Episode 44: Tyler Carey on the Modern Challenges of Publisher Workflows

Tyler Carey is the Chief Revenue Officer of Westchester Publishing Services, LLC and has worked in publishing and technology for over 20 years. He joins us on the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss how Westchester Publishing Services helps publishers, as well as the common challenges that publishers face regarding their workflow, such as accessibility standards, metadata, and the rising need for large print books. Tyler also serves on the BISG Workflow Committee and recently published a BISG blog post titled Content Considerations and the European Accessibility Act to discuss resources and steps to take on accessible epubs.

Westchester Publishing Services works with over 600 publishers to help edit and typeset their books, as well as create accessible digital products. They’ve provided publishers with the highest quality and most cost effective editorial, composition, and digital conversion services for over 50 years.

Throughout this episode, Tyler references multiple accessibility resources. See below for links:

1. Accessibility Guidance – White Paper by Bill Kasdorf, available to AUP member organizations
2. ACE by DAISY epub checker – Free resource for checking quality of current epub files
3. Benetech’s GCA (Global Certified Accessible) Program
4. Accessibility Metadata Best Practices for Ebooks – EBOUND Canada & Laura Brady Paper
5. Accessibility and the European Accessibility Act – Additional blog post by Westchester Publishing Service

Be sure to follow Tyler Carey and Westchester Publishing Services on LinkedIn.

TRANSCRIPT

Joshua Tallent
This week on the BookSmarts Podcast, I’m chatting with Tyler Carey, who is the Chief Revenue Officer of Westchester Publishing Services. Tyler, thanks for joining me.

Tyler Carey
Hey, thanks for having me, Joshua.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, it’s great to have you. So I think we should probably just start off and ask the question, what does Westchester Publishing Services do? What is your your role in the industry and how do you help publishers?

Tyler Carey
Sure. So we’re a US employee-owned company. We’ve got offices here in the States, UK and India. And we work with over 600 publishers to help them edit and typeset their books, as well as create accessible digital products. So publishers come to us with either the concept for a book and we help with content development. Or they come to us with a manuscript that needs things like copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, and indexing. And a lot of the work that we do uses InDesign, we use a lot of internal processes and software we’ve built and we’re Dropbox partner, where we have a project management tool called Client Portal where clients are able to log in and see all their projects in real time.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. Okay, so we’re talking production in many ways, and but not just production, kind of even ideation and some of those other things at the beginning of the process. And I suppose over the years, you’ve worked with a lot of different publishers that have varying ways of handling those processes internally, different types of workflows and different types of processes they like to use. So how do you work with a publisher to understand their intended workflow? You’re starting up with a new publisher kind of working through the thought process of how you can help them. Maybe they have a workflow, maybe they don’t. How do you map it to your own team? How do you help your team understand and help the client understand the the way you’re going to work with that specific publisher?

Tyler Carey
Absolutely. I mean, 10 years ago, we kind of changed the way that we engage with publishers. And we became an employee owned company at that time. And a piece of becoming an employee-owned company is that every employee owns a piece of the company, essentially shares. And so there’s an interest in growing a company. Not many Gordon Gecko hockey stick-like growth kind of way. But certainly as we all are shareholders, we all want to make sure we’re able to add more accounts and add more books and add more projects to the mix and start to do new things to help. So one of the things that we did at that time was we sat down. At that time, we had about 50 clients, now we’re over 600. And we sat down and we kind of just, you know, flow charted out the different workflows that were in process for the overarching markets, how university presses typically work with us, how academic publishers and journal publishers work with us, trade houses, children’s books, whatever it might be. And we tried to work out what are the commonalities most publishers are going to have. And so we built some like very vanilla workflows that are available on our website that are a limited number of stages of what happens when a book is ready for typesetting. And what are the areas where our staff has dependencies and where the publisher typically has dependencies. And since those are vanilla, they do not fit any existing publisher, but they serve as a good kind of frame of reference. So when a publisher approaches us, or they respond to a marketing piece, or we meet them at a conference, and they say they want to talk, well, we usually bring those to a meeting. And we don’t, powerpoint people to death of here’s what we do with Macmillan, here’s what we do with Source Books, or Norton. You know, we try to just sit down and say, well, here’s a way of doing the whole process. Now if you want to talk about just production, you want to talk about copy editing, indexing, but, you know, let’s just kind of lay out what some steps are, is this the way you do it? And where does it differ because it’s gonna differ. And so from there, we try to flowchart out what the differences are that the clients can have within their workflow. 9 times out of 10, the way that somebody is going to work with us on the book doesn’t affect the cost at all, it’s just to make sure that when we start working on a project for them, that we have a handle on how they like to be communicated with. Our default setup for exchanging files is using Dropbox just because with 16,000 plus projects here, we have one enterprise platform that we use for asset management. But each publisher is going to have different systems that we interact with, whether some publisher still has FTP fittings to them, others use WeTransfer and things. So you know, we try to set up a default environment where we have access to the content for our own staff so that they can track things. And then in our client portal, that workflow then is kind of mapped so that the client can see where things are at each gate. You know, is the author still sitting on top of reviewing the copy edited manuscript? Is our team still working on pages and they can see kind of where all the different pieces flow together. A lot of that comes down to software and technology. A lot of these are things that we built in house, some of them are things where we’re using Salesforce, for instance, for the kind of upstream stuff when we’re still in sales mode. We use Dropbox Paper for documenting client workflows. And then that’s something where all that institutional knowledge is preserved. And so we can take a client style guidelines, and then what we learned during these flowchart conversations and put it on to document and we even share with clients say, does this align just so that we have everything agreed upon. And about half the time when a client is working with us, they’re actually looking to change their workflow a little bit. So this helps them get a little creative and gives them some agency in the process to say, ideally, we want this step to take less time or, you know, here’s the new platforms we’re going to start distributing content on, and how can you make sure that the files are pushed there. So it’s a pretty iterative process. But it’s something where we have a framework that’s set up that makes it less homework for the client, and more of an opportunity for them just to share with their ideal state looks like and then for us just to put together some things that document that and then constantly reinforcing that documentation with the staff so that as we continue projects, they’re held to the same standard and process.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. And I imagine, like you said, there’s a publisher that comes to you is going to be getting years and years of experience all bundled up in your team and the ability to say, well, we want to make the process more efficient. How can we do that, that’s going to be a lot easier when they’re talking with your team with, you know, having seen, okay, we’ve done this with all these other types of publishers. Here’s what we’ve seen other publishers doing. And here’s the kind of a workflow that might help you or tweaks to your workflow that might help the process run more smoothly.

Tyler Carey
Absolutely. And there’s stuff we’re learning from clients too as to what preferences they have or systems they have. We had a client that uses a distribution platform for files approaches years ago to see if we could push and pull files with that distribution platform. And at the time, we didn’t, and we said, well, we haven’t done it before. But we’ve sat down with that client and with their distribution partner to kind of map out what kind of limited access could we be provided to that system so that we’re not running rampant through their whole asset management system? You know, what metadata do we need to push there, so that we’re making sure that everything that should be in their ONIX feed is in their ONIX feed, and then what controls and gates are there in place, because if they had things set up to go automatically to a printer, we don’t want to put a file in there that is not ready for print that automatically gets sent to, you know, Lakeside Print, or something like that, you know, automatically. So we work pretty closely with our clients to kind of share if somebody brings up that they’re on a system like that, we can say, well, here’s what we do with this publisher on that system. Is that of interest, or do you want to maintain more control? But at the same time, it’s also for us something where we’re routinely brought other deliverables and requirements from clients that we haven’t had to work with before as new platforms pop up, or Amazon changes its guidelines weekly as to what they want in a EPUB. So we constantly have to adapt on that, too.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So let’s, let’s take a step back from Westchester specifically, and talk a little bit more industry wide, and kind of take some of these ideas and this the knowledge that you have about the industry and kind of think about it from a broader perspective. You and I both serve on the Workflow Committee for BISG, and you’ve been really involved in that for a long time. And I guess a big question that I would want to bring here is, what do you think are the struggles, the challenges that publishers are dealing with right now when it comes to workflow? What have you been seeing both with your clients at Westchester and just in general? What are the big topics, the big conversations that you feel like maybe publishers aren’t aware of that they should be thinking about? Or the issues that they are aware of and they are struggling with? Maybe we can talk about some some possible solutions to those.

Tyler Carey
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s three things that come to mind for me that are really common threads for for my sales team, and for our account managers, and our client service and editorial staff as they’re engaging with clients. And those are accessibility metadata, and kind of expanding the file formats that are needed for distribution to take advantage of some, I wouldn’t say newer options, but just options people are really doubling down on. So just kind of in succession, I mean, on the accessibility side. I’m not the smartest guy in the room on accessibility within the BISG Workflow Committee. There’s certainly a lot of folks who have contributed a lot more. I mean, Bill Kasdorf wrote a really extensive white paper for AUP that I know a lot of University Press has found very helpful. There’s a lot of people in that workflow committee who really helped steer the discussion around accessibility in the industry and if any listeners are not involved with BISG’s Workflow Committee, and these are challenges they’re having or areas where they can share advice, I’d certainly recommend they reach out to BISG to participate. On the accessibility side, the things that we’re seeing as a vendor and that we’re hearing about a lot in the workflow committee, and a lot from our clients, deals with dealing with the backlog of their titles. So with the European Accessibility Act coming up next year, there is a lot of debate and frankly, a lot of it’s really abstract at this point in a sense, where the EAA, the European Accessibility Act, on paper says that by 2025, any product sold within the European Union has to have options for accessibility kind-of baked into that and there’s different applications depending on whether you’re selling furniture, whether you’re building a building, whether you’re for selling books, and the read that a lot of publishers have is that they need to provide an accessible ebook. There is a lot of debate around the wording of it because each EU nation is going to have to put together their own laws enforcing this. And so since a lot of those laws aren’t out yet, you can’t really debate what is and isn’t required by what date. So a lot of it, as I said, is kind of abstract. But the the guiding principle is that by 2025, everybody should at least have a plan in place in case there was something where they were pressed on it. And some of the reads of the EAA suggests that, certainly for any frontlist books, you need to make sure that moving forward, you have accessible versions of them. And for backlist, that’s where a lot of the debate comes in as to how much and by when you have to have your lists completed. But even if you have five years to complete, you know, or six years to complete, converting all your back list, if that was the read that your council took of it. That’s a lot of work for a lot of publishers. So it’s kind of like these are products where you’ve already created them, delivered them, recognized the costs, and they may have been sitting out there for 20 years, and you have like an old dusty ePub 2 file which is nowhere near accessible, and can’t even load on current Kindle, necessarily, and now you gotta clean it up. And the effort to clean that up, even if you’re using affordable labor, he’s still looking at something like say 50 bucks a title. Even smaller publishers with deep backlist is a lot of money. You know, so something where I think that’s a topic everybody’s wrestling with. Vendors like Westchester, and there certainly are a bunch of us. If you go to the benetech GCA website, there’s a list of vendors that are GCA certified to create accessible ePubs. And there’s certainly other people out there who can create accessibility pubs who aren’t part of the GCA ecosystem. But you know, there’s people who can help on that. But a lot of it comes down to workflow and looking at what you’re doing in house. So the presses that we’re working with, smarter with a lot of resources presses that we’re working with, have had guidelines in place for years, but very few publishers really have had guidelines in place for years and had the ability to build this out. So I mean, there’s the need for a lot of publishers right now, very well-meaning publishers, very talented publishers, if they haven’t addressed the need within the market to have accessibility baked into their workflow, whether it’s asking authors to supply all text, whether it’s asking their production staff to change how they’re exporting files out of InDesign, or to go through the DAISY Ace Checker for each file, there’s a lot of different things that can happen. And there’s a good blog post. A lot of good blog posts that Laura Brady has written in partnership with eBOUND Canada, as well as on her own feed that you can follow on LinkedIn, or her own site. Bill Kasdorf, as I said, wrote the AUP working paper. Just as far as a talking head pointing to a lot of different resources, I did a blog posts for BISG that kind of puts links to some of those things out there. So if you had the bisg.org site, in their blog section, there’s a recent blog post from May 24, that just links out to a bunch of the resources you can look at to see and get a few perspectives on it. So I mean, that’s the one where it’s a challenge, right? That’s the biggest kind of challenge for a lot of publishers right now. Metadata is something where, I mean, that’s a little bit like kind of dancing about architecture, but metadata is something we’re certainly, all the different pieces of where we work with publishers, whether it’s pulling the assets and the metadata that they have for a project before it goes into production, and then all the pieces that come out of the production cycle that need to go back into their metadata and into their ONIX feed. Those are things where as the requirements for metadata and the use cases for it within the distribution and marketing ecosystem continue to expand. That’s something where I think a lot of publishers need some additional support there. And to be clear, it’s not even support Westchester provides. I think there’s just a lot of professional development, to adapt to how you’re going to handle your metadata if you use different distribution platforms, what your printers are going to require for files, what your marketing folks need in order to describe the files, when the projects are going out on Amazon, or Barnes and Noble. That’s something where I think that the scope of that responsibility to publisher just continues to increase. And it’s something where I think BISG, again, has a lot of great resources for that. But it’s something where, functionally anybody who’s involved in the production of a book, or a journal or a white paper, there’s just an increasing need for compliance, at the very least, but also creative thinking as to what’s gonna be the best systematic way to generate some of this metadata rather than handling it manually like a lot of publishers or vendors might have in the past. And the last topic that I see a lot of folks really spending a lot of time discussing with us within our frame of the workflow right now is the piece around POD and large print. So those were things that pre pandemic were a little bit less of an interest to most publishers. I think you saw the quality of print in the 2010s really, really increase the tactile quality of a book that you would go to a bookstore to get became a lot better. And you know, really, manufacturers really stepped up their game. And then the pandemic happened. And all of a sudden, there was a huge demand for books, you know, paper and print supplies were challenges. And so you saw the rise of POD as an option just to get books into the market, where it had been kind of, for a lot of our clients, more of a security blanket in the past. Like, they’d ask us for a POD file along with their printer file for their more traditional printer. And you know, now it’s something where we see a lot of publishers scaling using POD, even in the tradespace where that had not been the primary method for years. So what we see when we’re delivering files is there are take some university presses, for instance. There are some where they look at their list and they’re saying, you know, these ones, if we’re going to warehouse 300 copies of these, and they’re going to kind of drip out of the warehouse, that’s going to be a huge incurred ongoing expense, just 300 copies of a book, let’s just make this one POD only. And you’ve seen the rise of MIT’s open access publishing program. Certainly, many other University Presses, they’re building out similar programs or have had programs for years where I think POD is becoming a more common delivery mechanism. I think it’s becoming more of an accepted standard, that the quality of POD books has also certainly improved over the past several years, with Ingram and others doing a lot of great work in that space. And, you know, related to that, another need, as all of us are continuing to get a little older, that is becoming more apparent to myself, is the need for large print books. And so certainly, I use the heck out of my Kindle, and I make the font size as big as I needed to accommodate my progressive lenses. But there is an uptick in sale of large print books which had been a declining piece in the market for years. And we’re seeing publishers looking at large print. Somewhat for complaints on accessibility, not that it’s a massive checkbox for it, but I think they’re saying, well, we’re doing a compliant EPUB, let’s also make a better compliant print product. So we’re seeing a lot of folks ordering that as a deliverable from us and from their other production houses. And I think there’s also a more efficient process where vendors like Westchester and other production companies to create quality large print files quickly and much less expensively than we did in the past. So something that’s not as much of a barrier to entry as it had been years ago. So yeah, that’s that’s my weather report right now on those three topic.

Joshua Tallent
I’m curious about that last one on the large print. Obviously, you’re taking up more paper when you go to large print. It’s gonna make it less sustainable in some ways. Have you at Westchester or have you personally been thinking about the sustainable typesetting kind of movement? Have you heard about this? Have you talked with Klaus Krogh or any of the guys from 2kDenmark?

Tyler Carey
Yeah, I was just gonna say, 2KDenmark does a phenomenal job of this. I like Klaus a lot. He’s got a lot of, he’s always had a lot of fantastic ideas in the industry and I think he and his team at 2KDenmark have been innovative on a lot of fronts. I mean, even going back to the way that they handled typesetting Bibles years ago was just so innovative, you know, putting technical solutions to that where he was able to help publishers of Bibles really scale what they did. And similarly, when he kind of faced the problem of how do you make a large print title that’s not going to eat an entire forest. Yeah, as anybody listening, I hope we’re going to have the links for the podcast, that they check out 2k Denmark’s information about sustainability. I think their approach to sustainable typesetting, which from a real oversimplification basically is looking at ways to kind of play with the letting, and other aspects of the typography to fit characters in in a readable way without absorbing quite as much paper. That’s a massive oversimplification of the 2K Denmark team. They do a better job explaining it. But that is something where we have some clients driving us towards requirements like that. And the things that we often see are for publishers who have a really keen understanding of kerning and letting and kind of a little bit more old school in some sense and this is where some of those old school skills that some of us built up in production decades ago really come into play, because they’re things that are settings that can be modified in InDesign that a lot of people aren’t touching, except maybe to fix widows and orphans or a blatant river on a page. For those who are really into book production are worried about text either overflowing or under flowing on a page or creating visual cues. Those are things that kind of is a little bit more of the artistry of typesetting. So it’s not the piece where you can automatically create a book and walk away with something that’s just export from Word into InDesign. But those functions there, I think we’re gonna be seeing a lot more of this. I know that we’ve seen the folks at Johns Hopkins University Press and others, you know, kind of engaging on this subject in the market and kind of helping amplify it when they have opportunities to speak at conferences about the things that they’re looking at in production. So I wouldn’t be surprised if you start seeing more larger trade houses just because there’s a cost impact for them too. If they’re doing much larger print runs than most of the publishers in the space, there’s a cost savings piece there, too. It’s not just good for the environment. It’s also good for the bottom line.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. And the readability aspect as well. I mean, being able to have smaller text that’s still just as readable as larger text or larger texts that’s readable but it doesn’t have to be so large that you’ve, like you said, take up a whole forest. There’s there’s variables there that I think are really interesting. I had Klaus on the podcast a while back, and he’s a great guy, great friend. And I think the direction we’re heading in publishing, but where we’re thinking about these kinds of issues and finding technical solutions to them that are valuable, and that they’re actually executable, I think it’s going to be really good for us in the next couple of years.

Tyler Carey
Yeah, I mean, large print. Readability is key, of course, because it’s about making it the font larger and more readable. But presentation is the piece that we most play with when we’re working with a publisher in large print, because it’s very easy to take an existing PDF, or even better the InDesign assets and just kind of blow them up or reflow them across a larger number of pages that have 16 point font, or whatever it is that we agree upon with the publisher to qualify as large print from their viewpoint. But doing that in a way that’s going to be a better reading experience, rather than constantly having to thumb through a book where you have this massive extra spacing, it’s unnecessary. We got it down to it’s only about two hours of extra work beyond what an export would be to create a more functional, better quality, large print title. So there’s a fee for us to generate a file and we can just spit it out and give it to you for one rate, or for an extra two hours worth of staff time, we can make it a much better file. And most publishers, as they compare the two, see the value in just doing this right and doing it for the little bit of extra cost that comes into it. Because even if it’s just for library sales, wherever they’re trying to kind of think of this, it’s going to help with the delivery of the books to the market.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Tyler, I think we’re out of time. I really appreciate you chatting though, and talking about workflow is always interesting, because there’s so many different ways publishers handle things, right? And so you guys at Westchester have been working with so many different publishers,it’s nice to know that you’re also, at the same time, taking all of that knowledge and those ideas and the things that you’re seeing out in the market and bringing them back into the industry in BISG and taking that opportunity to help the rest of us learn what you’re learning, which is always really important. So I appreciate you coming on the show today. Can you share with our audience, any places where people can follow you or follow the work that you’re doing online?

Tyler Carey
Sure, I think the best place is our website, Westchesterpublishingservices.com. We also are active on LinkedIn and our LinkedIn URL is a little bit long for me to read out over podcast, but I’m sure we’ll pop it in the podcast notes. I’m at Tyler Carey on LinkedIn. And we also have a YouTube channel where we gather all of the videos from our webinars that we co-host with BISG recently actually with Publishers Weekly stationers company and other industry orgs, where we try to bring folks to the table to talk about some of the things like this. So we’ll include those links for you, Joshua, in case you want to share them with folks, but we’re certainly open to any questions anybody may have about what we do and any ways we can help.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, we’ll definitely share all those and I do highly recommend the webinars. Always really good to see what you guys are putting on so appreciate that. Thanks for joining me. That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you liked what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify and I looked the other day. I don’t have a single rating in Spotify. I don’t know why. Come on, people. Go to Spotify. There we go. But yeah, leave us a rating if you can, and, or wherever you listen to the podcast and you can also share the podcast with your colleagues. We always appreciate that. If you have ideas, suggestions, topic ideas for the show or something else, you want me to interview somebody that you think is interesting in the publishing world, then you can send an email to me at Joshua@Firebrandtech.com. And thanks for joining me getting smarter about your books.