At Westchester, there has been a significant increase in demand for editorial, production, and digital services across all publishing sectors. “We are taking on more of our clients’ project management and editorial tasks as they deal with labor and hiring challenges,” says business development director Deb Taylor, whose team has been busy working on thousands of publications for more than 500 publishers around the world over the past year.
“Increasingly, we have had clients coming to us saying, ‘Can you take on other tasks that we haven’t asked of you in the past, such as permissions management, developmental editing... ’, and the list goes on,” Taylor says. “So we have stepped in to help carry the load and handle more complex tasks, often upstream from where we usually started on projects for those clients in the past. Affordably adding value—and solving problems—is what we do best.”
As a Benetech partner and a DAISY member, the team assists clients with workflow questions as well as with converting their content, including alt-text generation, to meet accessibility standards. “We also offer title certification along with accessible digital conversion exclusively for members of IBPA and IPG, thus enabling small and independent publishers to affordably convert their titles to meet accessibility standards and have their titles certified without needing to become certified publishers themselves,” Taylor says. “Having more accessible and certified titles also helps these publishers expand their readership base.”
More U.K. and U.S. clients are finding value with India Direct, Westchester’s offshore full-service team, says chief revenue officer Tyler Carey. “Certain projects require services to be handled domestically while others benefit from the cost savings achieved with a fully offshore model. Regardless of location, clients are assured that their projects will receive a consistently high-quality service while benefiting from the flexibility offered by our customized approach.”
The Westchester team sees the higher demand for content as driven by literacy, English language teaching and translation services, curriculum mapping and correlations, and assessment development, as well as the increasing assistance that EdTech and education publishers are requesting. “There is a growing need for culturally responsive education analysis, and our team provides an additional layer of expertise to help publishers analyze and align their content with state guidelines,” says Taylor, adding that the team works in consultation with clients so that they don’t have to develop such expertise in-house.
Westchester’s growth, Carey says, “is less about expanding into new markets and more about solving problems that clients often keep in-house but in which we have expertise. By helping our clients to publish more books—or publish more quickly—through leveraging our development team’s ability to deliver technical solutions and our staff’s ability to solve problems and manage tasks that clients are getting bogged down with, we are winning—and our clients are winning.”
