Westchester Publishing Services

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Westchester Wrap-up: Summer 2019

Stationers' Company

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

In the summer months, the pace typically slows down, allowing an opportunity to relax and enjoy the longer, warmer days summertime offers up. While all of us at Westchester made sure to take some time to spend with friends and family, we were still working hard to make sure all of our publishers’ projects were moving along through the pre-press stages. Here’s a quick wrap-up of what we did this past summer:

Collaborative partnership

Dropbox is one of the members of Westchester’s Partner Network, and their Dropbox Business suite of products helps us to remain connected internally as well as with our freelance resources and client publishers to flow project assets to each other within a secure framework. Check out this video that Dropbox produced over the summer that shows how Dropbox applications help support Westchester’s development initiatives, including our Client Portal.

Westchester profiled in Publishers Weekly

In early August, Westchester Publishing Services was featured in the Publishers Weekly annual Digital Solutions in India issue. In the article, Chief Revenue Officer, Tyler M. Carey, explains how the company is prepared for continued growth during the next decade, and reflects on the significant milestone of 50 years of serving publishers’ pre-press requirements, along with reaching the fifth anniversary of being a 100% employee-owned company.

Meet Dilip Chacko

Shortly before the Digital Solutions in India article was published, I had the opportunity to speak at length with Dilip Chacko, Founder and Managing Director of our wholly-owned composition facility in Chennai, India. It was an extremely informative discussion encompassing Dilip’s career, his guiding principles, and how his focus on providing high quality applies to client projects as well as the employees who work on them.

Client Portal Update

In the spring edition of the Westchester Wrap-up, we shared how the Client Portal had been shortlisted for the Stationers’ Company Innovation in Excellence Award. Not content to rest on our laurels (or nominations), we are continually adding capabilities to the Client Portal to better serve the requirements our clients have. Last month, we conducted a webinar demonstrating several of the helpful features that make publisher workflows more efficient throughout the pre-press production process.

UK conferences

While July and August are quieter months from a working standpoint, the pace tends to move faster with September’s arrival. Tim Davies, Managing Director of Westchester Publishing Services UK, was particularly busy last month meeting with publishing industry professionals at the ALPSP (The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) Conference, and the IPG (Independent Publishers Guild) Autumn Conference. Prior to those conferences, Tim shared some helpful insights for independent publishers in this IPG podcast.

Next Generation Science Standards

If you haven’t been in the classroom for a decade or more, you might be surprised at how much more proficient students are required to be when it comes to understanding scientific concepts. Our STEM Content Director, Dave Bailis, explains how a more effective science curriculum is being implemented around the country to help prepare students for a world that is more reliant on science and technology than in previous generations.

In the Community

Earlier this year, our Westchester K-12 division implemented a program where each month one member of the team selects a project to fund from the thousands that are submitted to DonorsChoose.org by public school teachers. These projects are often for schools where the majority of students are from low-income communities that aren’t able to access much-needed classroom resources through traditional funding avenues. During the summer, STEM Content Director, Dave Bailis, and Director of Creative Services, Mark DaGrossa, each had the opportunity to fulfill a teacher request that was meaningful to them.

Meet with us this fall (and beyond)!

We’re attending and exhibiting at several conferences during the next few months, including Frankfurt Book Fair next week, FutureBook in London this November, and the SIIA Education Business Forum taking place this December in New York City. If you will be attending any of these events, let’s catch up! Make an appointment to connect with us, and be sure to visit our Conferences and Events page where we will be regularly adding information about the conferences Westchester will be attending or exhibiting at in 2020.

You don’t need to wait for a conference to speak with our knowledgeable staff about how our fifty years of experience in providing editorial, composition, and design services can help you produce quality publications while condensing schedules and trimming pre-press expenses. Contact us today to learn how Westchester’s consultative approach can benefit your projects.

 

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

We’re halfway through our 50th year in business, and Westchester Publishing Services has continued to be very productive in several areas! Here are a few of the highlights from this past spring:

The Westchester K-12 Team Welcomes Walter

Walter Henderson, Jr., Senior Supervising Editor, English Language Training In April the Westchester K-12 Product Development team grew when Walter Henderson, Jr., joined the team as Senior Supervising Editor for ELT (English Language Training). Walter has an impressive professional background as a classroom instructor both in the United States and overseas, as well as working with academic institutions and publishers to develop suitable course materials for English Language Learners (ELL). Having Walter and his extensive professional network as a part of Westchester K-12 allows us to provide educational, academic, and professional publishers with a wide range of product offerings, including bilingual and translation content to support the specific needs of English Language Learners in educational and business settings.

 

Westchester Publishing Services UK profiled

Coverage about Westchester’s 50th anniversary continued into the spring, with a comprehensive profile in The Bookseller (may require login to read) about our company and the factors that brought us to further expand the business into the UK market, under the guidance of Managing Director of Westchester UK, Tim Davies. More coverage about Westchester’s anniversary can be found in these articles.

K-12 Catalog

Westchester K-12 Publishing Services Catalog 2019This spring the Westchester K-12 art and design team produced a comprehensive catalog that showcases the capabilities and services the Product Development team is able to provide educational and ed-tech publishers for new curriculum content or product updates. Download your complimentary copy and let us know how the Westchester K-12 team can help you.

Client Portal Nominated for Innovation Award

Stationers Company Shortlisted Innovation Excellence Awards 2019In May, we were excited to learn that our Client Portal had been nominated for the Stationers’ Company 2019 Innovation Excellence Awards in the Customer Experience category. To receive this recognition from the Stationers’ Company – a London-based guild with a more than 600-year history of serving members of the publishing and media industries – was a particularly special acknowledgment of the work our technology team has invested into building a project management platform that serves the specific requirements of publishers. This article provides additional information about the newest features we’ve added to the Client Portal to make it even more user-friendly.

British Book Awards

Westchester was proud to be the sponsor for the Academic, Education, and Professional Publisher of the Year category at this year’s British Book Awards which took place in London on May 13.  The awards program is also known as The Nibbies, and draws a veritable Who’s Who of the British publishing industry to recognize the successes of authors and publishers in the previous year.  Additional information about the Books of the Year shortlists and winners is available here.

Association of University Presses

Tom Hartmann and Susan Baker at the 2019 AUP Conference, DetroitIn mid-June, members of Westchester’s sales and editorial teams traveled to Detroit to attend and exhibit at the Association of University Presses annual conference. We always enjoy meeting with our clients at conferences to discuss the latest developments that are having an impact within the industry, and sharing with publishers who may not be familiar with our product offerings the many ways that Westchester’s services can help them to improve their workflows.

In the Community

In the last edition of the Westchester Wrap-up, I shared with you that the Westchester K-12 team had begun an initiative to make a positive difference one classroom at a time. Learn more about the projects that Anne Riccio and Laura Rolfe selected, and how you can help a classroom in your community.

Summer Reading

If you’re looking for a new title or two to add to your reading list, the Westchester staff have some interesting recommendations that you probably won’t find everywhere else. Check out the variety of fiction and non-fiction titles that we’re planning to read this summer, and let us know what you think!

We’ll be on the road at a few key conferences during the remainder of 2019, and planning is well underway for the trade shows Westchester will be attending and exhibiting at next year. The Conferences and Events page will continue to be updated as we confirm our commitments, so check back regularly to see where you can meet with us in person.

You can also keep up with the latest news from Westchester by following us on LinkedIn, and subscribing to our blogs (Westchester and Westchester K-12). Contact us any time to learn how our editorial, typesetting, design, and project management services can help you reduce production time and expense in your publication program.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!
Best,

Nicole Tomassi

 

 

Nicole Tomassi
Marketing & Conference Manager

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Westchester is continually reviewing feedback regarding our Client Portal.  The Client Portal, our no-cost online system for project management, is currently in formal release v. 2019.C.05, but a small, new feature was added this weekend that may make your life a little easier if you are a client with many live projects or articles in the Client Portal at once.  Meet the ability to indicate “Priority” projects in your dashboard.

How does the new “Priority” Star work?  In the Header of the Dashboard you will see a new Star icon next to “Action”. The Star is next to each job you have showing on your Dashboard as well.

This star will allow you to flag a job as a priority for you only.

So, if you have a priority project that you are focusing on, click the Star next to the job and it will change to red. You can then sort on the Star in the header, and all your jobs you flagged as priorities will show at the top of your Dashboard list.

Here are some screenshots to put more context to the above:

Click the Star next to a job and it turns red.

Portal Star 002

Sort on the Star in the header bar, and it will sort all Star jobs to the top.

Portal Star Button

This and other new features will be covered in the new User’s Manual we will be issuing in July.

Lastly, congratulations to Heidelberg UK for winning the Stationers’ Company Innovation Excellence Awards for 2019.  Tim Davies, Managing Director of Westchester Publishing Services UK, represented Westchester at today’s awards ceremony, where The Client Portal was awarded a certificate for being shortlisted for the Customer Experience category.  Congratulations to all our fellow nominees and to Heidelberg for the win!

Tim Davies, 2019 Stationers' Company Innovation Excellence Awards

Do you have suggestions for new features in the Client Portal?  Call your account manager or Contact Us to share your feedback and ideas.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer 

Late last month, I headed back across the Atlantic to visit with our growing customer base in the United Kingdom, as well as spend some time with Tim Davies, the Managing Director of our UK subsidiary. After spending another week visiting customers and attending conferences with him, I continue to be amazed at the depth of understanding of the strategic challenges facing publishers that Tim brings to even the most basic of engagements regarding editorial and composition services. Westchester, along with our clients are exceptionally fortunate to have Tim on board.

Lionel Bender speaking at The Bookseller Children's ConferenceOur first event of the week together was The Bookseller’s Children’s Conference, held at County Hall in South London in the shadow of the London Eye. We had meetings scheduled with a number of customers and prospective partners, and were elated with the amount of booth traffic from publishers who had never spoken with us before, wanting to learn more about how Westchester helps their peers. The opening session providing an overview of the industry stats (the state of juvenile publishing remains strong!) was reassuring and encouraging. Of particular interest to us in the sessions that followed were the comparisons between the US and UK markets provided by Hanna Otero (Lonely Planet Kids) and educational publishing luminary Lionel Bender. The Lonely Planet perspective largely dealt with how to package content for different markets, whereas the educational session dealt more with the trends in US supplemental educational publishing that could be considered within the British market. The former is of keen interest to Westchester as we do handle global editions for publishers, and the outcomes shared in the educational session bore some attention at our stand during the conference. Educational publishers came to take meetings and discuss the work being done by our stateside “K-12” division, which provides content development, editorial, and design services to US and UK publishers. The Bookseller continues to put together phenomenal conferences for the industry, and we look forward to seeing their staff again at FutureBook in November.

Tyler Carey and Tim Davies at the Westchester Publishing Services UK launch partyIn addition to being in town for the Children’s Conference and the monthly BookMachine meeting, Tim and I also had the opportunity to formally celebrate the opening of our UK office in Stratford-upon-Avon. Gathering with some customers, partners, and a few bottles of prosecco, we toasted this milestone in expanding our presence in the UK, and got to continue the week’s trend of meeting with publishers to better understand their particular take on the publishing landscape.

While I was in England, I also attended two events with the Stationers’ Company, the UK-based publishing guild that I joined last year. The Stationers’ Company plays an active role in the UK publishing industry, The plane tree at Stationer's Hall, Londondrawing members from all portions of publishing and media, from the paper industry to printers, writers, editors, publishers, typesetters, newspaper journalists, and more. The Sunday after I arrived, the historic Stationers’ Hall was opened to the public for tours as part of  Open House London. I volunteered to help, providing background about the hall to visitors who wanted to see the architecture or learn more about the Stationers’ as a livery company. The hall itself, built after the great fire, sits upon the prior hall used by the guild, where Shakespeare’s folio had been registered for copyright. While I knew enough of the history and trivia to welcome people into the hall for the Open House, my fellow publishing colleagues gave me even more interesting background about the building, including the fact that the King James Bible had initially been debated in committee in the original hall on that location.  The plane tree in the courtyard is also noted for having been planted on the ashes of burnt, pirated books, accounting for how it is one of the oldest and largest plane trees in London.

Tyler Carey at the 2018 London Bridge Sheep DriveI tacked on a few vacation days to this tripTyler Carey marching the flock of sheep across London Bridge to take in a West Ham soccer game, and for the last Stationers’ event of my trip. As shared in a blog post earlier this year, a privilege under guild membership is the annual marching of the sheep across London Bridge. A centuries-old tradition, guild members marching a flock of sheep into London is symbolic of the privilege of doing business within the city. I joined my fellow Stationers’ – and the members of other livery companies – to gather together and walk across the bridge with our sheep, documented by Guildhall in their records for eternity. Not a baaaaa-d way to end a trip to London. (Sheep-ish apologies)

Are you based in the UK and interested in learning more about how Westchester can help you with your editorial and production needs?  Contact us to arrange a discussion at the Frankfurt Book Fair, FutureBook, or at a meeting in between these next two conferences for the Westchester UK team.

 

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Olympia, London

A week and a half following my return, and I have finally dug out from a very productive London Book Fair. Westchester once again exhibited at LBF, where last year as you may recall we had a prime location next to the scholarly publishing seminars at The Faculty. This year, instead of being in an independent stand, we relocated to The American Collective Stand which provides fantastic service to the publishers and vendors that use their collective area for meetings and exhibiting. We also were able to attend the IPG stand party (read their  LBF recap here) to network further with our clients and potential partners. This different approach was very effective, with Dennis, Tim, and I having about 40 meetings over the three days we were at the Fair. Those of you who caught the New York Times coverage of the Fair and the rights business may have even had the opportunity to play some Where’s Waldo (Where’s Wally to our British customers) – yes, that is me in my powder blue blazer in the lower left corner of the crowd shot.

It’s worth noting that while the London Book Fair is indeed a global event that allows us to meet with publishers from many countries, this year our emphasis was focused on the British publishing market. Over the past year, Westchester staff have returned many times to the United Kingdom, where we have continued to build out our presence, UK-based staff and freelance resources, and most importantly, our customer base. The level of interest in Westchester’s services from the British publishing market has been so substantial that earlier this Spring we brought on Tim Davies to helm our UK operation.

Tim Davies, at the London Book Fair Westchester stand

Tim’s engagement with publishers on behalf of Westchester at the London Book Fair was a big game changer for the company. Tim has an innate understanding of publishers’ needs having been a publisher himself, and is also quite attuned to the consultative nature of Westchester’s business (no two clients really have the same workflow). This both-sides-of-the-desk expertise, if you will, has allowed Tim to have meaningful dialogues with British publishers, to help them evaluate their publications programs, areas where they may need some assistance, and explore ways that Westchester can provide affordable, scalable solutions to help publishers with as few as 2-5 titles per year or as many as 500+ address their specific editorial and production needs. Publishers we spoke with found our consultative approach towards working with clients and their authors to be very compelling. Shortly after the Fair, our Director of Operations, Terry Colosimo, released a blog post that expands upon this, and echoes much of what was discussed with our partners at the Fair.

Receiving the Freedom of the City of London honor

Lastly, a trip to London for me is not complete without trying to attend an event with my colleagues from The Stationers’ Company, London’s publishing guild. While the Westchester team did indeed catch up with several of The Stationers’ at the Fair and at surrounding events, I was fortunate enough to be granted my Freedom of the City of London from the Company. For this second round of Where’s Waldo/Wally, eagle-eyed readers of the Westchester blog may recall seeing a similar photo from our friend Lorraine Shanley’s ceremony, last year. It was humbling to be one of the few Americans offered this tribute, and in joining the ranks of Morgan Freeman and Bill Gates, I’m quite confident that the wrong Tyler Carey was nominated. Nonetheless, I was happy and grateful to join my friends, family, and colleagues at Guildhall for this ceremony. I was also amazed to learn that I am now eligible, under the privileges bestowed by my Freedom of the City, to drive a flock of sheep across London Bridge.  (No joke, every Fall Freemen get to do this.)  Anybody based near London with an available flock of sheep that can be leased (option to buy, negotiable) is encouraged to contact me directly.