Westchester Publishing Services

Excellence Delivered

Fall 2023 Conferences and News from Westchester

Production

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

headshot of Tyler Carey2023 has been another busy year here at US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services, as we continue to expand our stateside and offshore operations to further support our clients’ editorial and production needs. In addition to our standard editorial and production work, we are supporting numerous clients who are expressing increased interest in scanning backlist titles, print-on-demand file requirements, accessible ePubs, developmental editing, permissions, and author support tasks.  Across our global operations based in the US, UK, and India, we now support approximately 600 clients around the world. We appreciate the feedback from these partners that has helped us better understand how we can work with publishers and content providers to resolve their problems and deliver quality publications to their readers. 

To best support both client growth and the additional services we are providing, we announced two promotions earlier this Summer.  Deb Taylor has been promoted to our Chief Operations Officer, and Christober Masilamani has been promoted to our Managing Director for our Chennai, India production operation.  More information about their new roles can be found in this press release.  Let me know if a discussion with Deb or Christober about incorporating your needs into our plans and direction would be helpful. You can Contact Us anytime to schedule a discussion with your sales point of contact and our leadership team. 

We enjoy having an ongoing dialogue with the market about topics impacting our industry. Here are a few discussions that may be of interest to you: 

  • Last month, I spoke on the Publisher Nation podcast with Digital Book World’s Bradley Metrock – and industry thought leaders Lorraine Shanley (Market Partners International) and Andrea Chambers (NYU Masters in Publishing) – about how publishers are exploring AI within their workflows. You can watch the YouTube feed of our discussion. 
  • On October 10th, I will be presenting on the “Amplifying Impact” panel at Dropbox’s Work in Progress conference in New York City. I’ll be speaking about how we partnered with Dropbox to build out our Client Portal, and how both of our organizations continue to explore ways publishers and media organizations can leverage tools and technology to make their work more efficient.  You can sign up for this one-day event on Dropbox’s site. I’ll also share a blog post afterwards with info about the day’s content and any best practices that may be worth tracking. 
  • Most exciting of all, our next Publishing Now webinar – launched in partnership with Publishers Weekly – is coming up on Thursday, October 26th.  Speakers include Marina Padakis Lowry from Union Square & Co., Diem Bloom from Johns Hopkins University Press, and Bill Rojack from Midland Paper and Two Sides North America. Our panelists will be exploring the ways books are being produced in our new normal, including topics related to AI, workflow, and working with partners. You can sign up here. 

If there are any areas where you have questions, contact us to schedule a brief Zoom. We always like to help, even if that means connecting you with our partners who may be better able to support those needs that are outside our area of expertise. I would welcome the chance to hear from you, and learn more about what you’re exploring with your 2024 publications program. 

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

headshot of Tyler CareyUsually, the Autumn weeks leading up to Halloween and Thanksgiving have been times when Westchester’s clients were heads down on projects, aiming to hit end of year deadlines, and we found ourselves in a more transactional mode on projects. This Fall has been different though, with a lot of discussions between our clients and our sales, editorial, and production teams about changes to workflows and ways we can help address additional challenges our clients are having in getting their work on titles completed and getting their books to market.

The lunch meetings I’ve been having with clients during the past few months suggest that in some ways, we’re all finally settling into a bit of a more active ‘new normal’, and this also seems true about how we’re bringing our books to market. The seasonal rhythms in our businesses still continue to adapt and evolve as we move from a time of reactive behavior, where our clients were trying to adapt to the news of paper shortages and crowded windows at the printers. A year on, everyone is more cognizant of those challenges and better prepared for the schedules books are requiring now.

In another indicator of this more active normal, instead of focusing on supply chain challenges like we have in previous sessions, our recent Publishing Now webinar, in partnership with Publishers Weekly, looked at how publishers can pivot to better embrace industry trends for accessibility and sustainability. You can view the webinar here on YouTube, to see Kristen McLean (NPD Books), Bill Kasdorf (Publishing Technology Partners), and Rachel Martin (Elsevier) discuss these topics and share their insights.

Something else I’ve noticed in my recent in-person meetings with clients is how casual and ‘normal’ having in-person meetings is again. No one is being cavalier about the lingering risks of the pandemic, but declining infection numbers and the increased level of comfort many people have about conducting in-person meetings has made them a viable alternative for vendors and our clients to use to advance as many key topic areas as possible, rather than engaging in a series of Zoom meetings, countless cycles of emails, or Slack messages.

These recent discussions I have been having with clients have me feeling very upbeat and emboldened about the path the publishing industry is taking, with exploring new ways of doing things, doubling down on growth, and further embracing change. Here at Westchester, our teams are busy supporting clients in areas of their workflows that hadn’t been part of our “traditional” role in the past. Specific areas include the growth of our program for Ingram ebook distribution clients, through which we provide ebook conversion services for an affordable rate, to managing client assets in CoreSource and other platforms, and taking on more specific production and manufacturing tasks to free more time up for our clients’ staff. To me, that underscores how the industry is working together to find innovative ways to improve the speed with which books are being produced, and with less cost.

To make sure I wasn’t applying a Boston-New York-DC corridor perspective to the wider industry goings on, I reached out to Tim Davies, the CEO of Westchester’s UK operation, to see if he found the in-person uptick in activity was holding true for him – especially with his recent attendance at the Frankfurt Book Fair representing Westchester’s UK book and education units.

“From my perspective,” Tim shared regarding Frankfurt, “it was smaller and quieter than pre-pandemic but a ‘quiet’ Frankfurt is still busy and buzzy by the standards of any other trade event. Definitely fewer attendees, with several people commenting to me that they’d noticed US visitor numbers were well down. That said, it was great to spend time with old friends and colleagues and compare notes on our current experience of our respective publishing sectors, and international markets. Everyone I spoke to said they were really pleased that they’d come and that they expected next year’s numbers and vibe to be much more akin to how it used to be. I’ve already booked my hotel!”

This article in Publishers Weekly and this article in The Bookseller profile the scale of attendees at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year vs. prior to the pandemic, supporting Tim’s points above. PW also shared highlights of other recent regional conferences for booksellers, while Frankfurt was underway, demonstrating the uptick in interest in in-person events, and the opportunities that brings about for publishers and booksellers. It certainly feels like we’re returning to a time where more business may be done at places like the Javits Center in New York and the Olympia in London, as well as numerous smaller conferences around the country and the globe, where specialists meet to cover their products and areas of expertise. It’s invigorating to see this trend underway again.

So, let Westchester know what’s changing for you: What’s been keeping you busier than ever? What’s working well? What partners are helping save the day? What can US employee-owned Westchester be doing to help you? As we all continue adapting together, I welcome a conversation about ways your team is changing how you do your work, and exploring the additional ways our teams can help you.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Long time readers of the Westchester Publishing Services blog will know that prior to the pandemic, traveling into the market to meet with our clients and prospective partners was a key means of getting to know clients and their work, better understanding competitive gaps we needed to address, and also exploring new services that the market needed to help solve it workflow challenges. This blog was often filled with post-conference updates from the likes of the London Book Fair, BEA, Frankfurt, ASU+GSV, and more.

Over the course of the past year and a half, Westchester’s sales and marketing efforts have pivoted to better engage with our clients and partners via Zoom meetings with individual clients, webinars that were focused on meaningful content instead of commercials about our capabilities, and segmented email marketing messages to share updates on our efforts to continue expanding services to address the market’s rapidly evolving needs. Those needs pivoted during the lockdown and then further changed due to the ongoing pandemic’s impact on our industry’s staff, products, and supply chain.

Westchester still has all of its over 400 global staff working remotely, and at this point we have no plans to reopen our US-based offices in a “hybrid working model” capacity anytime before the beginning of 2022. We’ve successfully served our clients and grown our business quite a bit using a distributed working model, and can continue to do so as long as the situation requires.

But, on a recent warm, sunny New York City afternoon, I found myself sitting in Bryant Park, sipping a cup of coffee prior to my first in-person dinner meeting in over 18 months. A number of US-based members of London’s Stationers’ Company gathered for dinner to catch up and talk about the impacts of the supply chain and other factors on our industry. PW will be co-hosting a webinar on this subject with us in just a few days. [Updated 10/18 – You can now view the webinar on our YouTube Channel.]

Since that dinner, I’ve had the great fortune to head out into the field with Bill Foley, our longstanding Key Accounts Manager, and Deb Taylor, who recently joined us in the newly formed role of Director of Business Development and Marketing.  Bill, Deb, and I have started scheduling more field-based lunches and dinners to meet with publishers to learn more about what has changed in their organizations since the pandemic began, and how Westchester can best address their workflow needs. Topics like expanding our publishing technology solutions, providing standalone copyediting and permissions services, and more have been discussed already.

And we’re keen to pick up those lines of dialogue with you, whether it’s in person or via a Zoom or phone call. What things are impacting your publishing program? How can vendors like Westchester best help you navigate your editorial and production processes, taking as much burden off your team’s shoulders while they’re navigating all the manufacturing and supply chain factors that are taking up a lot of attention right now?  In other words, how can Westchester help you?  Contact us to schedule a meeting or call to explore things further.

 

As 2020 comes to a close, and we all look forward to the news of a pandemic vaccine with hope and relief, the team at Westchester Publishing Services is grateful for the health and spirit of our staff and customers.

Though few of us could have foreseen how publishing would be transformed, almost none would be surprised at the resiliency the industry showed by adapting, sharing best practices, and identifying solutions to meet the needs of our customers.

As many trade shows and conferences were cancelled or went virtual, Westchester understood the importance of staying connected with the publishing community, at least digitally. Below, we look back on 2020 to see how Westchester and our customers adapted to all the changes this year brought.

In early March, Westchester made the decision to transition the majority of our employees to a Work from Home model. On March 19, we hosted a session with panelists from various areas of publishing to share how their companies and staff were adjusting, and providing actionable ideas to help the transition process go more smoothly. Additionally, we cultivated this resources page for our new reality.

In July, we teamed up with Publishers Weekly to present a panel discussion about the state of the industry, along with the challenges and opportunities for companies in the publishing supply chain to consider during the crucial second half of the year. In addition to the webinar, PW produced a summary article, and we made multiple resources from the webinar available to access on our website.

In September, Tyler M. Carey, Westchester’s Chief Revenue Officer, participated in a BISG panel discussion led by Brian O’Leary about how publishers can identify inefficiencies in publishing workflows and solutions they can implement to improve effectiveness (requires free registration).

Westchester Services Checklist
Download our Services Checklist

Westchester released several case studies this year, sharing the solutions we provide for publishers to streamline their workflow and perform tasks that they may not have previously considered engaging a services firm to handle. You can download the convenient checklist shown here to help you identify ways we are able to improve your workflow.
We were also featured in the Publishers Weekly Digital in India issue about how our expanded production capacity and robust Client Portal (provided at no cost to clients) helped clients efficiently manage their editorial and composition jobs throughout the year.

Until we are able to safely return to in-person events, Westchester looks forward to connecting with you virtually through webinars and other content forms. We’re a convenient phone call or Zoom session away to help you address your workflow challenges. Get in touch with us, and let us know how we can become your trusted partner in publishing in the year ahead.