Westchester Publishing Services

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Westchester Wrap-up – Spring 2018

Composition

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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The Benefits of Using the Right Vendor Instead of In-House Resources

by Paul J. Crecca, President and CFO of Westchester Publishing Services

In my previous article, “The Benefits of Sending Pre-Press Production Work to a Vendor,” I talked about the potential cost savings when using a large pre-press production vendor with an India based composition house vs. handling this pre-press work in-house. In this article, I would like to discuss the question of vendor quality compared to the quality of final work product produced by in-house staff.

To jump right in, let me give you two key reasons why a large vendor can (let me emphasize “large” and “can,” which I’ll come back to) achieve better work product quality than in-house staff:

1. Expert Staff – The professionals and staff handling each task along the production workflow are specialists, experts in performing their specific responsibility – back to the time-honored principle – practice (or experience) makes perfect. Adding to this, because a service vendor must have experts in each task along the workflow, they must ensure each expert is well and frequently trained – otherwise, they will lose the game.
2. Quality Controls – Any good service provider knows that despite having experts handling each task, those experts are human beings, and they will occasionally make mistakes. Thus any good service vendor knows they must have comprehensive Quality Control procedures to identify and correct any errors that might occur.

A publisher can certainly bring on experts in any and all tasks in their production workflow just as a service provider does. But is it possible once the publisher has brought in that expert “shortstop” to keep the shortstop playing in that position full time? Without a substantial volume of projects flowing through the workflow, and all the other positions filled with their own experts (1st base, catcher, etc.), I submit the answer is no, it’s not possible for that in-house expert to only handle one key responsibility. Then how much training, most importantly on-going training do those in-house experts receive? I’ve worked in several very large companies, and job-specific training after day one was non-existent. As a practical matter and a reality, it’s just not possible for a publisher to maintain experts at each stage of the pre-press production workflow.

As a vendor providing a service where product quality can mean the difference between a successful business and total business failure, it would be playing Russian roulette not to have comprehensive Quality Control procedures in place. In this case, we’re talking about the primary product of publishers, the books and other publications they sell, where even a single quality failure could be disastrous. At Westchester, we have QC procedures in place aimed at achieving 100% quality assurance. While it is possible for a publisher to have similar QC procedures in place, often the pressure of keeping internal costs low wins out over having the extra staff necessary to perform those QC functions. Ultimately, the risk of quality issues getting through to final publications are a trade-off these publishers live with, but they don’t have to.

Now let’s come back to why a “large” vendor “can”.

The importance of being a “large” vendor is related to the challenge of a publisher having experts in each key position along the workflow. In order to maintain experts in each key position, there must be a volume of work to keep them engaged and productive in that position. If you only keep an in-house paginator engaged part-time setting pages in InDesign – and doing completely different tasks the rest of the time – will they ever be as good and efficient as someone doing the same task full time? Being a large vendor ensures the volume of work necessary to keep the experts in place in all positions at all times, performing at the top of their game.

The importance above of saying a vendor “can,” relates to a common complaint in today’s pre-press production service market. Large service providers in this space have the resources and the necessity to implement the comprehensive QC procedures which ensure very high-quality end product – but many do not. We at Westchester are baffled by this but take pride in separating our company from those vendors who cannot deliver near-perfect quality. Once again, we aim to achieve 100% quality assurance for all our publisher clients.

At this point you might be asking, can a vendor provide all this, experts along the entire workflow plus comprehensive quality control procedures? The answer is yes, tying back to key points in my previous article about higher vendor efficiency resulting from larger volumes as well as an extremely cost-efficient workforce on the typesetting side of the workflow.

Westchester Publishing Services with our 40+ U.S. based production editors/project managers, 350+ network of copyeditors, a U.S. based customer service department, and 100% company owned and U.S. managed composition/typesetting house located in India, is the only U.S. employee-owned company of scale focused solely on pre-press production services. We’ll leave the printing to the experts in that field, but only after we take care of the coordination and hand-off of your final print files with your designated printer.

I would love to know what you think – please comment below.

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

by Paul J. Crecca, President and CFO of Westchester Publishing Services

A question which regularly comes up for discussion in our management meetings is, “What is the argument from a publisher’s point of view for keeping pre-press production in-house?” As the CFO of Westchester, I have been studying the numbers related to that question for nearly three years – and the answer eludes me.

Each of the 20+ expert U.S.-based production editors employed by Westchester handles approximately 15,000 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 are able to 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, ensuring we could keep our composition (typesetting) production costs competitive. Our employees in India are compensated at the high range compared to our India based competitors however it is certainly not what a U.S. based typesetting position would pay. Other vendors outsource your work to third-party shops where the oversight may be lacking, causing delays 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 being 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 which will be addressed in future posts, 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.

I’d like to hear your thoughts about internal production costs and keeping pre-press production in-house – please comment below.

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