Westchester Wrap-up: Winter 2020

Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

We are only four months into the year, but it’s clear that 2020 will be profoundly transformative. The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching impacts on the way our clients and colleagues conduct business that was unimaginable a few months ago. Westchester’s global workforce has transitioned to a distributed model in order to fully support our clients’ needs as they respond to rapidly evolving changes within the supply chain.

Below are several ways that we have worked with our clients and the industry, prior to and during the crisis.

Publishing transitions to working from home

In mid-March, recognizing the seismic relocation every company was experiencing at nearly the same time, we hosted a webinar that gathered together several publishing industry professionals to share their insights and useful ideas about ways publishers could help their staff – some who had never before worked from home – transition to a distributed workforce. You can watch the video presentation or download the slide deck and a printout of all the questions that were answered during and after the webinar. We have also curated a resources page with links to a variety of informational and educational content for you and your family.

Westchester K-12 gets a new name

In early January, we shared the exciting news that Westchester K-12 Publishing Services had changed its name to Westchester Education Services. This new name is a more accurate reflection of the expanded range of product development areas that our team is able to provide support in for educational publishers and ed tech companies. Along with the updated name comes a new and improved website.

BETT 2020

Later in January, Westchester Education Services attended the BETT Show which took place at London’s ExCeL Convention Centre. Our team members from the US and UK enjoyed having the opportunity to meet with education publishers and ed tech companies from across the globe and share information with them about the various ways we could help them conceptualize and bring their projects to market. Kevin Gray, President and Chief Content Officer, prepared this blog post of conference highlights.

West Margin Press

Mint Editions is a recently launched imprint that is part of Ingram’s West Margin Press, and one of the newest client publishers Westchester has begun working with. As we do with all of our more than 200+ clients, we listened to the needs the Mint Editions team expressed and worked with them to customize an effective production approach that met their requirements. As West Margin’s publishing director Jennifer Newens shared, “It has been a wonderful experience working with Westchester on our book production needs for these titles!” Let us know how we can help you with the editorial and production phases of your publication process.

Denise Hart appointed at Westchester Education Services UK

In early March, we announced the appointment of Denise Hart as Operations and Project Lead at Westchester Education Services UK. Denise has extensive experience and expertise in UK educational publishing, having previously been Content and Operations Director at Rising Stars / Hodder Education; latterly advising UK educational publishers in her role as an independent Publishing Operations Consultant. Working with Tim Davies, Westchester’s UK Managing Director, Denise will be supporting Westchester Education Services UK in its continued growth in both the UK and international educational and ELT publishing sectors, as well as its work with EdTech companies worldwide. Contact Tim to arrange a convenient time to discuss your product objectives and how we can help.

Westchester Education Services DEI Mission

Nilofer Ali, Westchester Education’s Resources Manager has been very busy during the past few months. February brought the announcement of a partnership with Dayton Young Black Professionals, intended to increase awareness of career paths for publishing in the Greater Dayton area. Shortly after that, Nilofer and Jalen Turner, a University of Dayton student who also interns with Westchester, participated in the campus Career and Internship Fair to bring attention to the opportunities in educational publishing. If you haven’t visited our website recently, I encourage you to see the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion section and review the resources that Nilofer has compiled with the intention to foster a dialogue within the educational publishing industry about this important topic.

Westchester Supports UK Book Trade Awards

Further expanding its extensive sponsorship programme, Westchester Education Services UK announced its sponsorship of a key category in both of the two most prestigious 2020 UK book trade awards programmes:

• The Independent Publishers’ Guild Award for ‘Education Publisher of the Year’.
• The British Book Award for ‘Academic, Professional, and Education Publisher of the Year’

Keeping you informed with relevant content

We host webinars periodically, including our next one on April 28 that will be moderated by Walter J. Henderson, Jr., Senior Supervising Editor of ELT at Westchester Education Services, about supporting the needs of ELT students while they are out of school. Complete this 1-minute survey to tell us what topics you would like Westchester to provide more information on.

All of us at Westchester hope you, your family, and your colleagues will continue to be safe and in good health. As a business that has worked alongside publishers on their evolving publication needs for more than fifty years, we remain ready to help our industry partners. Our entire team is available to help our customers — along with anyone else in the industry with editorial, production, or other tasks related to your publishing program or online content. We invite you to give us a call, send an email, visit our website, or follow us on LinkedIn to remain connected during these unprecedented times.