Westchester Publishing Services

Excellence Delivered

Accessibility, AI, and more…

copyediting

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

headshot of a bearded man wearing glassesIt’s been a busy few weeks for me, meeting with some of our clients about expanding our support for their lists, this year. During these meetings, two topics have been coming up again and again. Accessibility — and AI.

For the former – accessibility – Westchester has a lot of resources that we can bring to bear to help. If you’re at all looking for further support in making your content — whether upcoming titles or backlist — accessible, please do reach out. Westchester became a GCA-certified vendor in 2021 to help publishers with their accessibility needs for ePubs. We also joined DAISY to further our knowledge and support for accessible content. In an ongoing basis, we’re keeping track of emerging trends in ePubs, Accessible PDF’s and more, including these recent changes for ePub files from the W3C. Personally, I’m on the Workflow Committee of the Book Industry Study Group, where my talented colleagues on the committee recently released this update regarding fixed layout ePubs. We’re helping with tasks from WCAG compliance to creating alt-text entries to large-scale backlist scanning and conversion projects. This recent IBPA webinar I participated in with Michael Johnson from Benetech covers some highlights to consider.

For the latter topic – AI – well, I’m not sure any of us have a clear vantage into how GPTs and emerging tools will impact our business in the long term. The team at Westchester have been using scripts and natural language processing for years to help automate repetitive tasks and run some of our comparisons and checks. Much as indexing software became a tool for trained indexers to use to organize keywords and condense the time it takes to index a book, AI will likely be used to help improve accuracy and create even more efficiencies in various parts of the publishing workflow. The talented publishing professionals at Westchester Publishing Services establish the gold standard in our industry, and using a variety of technologies to provide high quality solutions for our clients is simply part of our DNA. I know we’re already harnessing AI in specifics areas of our toolsets. I’m looking forward to seeing how our team will continue to evolve and develop more solutions that benefit our clients and the industry as a whole.

In case you missed it, this article by Thad McIlroy in the June 6 issue of Publishers Weekly, provides a bit more of a stimulating viewpoint on the subject. And this article exposes perhaps the extreme case of trying to automate as much as possible with AI – and the negative impact it can have on content and the people who collaborate with you on your content.

While these strategic discussions are happening in all of our shops, I still remain grateful that the majority of my time is being spent exploring the editorial and production services the industry has come to expect Westchester to handle with care since the launch of our company in the 1960s. Much like the rest of the publishing industry, we continue to pivot and evolve, but remain steadfast to striking the right balance between technology and human expertise to allow our clients to trust their publications with Westchester.

How can Westchester help you for the balance of the year on your projects? Whether it’s helping with manuscript prep, typesetting, copyediting, or other tasks for your titles and assets, just reach out, we’ll be here for you.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

National Archives, Washington, DCIt seems for the last several years that visits to our partners’ operations in New England and the Beltway tend to land in October.  Perhaps that’s because it’s this time of year when our clients have taken a post-Summer breath and are ready to begin talking about the editorial and production phases of their list for the upcoming year.  Or perhaps it’s because Key Accounts Manager Bill Foley and I like to try to get these visits in before the inevitable winter weather begins snarling up flight itineraries, road trips, and the like.  Either way, it has been a productive few weeks meeting with our academic, legal, university press, policy group, and trade partners from Boston to New York to DC.  What follows are some key topics that were hit upon during these trips – some of which may apply to you more than others, but all of which raise the recurring topic in these blog pages of tailoring specific solutions to each partner’s needs.

  • Alternate workflows for different product types – This came up during meetings with legal publishers and policy groups in DC and the Beltway, university press clients up and down the coast, and other publishers throughout the Northeast corridor. Over the years, Westchester has become associated with handling specific imprints or product lines for some of our clients, but it’s become apparent to them that we are able to help in other ways.  For some legal publishers, for instance, we may be more associated with helping them on their treatises, where for others we’re their go-to resource for statutory titles. Likewise, some policy groups think of us as ‘book people’, while others send us all of their working papers to edit on tight turnarounds. This is why we believe in having periodic reviews with our clients, so we can share ways we are helping your peers, which can often lead to resolving a similar challenge you’re having with books or other publications not currently assigned to Westchester. Talk with your Westchester rep about the areas where you’re experiencing challenges with books or other types of publications not currently assigned to Westchester, and let’s see if we can provide you with an affordable alternative to managing an army of freelance resources to get your publications to press.
  • Changing modes of trade publishing – Interestingly, after decades (five of them to be precise) of being the go-to vendor for trade publishers on their typesetting needs, we increasingly find ourselves being called upon to help copyedit and project manage trade titles as well. Certainly, our editorial operation, which has been around for over 20 years, has handled many key trade titles for clients over the years, but that has usually been during peak windows when trade publishers needed help on overflow titles.  More and more, though, we find trade publishers are giving serious consideration to outsourcing project management, copyediting, and production for entire imprints, to better free up their in-house staff to work on key or embargoed titles or avoid the time sink of managing a pool of freelance copyeditors with specific subject matter expertise. During the course of these early Autumn visits, several trade houses made moves to start outsourcing specific imprints to Westchester for editorial and production packaging.  We’re proud of the teams we have built over the years to support this need and are happy to talk with you about editing your fiction or trade titles, if that is a growing need.
  • Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and University of Pennsylvania’s book launch for Design with Nature Now.Quality matters – Lastly, one of the highlights of our October road trips was visiting the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and University of Pennsylvania’s book launch for the revised version of Design with Nature, called Design with Nature Now. Editor Frederick ‘Fritz’ Steiner and contributors led presentations at Cambridge’s Lincoln Institute of Land Policy about key projects covered in the book, as well as just the undertaking of revising an industry-standard title to address changing needs in landscape architecture to better address needs around climate change, new approaches to landscape architecture, and more.  The highlight of the evening for Westchester was the kudos and thanks the editors gave to Westchester’s own Susan Baker for her and Production Editor Deborah Grahame-Smith’s efforts working with Lincoln’s and Penn’s teams of writers, editors, and designers on editing and typesetting the book. The emphasis by our client on quality – and the thanks to our staff for their efforts to ensure a sustainable, durable new edition of an academic classic – were greatly appreciated and representative of why we do what we do.

I look forward to any thoughts the above may prompt for you about the publications you currently send to Westchester, or areas where we could help you that we currently do not.  Please reach out to me or your account rep to discuss your changing needs for support on your books, papers, and other publications, so that Westchester can help to prescribe possible solutions to help you continue to keep your publications on schedule and below budget.

 

Many vendors say that they can handle your editorial and production needs, but what do they actually mean? Who owns the process, and how are they ensuring quality and consistency from project to project?

Meet Susan Baker.

Susan joined Westchester in 2002 – from Greenwood Publishing Group where she was Vice President of Production – to launch our editorial services division that is based in Danbury, CT. Over the past sixteen years, Susan has led the team and continues building it out to serve an expanding client list that includes Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, Brookings Institution Press, and dozens of other clients. In all, Susan’s team currently provides editorial services for more than 600 titles every year.

Why do such prestigious clients rely on Susan’s staff and processes?  In a word, care.

Susan’s team of production editors ensure that each book, white paper, or journal is handled with the attention to detail that the publishers themselves would ideally provide. From the beginning of a project, reviewing a manuscript prior to pre-edit tagging, organizing art logs and pre-flighting art, engaging with authors to launch projects, testing and assigning copyeditors specific to a project’s domain area, checking copyedited pages, engaging with designers and our composition team on steps from castoff to sample pages, checking first pass pages, reviewing pages with the publisher, checking printer proofs and epubs, all the way through to ensuring that assets have been received and processed by printers and platforms, the editorial services team looks after everything.

Wow, that’s a long list of items to care about!

Based on what clients have shared with us, there are few vendors or freelancers in the marketplace who possess the level of attention to detail that Susan and her team of editors provide on every project. Download copies of our workflow documents, providing examples of full-service and digital production workflow options. We know each client has different needs, schedules, and approaches to handling their projects, and we work with you to adhere to your workflows, ensuring your projects are completed accurately, on-time, and within budget. Contact us to discuss the ways Susan’s team of production editors can put their expert care and attention to detail into your projects.