UK

May 6, 2019

There’s an often overlooked page on Westchester’s website called “Pre-Edit Services.” Pre-Edit services are not an in-demand service that publishers often shop for, the way they do copyediting, design, typesetting, or ePub conversion. If you’re a publisher that uses a pre-editing template or system, you may feel you do not need to explore alternatives. If you’re a publisher that doesn’t currently pre-edit your manuscripts before they go to copyediting, you may be missing out on a great way to save copyediting costs and time, as well as standardize your publications.

If you publish more than a handful of books each year, you have likely run into the types of issues where you have different copyeditors who each structure and tag manuscripts differently, or somehow strip out any styles or tags you or the author had inserted in the first place. This is one of those problems where the ability to put a number on the cost for your staff’s time to address this problem is hard to grasp – but it’s not insubstantial as your publishing program grows and grows.

How does Westchester pre-edit titles for our clients? We work with each client to best understand their content. This no-cost consultation helps ensure that your books are not just placed into a cookie cutter template that might be better suited to a totally different type of publisher. Do you publish poetry, cookbooks, mysteries? Each of these needs to be set up differently for pre-edit services, and we’ll work with you to establish tags that are clean, make sense to you and your copyeditors – and best of all, translate into Westchester’s typesetting system to help keep your composition costs down too.

Want to know what else makes this great? It’s free. If you commit to sending an agreed upon volume of books to Westchester annually, after trying us out and making sure we’re for you, we’ll set the pre-edit tags and template up specifically for you, give you guidance for your copyeditors, and then typeset your books for as little as $1.75 per page. Contact us to learn more.

April 29, 2019

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Westchester is proud to be celebrating 50 years of providing publishers with quality pre-press services. The ways that content can be delivered and accessed are more numerous now than at any other time since Gutenberg invented the printing press, but our primary mission continues to be ensuring that we consistently deliver excellent customer service and finished files to our clients on every project we handle. Read on to see some of the significant moments that began our golden anniversary year:

Westchester turns 50!

Westchester began operations in 1969, and during the past 50 years the company has grown and evolved into what is currently the only U.S. based firm whose exclusive business has always been as a provider of pre-press services for publishers. We shared the celebratory news in the February 18 edition of Publishers Weekly, which also included this letter from President and CEO, Paul J. Crecca.

Macmillan U.S. extends contract with Westchester

In late March, after reviewing a number of options for handling their book composition requirements, Macmillan Publishers signed a new agreement with Westchester to continue providing U.S. managed book composition services for virtually all of their U.S. trade titles. We’re pleased that this long-term partnership which began nearly 30 years ago in 1992, will continue to grow stronger in the years to come.

London Book Fair

Members of the Westchester management team from the United States and United Kingdom returned to the Olympia this past March for London Book Fair. It was a busy three days of appointments with clients, prospective customers, and publishing industry friends. London Book Fair also provided the ideal backdrop to raise a celebratory glass to 50 years of success. Take a minute to enjoy some of the highlights in this installment of Travels with Tyler.

International Studies Association Conference

The month of March had a double meaning for our international ambassador of publishing services, a/k/a Chief Revenue Officer, Tyler M. Carey. He received a few more stamps in his passport as he made his way from London Book Fair, to Toronto, Ontario, for the 60th Annual International Studies Association convention. Catch up on highlights of his Canadian trip in this bonus edition of Travels with Tyler.

Westchester UK website

The UK office in Stratford upon Avon is off to a very strong start. This past February, we launched the new Westchester Publishing Services UK website to help publishers based in the UK and Europe learn more about the various editorial and typesetting options we can provide for their publications. Take a look around and let us know what you think!

Meet Tim Davies

If you’re a reader of our blog, you may be familiar with the profiles we publish periodically focusing on key personnel within the Westchester organization. In this recent post, we introduce you to Tim Davies, Managing Director of Westchester Publishing Services UK.

SXSW EDU 2019

In March, Westchester K-12’s Kevin J. Gray and Tim Cross attended the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, TX. Between appointments with clients and prospective customers, they had the opportunity to listen to sessions led by thought leaders and innovators in the education field. Read Kevin’s conference summary.to learn some of the conference highlights.

A positive ripple effect

A presenting sponsor of the SXSW EDU conference this year was Chevron, who is also a corporate partner of DonorsChoose.org, an online platform where public school teachers are able to submit funding requests for their classroom projects. Find out how receiving a gift card to DonorsChoose.org at the conference became the catalyst for a new initiative being led by our K-12 team.

Unfamiliar becomes familiar with award-winning

Westchester K-12 is now officially an award-winning team! The graphic novel Unfamiliar, an original work for middle grade readers that was conceptualized and created by our colleagues in Dayton, recently received an award from the Dayton area chapter of the American Advertising Federation. Take a look at this video, for a behind-the-scenes peek at some of the different steps involved in creating a graphic novel.

It’s easy to stay informed about the various conferences Westchester will be attending throughout the year, or learn more about our editorial and typesetting services by visiting our websites (westchesterpublishingservices.com, westchesterk12publishingservices.com, and westchesterpublishingservices.co.uk). You can also subscribe to our blog, or contact us to find out how we can become your trusted partner in publishing.

April 14, 2019

Celeste Bilyard, Production Manager, Journal Services

Who’s minding your journals at your current vendor? Do they play a proactive role to ensure editorial and production requirements are being handled as efficiently as possible? Westchester Publishing Services has provided high-touch, high-quality support of journals for over a decade, and is more of a partner than a vendor to our clients. How?

Meet Celeste Bilyard. Celeste, like several members of our management team, is a veteran from Greenwood Publishing. Celeste began her career in publishing as an apprentice to the production manager, where she learned the ropes on book production, reprints, copyright, engaged with printers and vendors, and much more. In between Greenwood and Westchester, Celeste added extra skills to repertoire, including freelance design, coding, and customer service. All of these skills helped her to understand a client’s products and processes to help resolve bottlenecks and challenges. “Clients expect us to be knowledgeable in these areas and to use that knowledge throughout production to deliver a quality product in a timely manner. They depend on us, trust us,” she says.

At Westchester, Celeste rapidly became one of the leaders within our then developing journals program. Her approach to different journal cycles and shorter run times made her a very valuable asset to our clients as we worked collaboratively to address expanding needs, including open access, continuous publishing, onshore and offshore editing, and more. “Clients enjoy the copyediting choices and are extremely satisfied.” she noted.

Celeste relishes the fast-natured pace of the journal department. “Each day is exciting. Every staff member brings different strengths to the department. Some are very technical, some excel at file analysis, some at troubleshooting, resolutions, scheduling tight turnaround times, understanding of coding, and older systems knowledge. This allows us to pair a project to team members who will best suit the journal’s needs, and information is shared to make the team stronger. We help each other in maintaining a well-rounded department.”

Due to this versatility, each client – and for some clients, each journal – has unique workflows. Clients are not expected to select a set workflow for their journal production; rather, Celeste, Terry, and other members of our team collaborate with new clients, working closely and tirelessly to discuss expectations and create custom procedures and profiles in our Client Portal.

This free consulting that is applied to each project and partnership is valuable for both us and our clients. Wouldn’t you like to know more about how we can help you? Contact us.

March 22, 2019

Once again, Westchester exhibited at the London Book Fair at the Olympia in Kensington, London, UK. This year, Dennis Pistone (Chairman) and Tim Davies (Managing Director, UK) were in attendance at our stand, and I joined them for the three days of the Fair to meet with our UK clients, as well as other partners from the US and Europe that were in attendance.

Cecil Court Sign

I arrived to London before the Fair, to adjust to the jet lag prior to commencing the three busy days at the Olympia. To pass the time in a literary way on the day before the Fair, I visited Cecil Court. This tiny, one-block street in Central London is known as the city’s – and perhaps the world’s – best collection of antique book dealers, print makers, and more. Photos are below, and a much better researched and detailed overview is available on Atlas Obscura, but suffice it to say that any book lover’s visit to London should include a brief stop by this Diagon Alley of literature.

Bookstore Window – Specialist in Music Scores

With the Book Fair underway on Tuesday the 12th, Tim, Dennis, and I were off to three solid days of meetings with customers, potential customers, partners, and friends. Leading up to the Fair, Publishers Weekly had covered Westchester’s 50th anniversary in an article in the March 4, 2019 issue. During the Fair, the coverage continued with an article in the Publishers Weekly London Book Fair Daily highlighting our expansion in the UK market through opening our office in Stratford-upon-Avon and hiring Managing Director Tim Davies.

To cap off the observation of Westchester turning a half century old, Founder and Chairman Dennis Pistone joined Tim and me in our stand – along with our customers and partners attending the Fair – to toast our 50th. With friends from the IPG, Stationers’ Company, the media, and our growing UK client list in attendance, we were fortunate and happy to mark this milestone with well wishes all around for another half century.

After a busy few days at the Fair and in other meetings around London with our partners, I had one last stop to make. As covered extensively in the media last year, Westchester’s partnership with Dropbox has helped our clients have faster file transfers with Westchester, increased internal speed and expanded capabilities within Westchester itself, and serves as the platform for our Client Portal. At the tail end of my trip to London, I was able to meet up with our partners from the UK Dropbox office at the London Library, to film a short overview of our work together. Stay tuned for footage from this conversation, coming this Spring, sharing more insights about the ways the Client Portal is expanding to help our clients better interact with their editorial and production projects at Westchester.

London Library

Are you a UK-based publisher looking to learn more about how Westchester can help you with your editorial and production needs? Visit our new UK website and contact us to connect with Tim Davies and discuss your publishing program.

March 8, 2019

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Why do policy groups partner with US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services on their books and white papers? We provide a wider breadth of offerings than most individual editorial and design freelancers – or even competing vendors – are capable of.

One of the trickier aspects of any policy or analysis publication can be data visualization. Get it right and your book or paper really stands out, delivering meaningful content visually and with impact. Get it wrong and you’ve got a mess on your hands that looks like a PowerPoint done by a high school student.

To really get data visualization right in the first place is often quite expensive – and something that requires having the right resource available to start work as soon as your publication is set to go to design, and in turn publication. Many policy publications are time sensitive, making this approach a risky gamble from scheduling and cost perspectives. This is where Westchester can help.

We are a US employee-owned company with US-based designers, offshore typesetters that span 3 shifts, and hundreds of staff and freelancers ready to go at a moment’s notice. If you have a publication that is time sensitive but also requires high impact visuals, we are your most affordable and reliable option. In many instances, the policy publications we work on are embargoed or at the very least fall under copyright, so it would be improper of us to share examples of our work. This past year, though, we worked on an open access title with Brookings Institution Press – the CEQ Handbook – which, as it is open access, is available to be viewed online. This link brings you to the CEQ Institute’s page, where you can view sections of the publication online at no cost. For publishers that handle economics content, or any other type of content that needs to be presented with high-quality data viz, it’s worth flipping through the PDF to see the great work that Brookings and its author, Nora Lustig, did on the title. We were pleased to be selected by Brookings to provide the editorial and production services that resulted in the final printer and online files.

I also encourage you to visit our services page to learn about the complete array of high-quality, reliable pre-press services we provide for policy groups, think tanks, and foundations. Rely on Westchester – we have the expertise your projects require, whenever you need it.

Pre-Edit Services – How Westchester can help you trim copyediting costs and time

UK