with creating workflows for our clients based on their project requirements, and we’ve received many inquiries about handling tasks that are further upstream or downstream in the editorial and production process. Read this case study about how we designed a custom workflow for West Margin Press, and review our services checklist to see all the ways that Westchester can help you.

 

Westchester Education Services participate in two SIIA panels

The Software and Industry Information Association (SIIA) Education Technology Conference originally scheduled for two days in June, was another conference that revised its format to virtual sessions, which took place over the course of three weeks in May and early June. Westchester Education Services President and Chief Content Officer, Kevin J. Gray, was the moderator for the session, “Haven’t We Seen This Before? Lessons Learned”. The knowledgeable panel of education industry experts provided guidance to the audience about what is working with remote learning and where improvements are needed to support students and their families. Kevin was also a panelist for the session “Product Paths to Support Learning”, that explored how educational publishers and ed-tech providers are adjusting their products and services to meet learners where they are in remote learning environments. (SIIA login may be required to view sessions)

Use the Client Portal to streamline project management

Having an easy to use, secure project management platform that helps you see the status of every project and each asset associated with it can save you from the hassle of lots of emails, and phone calls to track important information down while you and your staff are working remotely. This video overview of the key features of our award-winning Client Portal shows how efficient project management can be. After you watch it, get in touch with us to learn how it can be customized to your requirements.

IPG Virtual Spring Conference

Like the US, the UK conference calendar was upended, most notably with the London Book Fair completely scrapped for 2020. The Independent Publishers Guild (IPG) Conference originally planned as a one day event at the beginning of May transitioned to a 2 day virtual conference hall at the beginning of June. Westchester Publishing Services UK was an exhibitor at this first of its kind event for the IPG. Prior to the conference, UK Managing Director, Tim Davies, shared a video to IPG members about how Westchester supports independent publishers in challenging times and potential longer-term impacts for the industry.

Westchester Education Services forms DEI Committee

The need for increased representation in the publishing industry is very topical due to current events, and something that Westchester has been incorporating into our recruitment efforts for staff and freelance resources for a longer time. In March, the Education Services team unveiled a DEI Mission Statement that includes action items for creating and nurturing a diverse talent base. In June, we announced the formation and membership of a DEI Committee, who are responsible for developing goals and guiding the strategies to ensure an inclusive and equitable working environment for everyone. Later this summer, we will be hosting a webinar about measurable steps that publishers and ed-tech providers can implement within their business. While we still have more ground to cover in our own organization to achieve full equity, we believe it is important to work together with our industry partners so we can all develop best practices that help everyone attain this goal.

An out of this world Nibbies

The British Book Awards, known by their nickname the Nibbies usually holds a formal gala event to recognize publishers and authors that have had a significant impact on the British publishing industry during the previous year. Westchester Education Services sponsored the Academic, Educational and Professional Publisher of the Year category which was awarded in late June, While we couldn’t be there in person to congratulate the winner, having an astronaut make the announcement is a pretty cosmic way to share the news. Watch the publisher shortlist and winner announcement in this video, courtesy of The Bookseller.

Stay connected with Westchester

Stay in the know about the different products and services Westchester offers, including topical webinars by following our LinkedIn pages for Westchester Publishing Services and Westchester Education Services. To make sure we’re delivering content that’s relevant, take this one-minute survey to let us know what topics you would like Westchester to provide presentations about.

Everyone at Westchester hopes that you, your family and your colleagues will continue to stay safe and in good health. Our entire team stands ready to help our customers, our partners and others within the industry with editorial, production, and project management tasks related to your publishing program. We invite you to give us a call, send an email, or visit our website to learn more.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

If you were fortunate enough to be in Central London, tonight, you would have had the opportunity to attend another great BookMachine event, this time focused on book production.

Our friend and partner, Andy Wilson, Principal of Media at Dropbox, spoke at the BookMachine Unplugged session tonight as one of the panelists presenting on how publishers can use new technology tools to improve their production processes. He discussed how publishers are working with Dropbox to accelerate their workflows, and shared case studies – including one about Westchester’s Client Portal, which integrates the Dropbox API and platform.

We were grateful for this opportunity for our friends at Dropbox to highlight the benefits of cloud collaboration, and talk about our use case in particular.  In case you haven’t seen the Client Portal before, it is a secure, web-based project management tool that helps publishers obtain real-time status updates about their projects in production and share project assets securely between authors, publisher staff and other key project stakeholders.  Westchester Publishing Services provides this platform at no cost to our clients on projects managed through Westchester’s editorial or production operations around the globe.  Contact Us to learn more about how the Client Portal can help you minimize your effort in managing your projects, and give you greater transparency into where each project is at each step in its workflow with Westchester.

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

The calendar is winding down to the final days of the year, the decade, and Westchester’s 50th anniversary in business. It has been a really exciting year on many fronts, so join me to revisit some of the special moments during these past twelve months:

WESTCHESTER TURNED 50!

There was definitely a golden glow here at Westchester because, throughout the year, we were celebrating the significant achievement of being in business for half a century. The anniversary celebrations began with our appearance on the cover of Publishers Weekly’s February 18th issue, a profile article in the March 4th issue that helped us build a strong momentum heading into the London Book Fair, along with an article about our UK expansion in the Publishers Weekly Show Daily on March 12. We also hosted a stand party to toast our milestone anniversary with our friends and colleagues in the publishing community, where a wonderful time was had by all in attendance.

WESTCHESTER UK PROFILED IN THE BOOKSELLER

We have counted several UK-based publishers as loyal clients across the years, and realized we could do a better job of serving them and other UK and European-based publishers by having a more physical presence within the market. The Bookseller took note of our successful expansion efforts in this article (may require log-in to view) that was published in May, shortly before the British Book Awards.

NEW AGREEMENT SIGNED WITH MACMILLAN

In March, we signed a new agreement with Macmillan to continue the productive relationship our companies have enjoyed for more than a quarter-century. While Macmillan is no longer based in the iconic Flatiron building, we will always have fond memories of visiting the staff at their famous headquarters. Shortly before relocating to their new downtown digs this past summer, CEO John Sargent penned this article for Publishers Weekly about what it was like to work in this unique building.

 

UNFAMILIAR WINS AWARD

Great things were happening in our K-12 division as well in 2019. In the first quarter, the hi-lo graphic novel reader Unfamiliar, which was conceived, written, designed, and produced by our talented team received the Silver Hermes Creative Award from the Dayton, Ohio chapter of the American Advertising Federation. This video takes you behind the scenes to learn how the project went from concept to publication.

CLIENT PORTAL RECEIVES ACCOLADES

Unfamiliar was not the only award-winning initiative for Westchester this year. Our Client Portal, the secure, user-friendly, functional project management platform publishers want to incorporate into their pre-press production workflow was also receiving its fair share of positive attention. In May, The Stationers Company, the London-based guild for the media and publishing industry, shortlisted the Client Portal for their Innovation Excellence Awards, and in October, we presented about our Client Portal at the Rutgers Design Thinking program board meeting. In November, our partnership with  Dropbox – who worked with us to enhance the Client Portal’s capabilities – was recognized with a first-place win at the Bookbuilders of Boston NEPCo (New England Publishing Collaboration) Awards.

The video below, which was produced in partnership with Dropbox explains how we were able to incorporate the functionality our clients required into a beautifully designed platform that is easy for publishers to use.

CONFERENCES AND CLIENT MEETINGS

In addition to London Book Fair mentioned above, in 2019, members of the Westchester staff were busy criss-crossing North America and Europe meeting with clients and prospective partners at numerous trade shows and events, engaging in productive discussions with our think tank, university press, and legal clients. Westchester attended events as varied as SXSW EDU, ASU/GSV, the International Studies Association, British Book Awards, Association of University Presses, Frankfurt Book Fair, and FutureBook.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Last spring, the Westchester K-12 team started a program, where each month, one staff member funds a public school project that is trying to secure donations through the DonorsChoose website. Each selection is truly personal, and they have funded classrooms from New York, to California, and cities in between.

YEAR IN REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE WESTCHESTER K-12 TEAM

Recently, I asked members of the Westchester K-12 team to share some insights with me about a project or event that they were involved with during this year that was particularly meaningful for them. You can read their thoughtful responses in this blog post.

TIME FOR 2020 VISION

As we get ready to welcome both a new year and decade, we’re looking forward to several exciting events. In January, Westchester K-12’s Walter Henderson, Jr., begins his two-year term on the ETIN (Education Technology Industry Network) Board of Directors, and he will also be representing Westchester K-12 at the BETT Show in London.

We also have plans to exhibit or sponsor at several conferences, including London Book Fair, and the ASUGSV Summit. Visit our Conferences and Events page to learn where we will be and if you’re planning to attend one or more of these shows, be sure to make an appointment to meet us to discuss how we can be your trusted partner in publishing.

We look forward to seeing you in 2020, and talking about the many effective solutions we have to help you with your content development, editorial, and production needs. From everyone here at Westchester Publishing Services, best wishes for a happy holiday season and a wonderful start to the 20s!

Always be up to date with everything that’s happening at Westchester by following us on our LinkedIn pages for Westchester Publishing and Westchester K-12, watching Westchester on YouTube, and subscribing to our blogs for the latest information about us. We would love to hear from you, too! Drop us an email at any time with your questions or to discuss your publication requirements.

 

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

In October, I was fortunate enough to speak on a panel held in conjunction with the latest session of the Rutgers University Design Thinking Certificate Program. I’ve been on the advisory board of this program for a few years, as are other publishing, manufacturing, technology, and design thinking professionals. The panel consisted of Board Chair Hasan Elkomey (Chief Revenue Officer at Redstage), Joe Ford (COO at Hill & Smith), Matt Heller (Victory Design + Innovation), and myself. Needless to say, flanked by highly sought after design thinking speakers – one might even say visionaries – I could feel the onset of a case of Imposter Syndrome. My fellow panelists have used design thinking over their careers to reenvision how companies interact with their customers, their staff, and the products and services they provide. Me? Well, I’m just lucky to work with the great people at Westchester who routinely provide great editorial and production service on every content project they handle.

So, how does Design Thinking fit into the Westchester story? And what was I doing in Somerset, NJ, presenting at a grad school certificate program? This was really just another chapter in the ongoing story of our Client Portal. You see, the Client Portal that our clients use to interact with their projects took a long time to build. We initially tried to adapt off the shelf solutions, tried to build something focused on our own in-house workflows first and foremost, and went through several iterations. Along the way, we built a lot of great systems and features that became part of the iterative process, but it was our use of Design Thinking principles that helped us best define what our clients truly wanted to know about their projects throughout each project’s life cycle at Westchester. When we pivoted the viewpoint to “What would help customers better engage with their projects?” several pennies dropped. Key features came to include:

  • Transparency – the ability to see every project at every stage, and basically see in advance if things are going well or if there are risks due to author delays, etc.
  • Simplicity without losing Comprehensiveness – the ability to see at a glance where everything is via a simple Gantt chart, rather than multi-layered dashboards or spreadsheets
  • Portability – the ability to have reports generated that go to the right stakeholders regularly, without everyone having to be an active ‘user’ of the system
  • Customizability – knowing that each customer has slightly different variations to their publications processes and making the system flexible enough to adapt to those things
  • Easier file transfers – the default for a lot of our clients had been FTP transfers for years, but through our partnership with Dropbox we were able to piggyback on Dropbox API’s and the overall Dropbox architecture to make a much more elegant, quick, and facile experience for transferring files and engaging with each piece of content within the Portal rather than having to ping-pong back and forth between multiple systems and wait for files to load.

The topic of the panel at Rutgers that night was ‘Empathy’ and it was really only through the use of empathy for our customers that we got ourselves in the right mindset to be more aligned with the needs of our clients. Using an empathy approach helped us to identify those core requirements that took the ‘good’ pieces from the system we were developing, junk the pieces of the platform that weren’t working, and rebuild it using Dropbox and other systems as a more intuitive architecture and interface for our clients to have all of the capabilities they had told us they really needed from this type of system.

Certainly, Dropbox applies a lot of similar customer-centric principles, and recently they released a video about our work together, highlighting how Westchester’s use of the Dropbox platform makes for a better experience across our global operation and through our Client Portal for our own clients. In November, the productive, customer-centric philosophy shared between Dropbox and Westchester was recognized with a First Place win at the Bookbuilders of Boston New England Publishing Collaborative Awards, which is an annual celebration of publishers and vendors who work together to come up with innovative solutions to address issues impacting the industry.

Westchester is fortunate to work with a collaborative partner like Dropbox, and also all of the collaborative partners within our client base who took time over the past few years to try out early iterations of the Client Portal, provide feedback, test new things, and ultimately help develop what’s now a comprehensive yet simple tool for managing work in process at Westchester.

Many thanks to all, including the Rutgers Design Thinking program for letting me share our story on the panel.

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

In the summer months, the pace typically slows down, allowing an opportunity to relax and enjoy the longer, warmer days summertime offers up. While all of us at Westchester made sure to take some time to spend with friends and family, we were still working hard to make sure all of our publishers’ projects were moving along through the pre-press stages. Here’s a quick wrap-up of what we did this past summer:

Collaborative partnership

Dropbox is one of the members of Westchester’s Partner Network, and their Dropbox Business suite of products helps us to remain connected internally as well as with our freelance resources and client publishers to flow project assets to each other within a secure framework. Check out this video that Dropbox produced over the summer that shows how Dropbox applications help support Westchester’s development initiatives, including our Client Portal.

Westchester profiled in Publishers Weekly

In early August, Westchester Publishing Services was featured in the Publishers Weekly annual Digital Solutions in India issue. In the article, Chief Revenue Officer, Tyler M. Carey, explains how the company is prepared for continued growth during the next decade, and reflects on the significant milestone of 50 years of serving publishers’ pre-press requirements, along with reaching the fifth anniversary of being a 100% employee-owned company.

Meet Dilip Chacko

Shortly before the Digital Solutions in India article was published, I had the opportunity to speak at length with Dilip Chacko, Founder and Managing Director of our wholly-owned composition facility in Chennai, India. It was an extremely informative discussion encompassing Dilip’s career, his guiding principles, and how his focus on providing high quality applies to client projects as well as the employees who work on them.

Client Portal Update

In the spring edition of the Westchester Wrap-up, we shared how the Client Portal had been shortlisted for the Stationers’ Company Innovation in Excellence Award. Not content to rest on our laurels (or nominations), we are continually adding capabilities to the Client Portal to better serve the requirements our clients have. Last month, we conducted a webinar demonstrating several of the helpful features that make publisher workflows more efficient throughout the pre-press production process.

UK conferences

While July and August are quieter months from a working standpoint, the pace tends to move faster with September’s arrival. Tim Davies, Managing Director of Westchester Publishing Services UK, was particularly busy last month meeting with publishing industry professionals at the ALPSP (The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) Conference, and the IPG (Independent Publishers Guild) Autumn Conference. Prior to those conferences, Tim shared some helpful insights for independent publishers in this IPG podcast.

Next Generation Science Standards

If you haven’t been in the classroom for a decade or more, you might be surprised at how much more proficient students are required to be when it comes to understanding scientific concepts. Our STEM Content Director, Dave Bailis, explains how a more effective science curriculum is being implemented around the country to help prepare students for a world that is more reliant on science and technology than in previous generations.

In the Community

Earlier this year, our Westchester K-12 division implemented a program where each month one member of the team selects a project to fund from the thousands that are submitted to DonorsChoose.org by public school teachers. These projects are often for schools where the majority of students are from low-income communities that aren’t able to access much-needed classroom resources through traditional funding avenues. During the summer, STEM Content Director, Dave Bailis, and Director of Creative Services, Mark DaGrossa, each had the opportunity to fulfill a teacher request that was meaningful to them.

Meet with us this fall (and beyond)!

We’re attending and exhibiting at several conferences during the next few months, including Frankfurt Book Fair next week, FutureBook in London this November, and the SIIA Education Business Forum taking place this December in New York City. If you will be attending any of these events, let’s catch up! Make an appointment to connect with us, and be sure to visit our Conferences and Events page where we will be regularly adding information about the conferences Westchester will be attending or exhibiting at in 2020.

You don’t need to wait for a conference to speak with our knowledgeable staff about how our fifty years of experience in providing editorial, composition, and design services can help you produce quality publications while condensing schedules and trimming pre-press expenses. Contact us today to learn how Westchester’s consultative approach can benefit your projects.