Westchester Publishing Services

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Travels with Tyler – February 2018

Stationers' Company

Tim Davies, ALPSP UP Redux, Stationers’ Company – and more

By Tyler M. Carey – Chief Revenue Officer

Sign outside The British Library, site of the 2018 ALPSP UP Redux Conference

Westchester’s year is off to a great start, especially with the growth of our work in the UK market. As you may have seen a couple of weeks ago, we have brought on Tim Davies, formerly of The History Press and Oxford University Press, to help us grow our business in the UK.  Tim’s expertise running publishing companies, and his previous experience with American firms such as Baker & Taylor and Author Solutions has him uniquely positioned to help Westchester not just grow our client base, but also to identify any areas where we should grow. He is currently actively engaged in expanding our bench of copyeditors in Great Britain to help us stay ahead of the curve in our copyediting capacity as we grow.  And boy, are we glad Tim is doing that! At ALPSP’s UP Redux conference, there was a tremendous level of interest from the UK’s university presses about the work that Westchester does with many of their peers in the US, as well as more and more work with UK-based publishers.

Our friends at UCL Press hosted the recent ALPSP UP Redux, which was a well programmed conference for the university press and academic publishing spaces. The show had an international feel as a result of old friends from the States including Duke University Press and The MIT Press sending staff, giving the conference a set of contrasts to draw from for sessions and discussion. The US presses that came gave helpful, proven insights on where the US university press space has been and where it’s going; The MIT Press’ Amy Brand’s Keynote was particularly effective in exploring these areas. Timothy Wright (Edinburgh University Press), David Prosser (RLUK) and his panel, and Bloomsbury’s Richard Charkin also contributed quite a lot of perspective about where academic, university press, and library programmes have been headed. Andy Redman from Oxford also provided a very practical walkthrough of how a larger university press has embraced XML-first production to handle its large legal list, tying in nicely with the later panel on “buy vs. build” regarding tech platforms.

From the UK perspective, the use of Open Access as a mechanism to help grow presses rapidly was covered by UCL Press and other UK based presses, as well as JSTOR’s Frank Smith who added to the global perspective by talking about how Open Access has helped put scholarly content into the hands of scholars and consumers in emerging markets. There was some debate on this topic, but based on the successes of smaller start-up university presses in the UK – as well as those like UCL Press that have experienced growth fueled by open access – it was impossible to challenge the use of Open Access as a way to launch a program. The debate did continue though, as it pertains to the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) position that all UK monographs need to become open access in the near future. You can read more about publishers’ concerns regarding HEFCE’s stance in this article by The Bookseller.

Another highlight for me was once again visiting Stationers’ Hall for the New Members evening at The Stationers’ Company. While I’m still very much a new recruit myself, it was great to speak with other publishing professionals who are interested in joining the Company, as well as seeing old friends who have been members for years. Of special focus during the evening’s open presentation was a focus on the Stationers’ Academy and other charitable programmes run by the Company. It was inspirational to hear members speak of the mentoring work they do to help children better navigate their education and early professional development. There is truly a commitment at the Company to help others, while also ensuring that publishing continues to remain a viable path for young graduates, keeping up the Company’s more than 600 years’ worth of work growing the industry.

During the remainder of my trip to London, Tim and I took the opportunity to meet with existing partners. We also took time to plan for the upcoming IPG Spring Conference (if you haven’t registered yet, mention Westchester when you do) and the London Book Fair.  Westchester will have stands at both conferences and we’re eager to talk about all the great work we are doing with publishers in the US, and increasingly in the UK and Europe.  Please contact us to arrange a meeting to discuss your publications program and ways we can help.

By Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Westchester returned to the UK a few weeks ago for meetings with customers, partners, and potential customers, this time with three tentpole events across our trip.

Friend and colleague Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International was granted her Freedom of the City of London on 30 November, and I was fortunate enough to attend as one of her witnesses at London’s famous Guildhall. The ceremony, which essentially grants honorary citizenship to the City of London to members of guilds and dignitaries, was administered by Laura Miller, a Deputy Clerk of the Chamberlain’s Court City of London. In addition to her role at Guildhall, Miller is also a member of London’s publishing and communications guild, the Stationers’ Company. (More on them in a bit!)  Here’s a photo of Laura Miller, Lorraine Shanley, and the Beedle / Clerk of the Chamberlain’s Court from the ceremony.

On 01 December, I represented Westchester at The Bookseller’s annual FutureBook conference, where we sponsored and exhibited. The conference itself was phenomenal, covering many aspects of innovation and technology in communications and publishing, with tracks for audiobooks, educational content, and the trade industry. The session that stood out the most for me was the ‘What can we learn from the video on demand business?’ panel, which included Molly Barton from Serial Box, Jeff Norton from Awesome Media & Entertainment, and speakers from Yodomo, The Artists Partnership, and Mammoth Screen. I found Serial Box’s model for distribution of serialized titles to be very compelling, and Norton’s comments about how not just younger generations – but our society in general – are once again rapidly embracing digital ingestion of content to be thought-provoking.

The attendees at FutureBook confirmed much of what I’ve been hearing on my last few trips to the UK on behalf of Westchester, as well as in sales meetings I had in the days leading up to FutureBook. There is a keen interest in Westchester’s expanding US employee-owned operation in Connecticut, and the work that we do to support publishers from both our world headquarters in the US, as well as our offices in India. Some UK publishers have readily embraced the Domestic Full Service model used by Harvard University Press and others, through which US Production Editors, and US or UK-based copyeditors, take a developed manuscript and bring it through to final printer and ebook files with our composition operation in Chennai, India. Additionally, other publishers in the UK have expressed an interest in liaising directly with our editorial office in Noida, India, or solely with our composition operation in Chennai, India – as Bloomsbury currently does.

Louise Cameron, who is Bloomsbury’s Group Production Director very generously shared this testimonial with me, regarding the work we’ve done for Bloomsbury over the years:

“Bloomsbury has been using Westchester Publishing Services for Trade typesetting for over a decade – not just because the service is excellent but also because the company has been willing to invest and flex to support Bloomsbury’s evolving XML-based workflows.”

With a spring in my step from the above feedback, and positive decisions from three publishers I met with on this and a previous trip to proceed with working with Westchester, I continued on to my final – and most inspiring – of the industry events which brought me to London for this trip.

The Stationers’ Company is a more than 600-year-old London Guild that helps advance the publishing, media, and communications industries. It is perhaps best known as the organization that tracked copyright on British literary works as far back as Shakespeare’s folios and continued to do so in one form or another until 2000. You can learn more about their work here. There are not many Americans who are selected to be members of the Stationers’ Company; Lorraine Shanley, referenced above, is one of my fellow US residents who has been invited over the years. Very graciously, Oliver Gadsby (CEO, Rowman & Littlefield International) and Tej Sood (Managing Director, Anthem Press) sponsored me for membership, and on 05 December I was accepted in as a Freeman, or member, of the Company. It was truly an honor to join the ranks of publishing and media luminaries who have been members over the centuries, and to attend my Freeman ceremony at Stationers’ Hall, which is located in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral.  My wife came across the pond to join me for the ceremony (and yes, waiting for her at Heathrow Airport was like the opening scene of Love Actually), and it was a great memory that we will share for years to come.  Our marketing manager decided my ceremony was worthy of a press release, and below is a picture from the ceremony. I am looking forward to participating in many other Stationers’ events and supporting this amazing organization which does so much to help our industry.

Westchester is proud of the growth we are continuing to experience within the UK publishing industry. We already have a number of trips planned for our Staff in the next few months, including:

If you are interested in meeting with us at the above shows – or speaking by phone or Skype in the interim – please Contact Us to arrange a conversation about your publishing program and the many ways that we can help you.

This is my final blog post of 2017, so I will close by wishing you the happiest of holidays, and to be on the look-out for more Travels with Tyler posts in the coming year.