SSP

December 29, 2022

compiled by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

While the publishing industry continues to contend with various challenges in the marketplace, it also has a deep foundation of resiliency and collaboration to draw upon that provides us with the ability to adapt and thrive. Here are some ways we partnered with our industry colleagues throughout 2022 to help them identify and implement effective solutions:

Sharing Industry Knowledge

PW article about Impacts on Accessibility and Sustainability webinar. In 2022, we continued our successful partnership with Publishers Weekly, hosting two highly attended and informative webinars. In the spring, panelists Michael Jacobs, Lorraine Shanley, Jessica Ryan and Jim Fetherston discussed how each of their respective areas of the publishing industry were “Driving Business Forward”, and in the fall, Bill Kasdorf, Kristen McLean, and Rachel Martin provided steps publishing businesses could easily implement to have positive “Impacts on Accessibility and Sustainability”.

Also in the fall, consultant Jay Diskey was a panelist for the Westchester Education Services webinar, “2023 K-12 Education Funding and Policy Outlook”. The hour-long session was geared towards helping businesses developing materials for the K-12 education market better understand the various legislative and funding initiatives at both the federal and state level, and how these will impact the market during the next year.

A Fresh Look (and more great info!) for the Westchester Education Services website

This fall we improved the functionality and features on the Westchester Education Services website to provide you with a better user experience. With a mega-menu to help you quickly get to the specific subject areas you’re interested in, along with expanded content throughout including downloadable case studies, it’s packed with helpful information. Check it out and make sure to subscribe to our blog and our mailing list so you’re always up to date on what we’re doing.

Westchester UK and International Grows

Our colleagues in the UK expanded their ranks to continue serving the growing client base Westchester works with beyond the North American market. Joining the education team throughout the year were Thomas Storr, Emma Hudson, and Adam Wilkinson. In June, Rebecca Durose-Croft was promoted to the position of Managing Director, Education. In the fall, she took some time to discuss what led her into a career in education publishing in this blog post.

Within the River Editorial team (a division of Westchester Publishing Services UK), Grace Peterson has recently joined as project manager, to provide support for their increased full-service client roster.

Promotions within our US editorial and production teams

As our client base inside the United States has continued to experience stellar growth, several of our US-based editorial and production staff received well-deserved promotions during the year. Some of the long-time employees who are bringing their vast experience into new roles are Terry Colosimo, Scott Keeney, Wendy Muto, Celeste Bilyard, Amanda Montes de Oca, Melody Negron and Erin Davis. Congratulations and continued success!

Westchester Education Services Expands its Staff

It was also an exciting spring and summer of growth for the Westchester Education Services team as they welcomed several new people. Content Directors, Jennifer Cole and Laura Cunningham, Senior Editor, Tara Hlavinka, and Director of Client Solutions, Kevin Schroeder all arrived at Westchester in the spring, as shared in this press release. Later in the year to continue supporting client growth, we welcomed Christina DeYoung as Director of Client Solutions, Jada Bradley as Senior Editor, Culturally Responsive Education, Sheyla Lucas as Editorial Project Manager, and Jordan Orfitelli as Project Manager.

Scholarly and Academically Speaking

In June, Hugh Shiebler, Director of Client Solutions was busy on the conference circuit, representing Westchester Publishing Services for the Society for Scholarly Publishing Conference, in Chicago. Later in the month, he joined Bill Foley, in Washington, DC, for the in-person return of the Association of University Presses Conference. Both enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with fellow publishing industry colleagues, to discuss workflow solutions to help publishers. Hugh also conducted an information session for AUP attendees about accessibility, which you can view and download here.

Westchester UK Spring Events

Members of the Westchester Education UK & International, and Westchester Publishing Services UK teams participated in several publishing industry events during the spring, including sponsoring the Independent Publishers Guild Awards in April, the star-studded British Book Awards (known by its nickname, the Nibbies) in May, both of which were held in-person. Rounding things out in June was the hybrid Independent Publishers Guild Spring Conference. You can read more about it in these blog posts.

Westchester Education Conferences

Our Westchester Education Services colleagues were busy attending several industry conferences in-person, including BETT UK in late winter, ASU-GSV in the spring, and several events in late fall, including sponsoring the EdWeek Market Brief Summit in November (Christina DeYoung shares 3 Key Takeaways), as well as attending the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) regional conference, and the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), which you can read about in this overview from Kevin Schroeder. You can read more about our 2023 conference plans later in this message.

Have you heard Westchester Words?

Our podcast episodes are an efficient (15 minutes on average) way to learn about various topics that matter to the publishing, education and ed tech sectors on both sides of the Atlantic. You can find the Westchester Words and Westchester Words UK podcasts on your favorite streaming platform as well as on our websites, where we provide additional content related to the episodes along with downloadable transcripts. New episodes will be premiering in January, so now is the perfect time to get caught up!

What are we reading at Westchester?

The staff of Westchester are fortunate to be involved in working on thousands of book projects every year and on the other side of it, we enjoy doing our fair share of reading the finished product! See our Summer 2022 selections along with our recently published blog post Books We Want to Read or Gift Holiday 2022, to find out what books we’ve been reading this year.

Where Will Westchester be in 2023?

We are excited to have preparations underway for several industry conferences in the New Year, some of which we plan to attend in-person, including:

Digital Book World (January 16)
Future of Education Technology Conference (January 23)
BETT Show (March 29)

You can learn more about our event plans in this blog post, with more opportunities to connect online or in-person being added as the year moves forward.

Speaking of connecting online, we will continue to host informative webinars, starting with the Westchester Education Services session, “Best Practices for Engaging with a Vendor Partner Network” taking place on Thursday, January 19.

Let us know what conference and industry events are on your radar in the year ahead. We look forward to meeting with you at some point in 2023!

Employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services is honored to support more than 500 publishers globally, providing a wide variety of editorial, production, and digital conversion services, to help them prepare their publications for the print and digital formats their customers most desire. We look forward to continuing to serve publishers across all segments of the industry in 2023 with their frontlist releases, updates to backlist content, adapting materials for print on demand platforms, and conversion of assets into ePubs to help them get them content to market more efficiently and cost-effectively. As a Benetech Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA) Vendor, we have the expertise you can rely on to produce materials that are in accordance with accessible ePub accessibility standards.

Let us know how we can help you optimize your workflow in the year ahead, using the full array of customizable services we have to help you reduce or eliminate the project bottlenecks you don’t have time to deal with.

With best wishes for a happy holiday season and a healthy, prosperous New Year.

December 12, 2022

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

As 2022 comes to a close, and many of us are in the midst of more holiday travel than we’ve done in years, it occurs to me that 2023 may be a year more like the pre-pandemic business years than we have seen in a while. Attendance was up at Frankfurt this past year, our clients are increasingly having in-person meetings with our teams, and as I’m finalizing my 2023 budget for my sales team we have more conferences planned than in any year since 2019.

Where are you going to be in 2023? Is there a chance you’ll be at any of the following conferences? If so, please Contact Us to let us know.

Where Westchester’s going to be:

Home and our Offices – Zoom whenever you like!
Digital Book World (DBW), January 16-18, 2023
Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC), January 23-26,2023
BETT UK, March 29-31, 2023
ASU/GSV, April 17-19, 2023
London Book Fair, April 18-20, 2023
Society for Scholarly Publishing, May 31- June 2, 2023
American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), August 5-8, 2023
Frankfurt, October 19-23, 2023

The Westchester team would love to see you and learn more about what your publishing program looks like these days – and explore any ways our editorial and production teams could help. To be clear, many of our staff continue to work from home, and we know meeting up in person isn’t possible for everyone. Let’s meet up soon, however is best for you, whether in a conference room or on a Zoom!

July 27, 2018

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!

Keep up with the latest happenings at Westchester!

Subscribe to our blog or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. We’d love to hear from you, and share the solutions we are able to provide to help you more effectively manage your editorial, design, and production requirements.

April 24, 2018

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Though it took a long time getting to the East Coast this year, I really enjoy the spring season because it’s a time of optimistic renewal that generates a positive attitude in almost everyone. As all of us at Westchester look ahead to the events that will be taking place over the next few months, I hope you’ll take a moment to catch up on a few of our highlights from the first quarter of 2018:

Westchester K-12 opens office in Dayton

The Westchester K-12 Publishing Services division began the year by completing their move into an office located in downtown Dayton, Ohio. As Kevin J. Gray, Managing Director, K-12 Publishing Services noted, “Dayton is a perfect location because of the deep well of educational publishing talent in this region and its proximity to the midwest offices of many of the publishing houses Westchester K-12 serves.”

Westchester and Learnosity form an alliance

In February, Westchester announced we’ve entered into an agreement with Learnosity, an assessment platform firm based in Ireland. Westchester K-12 Publishing Services is the first company to join Learnosity’s newly created Custom Content division, providing a beneficial resource for educational publishers who need content creation services along with a flexible assessment platform which can integrate with their current systems.

Hitting the road, Westchester style

The year got off to a busy start, as we headed out to sponsor and exhibit at conferences including ALPSP UP Redux, IPG Spring Conference, and PubTechConnect. If you’re wondering where Westchester will be this spring, keep reading…

Where in the world is Westchester going now?

Westchester recently attended the London Book Fair, and highlights from this trip can be found here. Other shows Westchester is sponsoring or attending in the coming weeks include NCTM (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics) at the end of April, in Washington, DC, the Council of Science Editors conference in New Orleans at the beginning of May, and the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference in Chicago later in May. Visit the Conferences and Trade Shows page on our website to see a complete listing, and subscribe to our blog so you can be up-to-date about all things Westchester!

Turning a new page

In March we bid a fond farewell to Lynn Taylor, who expertly led our Journals division over the last several years. Lynn decided to retire so she would have more time to enjoy with her family and friends. While Lynn will be missed at Westchester by colleagues and clients alike, the Journals division is now in the equally capable, and competent stewardship of Celeste Bilyard, Production Manager, Journals Services.

At Westchester, we welcome the opportunity to meet with clients and prospective partners throughout the United States, the UK, and beyond. If you’re interested in learning how we can help you more effectively manage editorial, design, and production requirements like we have done for your peers, please contact us to find out more.

June 16, 2017

Plugging in: Insights from the CSE and SSP 2017 Annual Meetings – by Guest Blogger Tim Cross

As I mentioned in last month’s blog post, spring is a busy time of year for meetings. I’m a firm believer in the importance of plugging in and recharging, and my recent travels to both coasts for important conferences within the scholarly and scientific communities allowed me to connect with colleagues, peers, and the pulse of current trends in scholarly publishing.

I was in San Diego in late May to attend the Council for Science Editors conference in San Diego, where as co-chair of the Mentorship Committee along with Ken Heideman, I had the privilege of launching the new CSE Mentorship Program. This initiative is designed to help meet the needs of members seeking opportunities for growth and knowledge-sharing in scholarly publishing and editing. Interested individuals are paired with a mentor who will provide guidance through a combination of group activities, webinars, phone calls, and in-person visits over a one-year period. Feedback and recommendations will be gathered from all participants to make further refinements to the program. I look forward to seeing how the mentors and mentees will benefit from their participation in this exciting collaboration.

At the end of May, I traveled to Boston for the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference. While there, I moderated a session with panelists Anna Jester and Michael Jon Jensen about the evolving needs of publishers in the 21st Century, and the role service providers such as Westchester Publishing Services have in striking the proper balance as a partner with our publisher clients. The session was well received and there were thoughtful questions posed by the attendees.

Conference Topics in Common

There were a number of important topics covered at both meetings, from varying perspectives. The most significant highlights for me were:

The pervasiveness of piracy and the challenges that libraries and publishers face in fighting piracy, protecting researcher privacy, and streamlining access to content at institutions while balancing concerns for copyright and the potential for data breaches
The emergence of open access monographs and other innovations in scholarly book publishing that work toward aligning this channel of publication with research and academic journals
The need for agreed-upon standards and cross-industry collaboration between stakeholders in the management of data repositories and publication, metadata, persistent identifiers, and funding and Open Access requirements
Ongoing trends in Open Access journals, peer review, publication ethics, revenue models, and other aspects of the scholarly publishing endeavor that continue to be front-and-center issues of importance and interest to attendees

My colleagues and I realize the importance of active engagement with the scholarly community. By having regular conversations, meetings, and involvement at conferences, a service provider like Westchester Publishing Services is able to better understand the challenges and goals publishers are contending with, allowing us to be a more effective partner in helping them fulfill their mission.

If you attended either the CSE or SSP conference, I’d love to hear from you. Which speeches or sessions did you find the most helpful and informative for you? Drop me an email at: tim.cross@westchesterpubsvcs.com to let me know. Also take a moment to visit our Events page to see the conferences Westchester Publishing Services participates in throughout the year, and if you think there are ones we should be adding to our schedule, contact us!

2022 Year in Review

SSP