The pandemic has added a sense of urgency to the continued development of the cloud-based portal used by Westchester Publishing Services to best suit clients and internal needs, chief revenue officer Tyler Carey says. “Clients can use the Dropbox interface within the portal to see all versions of each asset, engage with the project and schedule, and share direct Dropbox links to content with their staff and authors,” he adds. “We are actively customizing it to specific client workflows as needed, making it more versatile than many off-the-shelf tools—and available to our clients at no cost.”

Westchester’s client roster is growing despite the slowed economy, with 2020 set to be the company’s biggest year yet, Carey says. West Margin Press, RosettaBooks, Berghahn Books, Stonesong Digital, and educational content providers such as CareerPath and Lorenz Educational Press are some of the new clients. “We are seeing growth with existing partnerships—Macmillan, Princeton University Press, MIT Press, for instance—that go beyond the type of work we had historically done together,” Carey says.

The demand for quality editorial services is rising. “Even trade publishers that normally keep copyediting in-house or have a limited number of freelancers are moving work to us in order to achieve a reliable and steady resource at a time when not all contributors and freelancers are able to support a digital workflow,” says Carey, whose team is creating more digital learning content for publishers and edtech providers.

“We provide additional lessons and assessments to expand the offerings that our clients already have,” Carey says. “Some clients are adapting to new platforms like Learnosity, which we have extensive history in helping publishers migrate their content to. Others, upon finding themselves selling an existing library of content that may not have been updated in a long time, are asking us to review the currency of their backlist, as well as to ensure that the older content addresses emerging needs on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The digital tools and processes implemented have made the WFH transition painless for 51-year-old Westchester. “We proactively pursued a partnership with Dropbox a few years ago because we saw the need for a client-centric platform with easy asset-management options, and to add publication-specific information and functionality on top of that through our client portal,” Carey says. “This enables us to easily ramp up for projects with our larger clients and establish variant workflows with the nearly 250 publishers we now serve. It means that we have alternate options in place to serve each new client instead of making them adhere to an off-the-shelf solution that may not solve the issues they face during these trying times.”

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