Westchester Publishing Services

Excellence Delivered

Publishing Ecosystem

Production

headshot of Tyler Careyby Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

The team at US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services are enormously fortunate to work with the hundreds of publishers and content providers around the globe that we support. While we’re always eager to help problem solve our clients’ content, editorial, production, and digital project challenges, we realize that we don’t exist in a bubble. Our portion of the publication life cycle is a crucial piece to ensuring quality in publications and digital content – but plenty of other organizations play key roles beyond us and the publishers we serve. Westchester’s meetings during January and February reinforced this, as our paths crossed with a number of our key partners and organizations that provide further support to our clients.

January saw me meeting with the head of the City of London’s Stationers’ Company during his visit out to meet with North American members in New York City. Tony Mash is a rarity in the world of British livery companies, as he is a dual US/UK citizen, providing leadership to what is essentially an extension of London’s guild system. The Stationers’ Company plays a key role as a leading organization for the content and media industries, hosting frequent in-person and virtual events to let thought leaders in areas of our industries as varied as journalists, pen manufacturers, publishers, and intellectual property attorneys explore topics that affect our industries through an interdisciplinary lens. The North American members will be hosting an upcoming webinar about the transatlantic IP implications of the use of AI within the publishing industry. Additional details and registration information can be found using this link.

To Tony’s credit, by leveraging his US and UK perspectives, he has helped grow the North American contingent of the Company to a few dozen active participants from all areas of publishing and media. More about the Stationers’ Company and how to join can be found on their site.

Six people seated around a circular table topped with menus, plates, silverware, and drinks.
Stationers and colleagues: Roger Rosen, Brian O’Leary, Tyler M. Carey, Michael Healy, Lorraine Shanley, and Tony Mash.

During the above get together, I also had a chance to visit with the Book Industry Study Group’s Executive Director, Brian O’Leary. Brian was excited to discuss this year’s BISG Annual Meeting, being held on April 12th in New York. This event routinely presents excellent panels and discussions around the industry’s pressing issues. Perhaps even more rewarding is the opportunity to meet and network with a wide array of publishing professionals who work in many areas of our industry, allowing us to meet vendors, publishers, and partners with which we might not typically interact on a regular basis. I highly recommend checking out the day’s agenda and signing up.

The late Winter also saw visits Deb Taylor (Westchester’s COO) and I made to our partners at Ingram and Dropbox. Ingram graciously hosted us for a meeting about our ongoing work together to support their publishers and authors with ePub conversion services and other capabilities. As part of our trip out to LaVergne, TN, we had an opportunity to tour Ingram’s Print on Demand facility, seeing the continually improving capabilities available to help publishers and self-published authors take a book from digital files – like the ones we create for our clients – at one end of their facility to shipping printed books off to consumers at the other end of the facility in lightning fast time. LightningSource has earned its moniker, for sure.

Our colleagues at Dropbox hosted me and Deb for an afternoon to talk about Westchester’s use of Dropbox’s API as part of our Client Portal, which makes publishers’ lives super easy by allowing them to transmit files to Westchester, and then track their projects at each stage. Westchester further uses Dropbox Paper for documenting our clients’ style guides and requirements, DocSend for marketing, Dropbox Sign for client contracts, and many more pieces of the Dropbox ecosystem. During our visit, we got to sit in for interviews and discussions that were filmed for an upcoming project. Stay tuned for this short digital film, this Spring.

bearded man wearing glasses, burgundy floral shirt and blue blazer with handkerchief in the breast pocket. Behind him are a film crew preparing to do a video shoot.

Other partners and organizations with shared interests in the publishing industry came up in many more discussions with our clients during the late winter.

  • One legal publisher was seeking out a partner to help with content development on an anniversary publication, so we were able to connect them with the talented Linda Secondari at Studiolo Secondari to explore her team’s writing and photo capabilities, to help them realize their vision for a 4-color tribute book that differs from their typical legal publications.
  • In discussions with another publisher about BISAC codes and THEMA codes, we were able to point them to our friends at the Book Industry Study Group, which provides guidance and tools to support this kind of mapping.
  • Another partner of ours was looking for a speaker on accessibility to help educate their clients about the European Accessibility Act, so we were able to connect them with the leadership at Benetech to arrange a webinar on this topic.
  • And another publisher was looking to repurpose books from their backlist, seeking to scan them, extract text, and chunk that text into a content management system for digital research. Through our own capabilities and those of our scanning partner, we were able to help them scope and execute on this plan.

Westchester is one individual provider within the overall publishing ecosystem, but due to the hundreds of publishers we work with and our shared industry networks, we’re able to help connect our clients with other trusted partners that can help solve problems that overlap or are adjacent to the work that we do.

Contact Us to talk about your publishing challenges, vision, and plans. Westchester is happy to explore our core competencies in content development, editorial, production, and digital. But, if your needs require something outside of our capabilities, we will be quick to say so and recommend a partner who could help. Solving problems and building relationships within the publishing community is what we do best. Reach out today and let us know what problems we can solve for you.

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.

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

In my previous article, “The Benefits of Sending Pre-Press Production Work to a Vendor,” I discussed the potential cost savings publishers can achieve 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 will focus on 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-trained and continues to learn about new systems or processes – otherwise, they will lose the game.

2. Quality Controls – Despite the fact that a provider has experts handling each task, those experts are human beings, and they will occasionally make mistakes. A good service vendor understands they must have comprehensive Quality Control procedures to identify and correct any errors that might occur.

Using baseball as an analogy, while a publisher can bring on experts in any and all tasks within their production workflow just as a service provider does, 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 and steady 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. The next question a publisher has to ask themselves if how much training, most importantly on-going training will they be able to provide for those in-house experts receive? I’ve worked in several very large companies, and job-specific training after day one was practically non-existent. As a practical matter and a reality, It’s just not realistic from a financial standpoint 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 have disastrous implications. 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 may have the resources and the impetus to institute comprehensive QC procedures which ensure very high-quality end product – but many do not. At Westchester, we take pride in separating our company from those vendors who are unable to deliver near-perfect quality. Once again, we aim to achieve 100% quality assurance for all our publisher clients.

You might be asking, can a vendor provide all this, experts along the entire workflow plus comprehensive quality control procedures? Tying back to key points in my previous article about higher vendor efficiency, the answer is yes, as a result of 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, 450+ network of copyeditors, a U.S. based customer service department, and 100% company owned and U.S. managed composition/typesetting facilities located in India, is the only U.S. employee-owned company of scale focused solely on pre-press production services. Let us take care of the editorial and production and after we take care of the coordination and hand-off of your final print files with your designated printer, we’ll leave the printing to the experts in that field.

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

A question which regularly comes up for discussion in our management meetings is, “What is a publisher’s point of view to justify keeping pre-press production in-house?”

Each of our U.S.-based production editors employed by Westchester handles thousands of 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 can 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, which ensures we’re able to keep our composition (typesetting) production costs competitive. Our employees in India are compensated at the high end of the compensation range compared to our India-based competitors, however, it is certainly not what a U.S. based typesetting position would pay. Other vendors won’t hesitate to outsource your work to third-party shops where the oversight may be lacking, resulting in delays and/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 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, 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.

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