Westchester Publishing Services

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Bookmachine Unplugged: Talking Production with Andy Wilson

Westchester UK

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

If you were fortunate enough to be in Central London, tonight, you would have had the opportunity to attend another great BookMachine event, this time focused on book production.

Our friend and partner, Andy Wilson, Principal of Media at Dropbox, spoke at the BookMachine Unplugged session tonight as one of the panelists presenting on how publishers can use new technology tools to improve their production processes. He discussed how publishers are working with Dropbox to accelerate their workflows, and shared case studies – including one about Westchester’s Client Portal, which integrates the Dropbox API and platform.

We were grateful for this opportunity for our friends at Dropbox to highlight the benefits of cloud collaboration, and talk about our use case in particular.  In case you haven’t seen the Client Portal before, it is a secure, web-based project management tool that helps publishers obtain real-time status updates about their projects in production and share project assets securely between authors, publisher staff and other key project stakeholders.  Westchester Publishing Services provides this platform at no cost to our clients on projects managed through Westchester’s editorial or production operations around the globe.  Contact Us to learn more about how the Client Portal can help you minimize your effort in managing your projects, and give you greater transparency into where each project is at each step in its workflow with Westchester.

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 Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Many year in review pieces come out in December, which means anything that happens the last few weeks of the year runs the risk of getting overlooked. That’s why I decided it might be better to wait a bit before sharing some of Westchester’s 2018 highlights with you:

Client Portal Enhancements

We continue to add capabilities to the Client Portal, our project management system that helps put more productivity and time back in the hands of our clients. Take a brief tour of the different ways the Client Portal gives you visibility to your projects while they’re with Westchester.

 

Prepress services whitepaper

Published and distributed by Publishers Weekly, Westchester sponsored this comprehensive report that provides in-depth analysis on why using the right third-party vendor to take care of editorial and composition services for your publication projects not only makes fiscal sense, but also frees up valuable resources within your company to focus on growing your business.

 

Westchester K-12 opens an office

2018 began with the opening of our K-12 division’s office in Dayton, Ohio. It’s an ideal central base for our team, given its proximity to several of our K-12 publisher clients who have offices in the Midwest region, combined with the large pool of educational publishing talent that calls the area home.

Westchester UK opens an office

After careful analysis and the strong reception we received in the market, we officially opened the doors to our Westchester UK office in Stratford upon Avon in September  – an apropos location given that it’s the birthplace of the Bard himself. Tim Davies, who was appointed as our UK Managing Director, has signed on a number of new clients who have been very pleased with the quality and the cost savings they can achieve when we provide editorial and typesetting services on their projects.

Expanded partnership with Dropbox

Our partnership with Dropbox continued to grow stronger throughout 2018. We collaborated on a case study about how we use Dropbox within our workflow processes with clients, and have integrated the Dropbox API into our Client Portal to further improve the UX, and deliver efficiencies for clients using this project management tool. We also had a discussion with George Baier to better understand how Dropbox envisions the ways media and technology will continue to intersect.

K-12 Familiarity

In the October newsletter I shared with you that our Dayton-based K-12 Publishing Services division was working on some special projects in front of the camera. One of the video projects the team focused on is about a graphic novel titled Unfamiliar. Take a look behind the scenes to see how our content and art teams created this graphic novel that addresses the themes of diversity and inclusivity in a format that students can engage with and see themselves in.

We built a new website!

The Dayton team was very busy this fall with a number of projects, including the updated and expanded Westchester K-12 website. Providing a complete overview of all the capabilities our K-12 team can execute on for educational publishers, it’s a great way to learn more about Westchester K-12. Click the image on the right to take a tour, and let us know what you think about it,

Our following grows

The number of people following us on LinkedIn nearly doubled in 2018. It’s a great way to stay in the know about what’s happening at Westchester, along with our website, blog, and other social media channels. If you’re not already connecting with us through at least one of these outlets, you should check them out so you can always be up to date!

On the road again…

The Westchester team was very busy in 2018, attending conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, including London Book Fair, Book Expo, ILA (International Literacy Association) NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Math), AUP (Association of University Publishers), IPG (Independent Publishers Guild), Frankfurt Book Fair, and many more. Be sure to visit our Conferences & Events page to see where we will be this year, and make an appointment to meet with us.

This is a very special year for Westchester Publishing Services, as 2019 marks 50 years since the company was founded. While some of the faces and much of the technology has changed over the past half-century, the one constant is the pride every employee has in delivering excellence on every job they work on for every client. We thank everyone who has been a part of this amazing journey, and are looking forward to celebrating this special milestone throughout the year!

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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.