Westchester Publishing Services

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Accessibility, AI, and more…

typesetting

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

National Archives, Washington, DCIt seems for the last several years that visits to our partners’ operations in New England and the Beltway tend to land in October.  Perhaps that’s because it’s this time of year when our clients have taken a post-Summer breath and are ready to begin talking about the editorial and production phases of their list for the upcoming year.  Or perhaps it’s because Key Accounts Manager Bill Foley and I like to try to get these visits in before the inevitable winter weather begins snarling up flight itineraries, road trips, and the like.  Either way, it has been a productive few weeks meeting with our academic, legal, university press, policy group, and trade partners from Boston to New York to DC.  What follows are some key topics that were hit upon during these trips – some of which may apply to you more than others, but all of which raise the recurring topic in these blog pages of tailoring specific solutions to each partner’s needs.

  • Alternate workflows for different product types – This came up during meetings with legal publishers and policy groups in DC and the Beltway, university press clients up and down the coast, and other publishers throughout the Northeast corridor. Over the years, Westchester has become associated with handling specific imprints or product lines for some of our clients, but it’s become apparent to them that we are able to help in other ways.  For some legal publishers, for instance, we may be more associated with helping them on their treatises, where for others we’re their go-to resource for statutory titles. Likewise, some policy groups think of us as ‘book people’, while others send us all of their working papers to edit on tight turnarounds. This is why we believe in having periodic reviews with our clients, so we can share ways we are helping your peers, which can often lead to resolving a similar challenge you’re having with books or other publications not currently assigned to Westchester. Talk with your Westchester rep about the areas where you’re experiencing challenges with books or other types of publications not currently assigned to Westchester, and let’s see if we can provide you with an affordable alternative to managing an army of freelance resources to get your publications to press.
  • Changing modes of trade publishing – Interestingly, after decades (five of them to be precise) of being the go-to vendor for trade publishers on their typesetting needs, we increasingly find ourselves being called upon to help copyedit and project manage trade titles as well. Certainly, our editorial operation, which has been around for over 20 years, has handled many key trade titles for clients over the years, but that has usually been during peak windows when trade publishers needed help on overflow titles.  More and more, though, we find trade publishers are giving serious consideration to outsourcing project management, copyediting, and production for entire imprints, to better free up their in-house staff to work on key or embargoed titles or avoid the time sink of managing a pool of freelance copyeditors with specific subject matter expertise. During the course of these early Autumn visits, several trade houses made moves to start outsourcing specific imprints to Westchester for editorial and production packaging.  We’re proud of the teams we have built over the years to support this need and are happy to talk with you about editing your fiction or trade titles, if that is a growing need.
  • Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and University of Pennsylvania’s book launch for Design with Nature Now.Quality matters – Lastly, one of the highlights of our October road trips was visiting the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and University of Pennsylvania’s book launch for the revised version of Design with Nature, called Design with Nature Now. Editor Frederick ‘Fritz’ Steiner and contributors led presentations at Cambridge’s Lincoln Institute of Land Policy about key projects covered in the book, as well as just the undertaking of revising an industry-standard title to address changing needs in landscape architecture to better address needs around climate change, new approaches to landscape architecture, and more.  The highlight of the evening for Westchester was the kudos and thanks the editors gave to Westchester’s own Susan Baker for her and Production Editor Deborah Grahame-Smith’s efforts working with Lincoln’s and Penn’s teams of writers, editors, and designers on editing and typesetting the book. The emphasis by our client on quality – and the thanks to our staff for their efforts to ensure a sustainable, durable new edition of an academic classic – were greatly appreciated and representative of why we do what we do.

I look forward to any thoughts the above may prompt for you about the publications you currently send to Westchester, or areas where we could help you that we currently do not.  Please reach out to me or your account rep to discuss your changing needs for support on your books, papers, and other publications, so that Westchester can help to prescribe possible solutions to help you continue to keep your publications on schedule and below budget.

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

When you select a vendor to handle typesetting services for your projects, you need to have a strong degree of confidence that the firm you choose has people with the skills required to get the job done correctly. How can you assess their capabilities to ensure that the quality of the work is in line with your expectations?

Meet Dilip Chacko, Managing Director of Westchester’s wholly-owned composition subsidiary, based in Chennai, India. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Dilip to learn more about his career in the typesetting business, and how he came to be a part of the Westchester Publishing Services team.

Dilip joined the typesetting profession in 1998 after spending 15 years with advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, where he rose to the position of Senior Vice President. Advertising and typesetting may not seem similar, however, Dilip points out there is a design aspect that is prominent in each profession.

Dilip invested four years into learning the composition trade at a Chennai-based firm that handled journals for a major publisher, and in 2002 made the move to owner-operator when he started Antares Publishing Services. Dilip’s primary objective was that the company earn and maintain a reputation for providing excellent service to its customers. One key way to ensure this is by handling all aspects of a composition job including quality control in-house. This is an important distinction because many overseas typesetting firms will send work to unvetted third parties who may not possess the necessary qualifications to complete the job, negatively impacting the quality of the finished product. This attention to quality impressed us, and in 2008, Westchester acquired Dilip’s firm to provide typesetting services exclusively for Westchester publisher clients.

From the beginning, Dilip understood the importance of assessing the capabilities of every applicant who wanted to work for his company, even if they had worked for other typesetters. Every person that applies must take a screening test, with only 1 in 10 applicants able to pass the rigorous skills assessment. New employees then undergo a comprehensive training program, spending several weeks learning the proper way to perform all aspects of the job and passing additional skill assessments before being allowed to work on client projects. The training doesn’t end there either, as employees continually learn additional skills that allow them to step into other roles throughout the business to provide seamless coverage wherever it’s needed. Many employees from the company’s earliest days are still here today because of their knowledge and attention to detail.

Dilip thinks of his role like that of a medical professional, making sure all parts of the typesetting operation are functioning in a healthy way. He ensures staff members gain the right experience through regular and refresher training, and by learning each client’s preferred procedures and requirements so that their projects can be delivered in a timely manner and to a standard of quality that won’t be found anywhere else. Dilip’s team possesses the wide variety of skills needed to understand the unique print and digital requirements of our clients, from writing hundreds of scripts specific to typesetting, understanding complex LaTeX content and developing templates to help our clients, and countless other transformations and applications, including the underlying technology that is used in our secure Client Portal.

Now that you know more about Dilip and his leadership of the skilled team members at our India-based composition services operation, it’s easy to understand why Westchester wanted to form a partnership. In the next blog post, we’ll explain how this mutually beneficial arrangement began.

CONTINUING A PARTNERSHIP OF MORE THAN A QUARTER-CENTURY

From Westchester Publishing Services’ beginnings as a typesetting company exactly fifty years ago, trade publishers have relied on the pre-press services we provide. Case in point – the U.S. division of Macmillan Publishers, for which in 1992 we began providing composition services on selected titles. The partnership between our companies has strengthened over time, with Westchester handling virtually all of the trade titles that Macmillan Publishers U.S. division releases annually over the past decade. This includes many titles that have contributed to Macmillan’s continued critical and commercial success, including the award-winning children’s titles in their Roaring Brook Press imprint, Jonathan Franzen’s novels, and James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty.

Westchester realizes that publishers have myriad options when deciding on who will provide editorial and composition services for their publications. We feel particularly privileged that Macmillan Publishers has selected Westchester to continue to provide composition services on virtually all of their titles. Read about the factors Macmillan considered, and ultimately reaffirmed in deciding that Westchester Publishing Services remains the right pre-press services provider for their publications. You can also visit our U.S. serviced Composition Typesetting webpage for more information about the composition service Macmillan has been committed to for more than ten years.

Westchester customizes our full array of editorial and composition service offerings to the specific requirements of each of our clients. Contact us to schedule an exploratory discussion of how we can help you get your titles to market more efficiently and cost effectively than your current processes.

IPG Spring Conference, and gearing up for the London Book Fair

By Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

IPG’s annual Spring Conference, held at the Crowne Plaza Heythrop Park in Oxfordshire, is an exceptionally well-organized event welcoming small-to-mid-sized publishers for an intensive two days of sessions and networking, to help address the pressures distinct to publishers of this size. The grounds of the Crowne Plaza are beautiful, looking a bit like a Downton Abbey manor house placed in the midst of a sylvan Tolkien tale.

There are truly few better places to have a conference!  A particular benefit is that it’s removed from the London trade publishing world, bringing Great Britain’s publishers to an area outside the city, thoughtfully disconnecting them from the day-to-day distractions that can pop up when you’re just a quick tube ride away from the office, or the sense of obligation to play tourist should you find yourself in London having come from a place far away.

Westchester’s Interim Director, UK – Tim Davies – and I were excited to exhibit at the conference. Tim came on board just prior to the conference, providing a great opportunity for him to meet with some of our existing clients as well as talk with other publishers in the industry about their current workflows for editorial and production on their publications. Tim has a longstanding history within the IPG and had been invited to host a very well received workshop with smaller publishers about managing growth and operations. He has also dived in to his new role at Westchester and has provided wise guidance on the resources we will continue to expand to support the particular needs of British publishers.

For Westchester overall, finally getting to attend an IPG event was very valuable. The sessions ranged from the topical (the BBC’s Amol Rajan discussing the trends of fake news and the trust in content), to the geopolitical (MP Ken Clarke providing a perspective on Brexit for the publishing industry), to specific publishing topics (workshops, presentations, GDPR and AI sessions, and a keynote by innovative designer Alan Moore). The feedback for IPG following the conference was very positive. You can read their post-conference wrap up here, which is like a mini-summary for those who missed it.

The footprint of IPG’s membership aligns quite closely with the size of clients Westchester typically supports, especially those that are in growth mode and are at the point where they need to evaluate the choice of hiring on a vendor to help support growth, or hiring on more staff and having enough work to keep them constantly busy.  Within the coming weeks, a white paper sponsored by Westchester Publishing Services will be released exploring that idea in greater detail.  Make sure you subscribe to this blog to stay up to date on that. While that paper has been in production for a while it was really valuable to revalidate that position in discussions with many publishers that are approaching that tipping point of growth.

In closing, the IPG conference also served as a great opportunity to meet with several of Great Britain’s independent publishers in advance of attending the forthcoming London Book Fair. It helped us to reaffirm the services that Westchester provides are in alignment with their requirements as we continue to expand our support for publishers in this important market.

Are you headed to LBF? You can find Westchester on Stand 6B107b.  Contact Us to arrange an appointment at the Fair, or just come by our Stand to meet some of our management team and discuss your particular publications needs.