Westchester Publishing Services

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Westchester Summer 2020 Highlights

editorial

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Westchester and the publishing industry overall have continued to change how we work on publication projects this year. Being able to successfully pivot and adapt to a different norm is a central theme running through our highlights from the summer of 2020. Read on to learn some of the ways we continued to maintain vital connections with our clients and within the larger publishing community:

Working Better Together

Publishing Now webinar whitepaperIn early July Publishers Weekly and Westchester co-hosted the Publishing Now webinar where attendees across all areas of publishing had the opportunity to hear from stakeholders at BISG, HMH, Ingram, and Princeton University Press about how each company was addressing challenges within their companies and beyond that were impacting producing, shipping, and selling publications to consumers, identifying potential issues to be aware of heading into the highly important fall and holiday seasons, and ideas for how publishers could prepare to navigate effectively through these situations. In addition to the webinar video, Publishers Weekly produced a summary article, and the panelists contributed content related to the discussion that is available to read and download from our website.

Welcome to Carol Wilson

In September, Carol Wilson joined Westchester Education Services in the newly created position of Director of Client Solutions. Carol has extensive experience within education publishing including her work at Pearson, Edmentum, and Renaissance Learning. This recent blog post outlines more about Carol’s credentials and how she will work with Westchester’s clients.

 

Westchester becomes a member of BISG

BISG logoPublishing is an industry where each sector is highly reliant on other companies within the supply chain that transforms author’s creations and delivers the finished product to consumers in the formats they desire. In these complex times, participating in a forum where data informs effective strategies for stepping through each stage of the publication lifecycle can be extremely beneficial. That is why we chose to become a member of the Book Industry Study Group this August. In this blog post, Chief Revenue Officer, Tyler M. Carey explains why the time was right to take this step and how other companies in the publishing industry can do so.

 

IPG Independent Publishing Awards sponsorship

As a member of the Independent Publishers Guild, Westchester UK had the pleasure to sponsor the Education Publishing Award category during the Independent Publishing Awards ceremony, which took place virtually on September 22. Kudos to the independent publishers who were nominated in the various categories, and congratulations to all of the winning publishers. You can view the awards show here.

 

Westchester Publishing Services featured in PW Digital in India article

Being able to conduct operations digitally has been mission-critical during the past seven months, and the right tools are crucial to ensuring processes run as seamlessly as possible. Westchester’s adoption of the Dropbox platform a few years ago both within our internal teams as well as serving as the foundation for our Client Portal are detailed in this article which was part of the coverage in Publishers Weekly’s annual Digital in India section.

 

Keeping focused on the needs of individual publishers

Westchester has weathered many different business cycles during our more than 50 years of operation. At a challenging time for many in the industry, this summer we surpassed the milestone of having more than 250 active clients, publishers who rely on us for editorial, production, content creation, and project management services while workforces are remote and the ways readers purchase and consume content has dramatically changed. We have achieved this by consulting with each publisher to identify the best solution for their specific workflow issues, and providing them with finished projects they and their customers can be proud of.
Would you like to experience how a collaborative partnership can help your publishing program? I invite you to contact us to learn more.

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.

CONTINUING A PARTNERSHIP OF MORE THAN A QUARTER-CENTURY

From Westchester Publishing Services’ beginnings as a typesetting company exactly fifty years ago, trade publishers have relied on the pre-press services we provide. Case in point – the U.S. division of Macmillan Publishers, for which in 1992 we began providing composition services on selected titles. The partnership between our companies has strengthened over time, with Westchester handling virtually all of the trade titles that Macmillan Publishers U.S. division releases annually over the past decade. This includes many titles that have contributed to Macmillan’s continued critical and commercial success, including the award-winning children’s titles in their Roaring Brook Press imprint, Jonathan Franzen’s novels, and James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty.

Westchester realizes that publishers have myriad options when deciding on who will provide editorial and composition services for their publications. We feel particularly privileged that Macmillan Publishers has selected Westchester to continue to provide composition services on virtually all of their titles. Read about the factors Macmillan considered, and ultimately reaffirmed in deciding that Westchester Publishing Services remains the right pre-press services provider for their publications. You can also visit our U.S. serviced Composition Typesetting webpage for more information about the composition service Macmillan has been committed to for more than ten years.

Westchester customizes our full array of editorial and composition service offerings to the specific requirements of each of our clients. Contact us to schedule an exploratory discussion of how we can help you get your titles to market more efficiently and cost effectively than your current processes.

Photo of ISA world events timeline since 1959
Timeline of world events since ISA’s founding, 60 years ago.

Hot on the heels of my trip to London for the London Book Fair, I visited another country in the Commonwealth, heading up to Toronto, Canada for the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention. For those of you not familiar with the ISA, it’s the world’s premier membership organization for researchers on topics of political science, globalization, international research, and more.  Their mission is to connect “scholars, practitioners, and students across the globe,” and based on the diversity and representation within the panels and attendance of over 6,000 researchers at this year’s convention, the ISA delivers on this mission very effectively as they celebrate their 60th anniversary.  Sessions and presentations covered topics related to specific current affairs issues, emerging methodologies in research and technology, diversity in research coverage as well as inclusivity within the research community, challenges to democracy, and much more.  From my attendance, I can see a very interesting collection of new white papers coming from these policy groups in the months to come.

Dozens of Westchester’s editorial and production clients were represented in the list of presenters and at stands in the Exhibit Hall, including Columbia University Press, Brookings Institution Press, Cornell University Press, The MIT Press, Macmillan Publishers, Princeton University Press, the United States Institute of Peace Press, W.W. Norton, The Cato Institute, and other policy groups and academic publishers. For Westchester, it was an opportunity to connect with a number of our clients and prospective partners to discuss how best our editorial and production services for the policy group and academic markets can help their publications programs, including the expansion of data visualization capabilities.

For our clients, the ISA Convention provided a few different opportunities. For some of our clients and partners, attending was a branding exercise, as their international studies lists have grown in recent years and they wanted to highlight that to researchers in the fields covered by the conference presentations. For other publishers and policy groups, the convention allowed them to pursue acquisitions of new titles, papers, and projects by meeting with some of the most noted scholars in the foreign affairs and policy areas about potential projects. For other publishers, sales were brisk at their booths, where their lists of scholarly and policy related titles were in high demand by researchers and institutions looking to expand their reference libraries.

Next year’s ISA Convention will be held in Hawai’i, a destination that can sometimes be difficult for researchers to get included in their budget, but due to the impact of the conference on the global study of international relations and current affairs there is no doubt turnout will continue to be strong.

Are you a publisher of academic or policy content, looking to explore ways you can expand your editorial, design, and production capacity, or reduce costs to produce your white papers, books, and journals?  Contact us to learn more about how Westchester can help.

by Terry Colosimo, Director of Operations

Before joining Westchester, I was a Production Manager at an academic publisher working with both printing and composition vendors. Though quality and cost were of importance, the vendor’s level of customer service weighed heavy in my decision-making process, and sometimes projects were awarded to a vendor due to the level of care that the customer service representative (CSR) would bring to it. Even though I have not purchased services for quite some time, I still have contact with some of the very first CSRs I was introduced to.

Once I started working here, my responsibilities transitioned from seeking out vendors to ensuring that Westchester’s reputation for quality and service was maintained. Fortunately, this has been an easy task to carry out, in that the representatives we have on our team exhibit the same traits which I sought out when I was on the publisher’s side of the desk.

Ask yourself whether your current editorial or production vendor embodies these qualities:

Responsiveness—responding to a customer in a timely manner would seem to be obvious, but I think we have all experienced that uneasiness that comes while waiting for a response. Many times your representative may not have all the information they need to answer your question, but this should not stop a representative from sending out a quick acknowledgment to let you know that they are looking into your query or working on your request. Once that acknowledgment is made, they should then get back to you in a timely and thorough manner.

Experience—a customer service team should have extensive knowledge in all areas of publishing services. Their combined experience comes from grasping the nuances of client’s production workflow. An experienced CSR knows what to ask if you are uncertain about the particulars of a job. What may be a new product or workflow for you may be familiar to your CSR and they should be able to help navigate the process with you. Not each customer is the same, but what a CSR learns from each customer helps build a knowledge base for each one on the team to use.

Flexibility—because not every client is going to follow the same model and not every one of your own projects is going to be the same, good customer service requires being flexible. You should get reassurance, and not resistance from your CSR that they can handle a time-sensitive or high profile project. Systems should be adaptable enough so that a unique project does not negatively affect the rest of your projects or schedules.

Ownership—you should feel like your CSR fully owns your account and acts on your behalf. A CSR’s responsibility is to make sure that everyone in the organization understands your SOPs; sees that any changes get implemented within each department and cross-trains others so that there is seamless service if they are away. Based on their knowledge and the relationship they have built with you, they should be able to work with you and offer suggestions if needed. Ownership also means acknowledging when mistakes are made and working on getting those resolved to your satisfaction.

Proactive—if a problem does occur, your CSR should be able to determine its cause and how to get it resolved as quickly as possible. They should work with production to determine ways to avoid such situations from happening in the future and give you a sense of confidence that an issue has been thoroughly addressed. And given their experience on your account, they should understand your needs well enough to resolve as much as they can internally before raising a query with you.

These five traits are what I believe set a vendor apart, and propel them into becoming a trusted partner to a publisher.  At Westchester, these are far more than a list of desirable qualities – they are key components guiding the approach we take with every project each of our valued clients provides us.

I hope my thoughts about customer service were helpful and informative for you. In my next post, I will share my thoughts with you on the subject of client visits.