Award-winning scholarly publisher Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) Press has embarked on a journey to fortify their internal operations, streamline their workflows and improve communication with funding bodies. Consolidating bibliographic, rights and sales analysis within a single, comprehensive and fully integrated system, the Press has selected BiblioSuite to future-proof their business, enhancing their metadata management and rights processes to significantly reduce manual effort and maximize revenue from their IP, and strengthening their project management and tracking to generate meaningful reports for funding bodies.
The Challenge:
Prior to BiblioSuite, WLU Press was grappling with labor-intensive and time-consuming manual processes, fragmented metadata management and the diverse requirements of funding bodies. The team needed a system that would streamline their workflows across departments to support and ultimately realize their strategic goals, and position them for continued success.
The Solution:
WLU Press selected BiblioSuite Product Management, Rights and Sales Analytics, opting for a hosted service that aligns seamlessly with their objectives.
Streamlining their operational workflows, reducing manual effort and enhancing efficiencies, BiblioSuite empowers WLU Press and its teams to:
Unify and centralize the product information, metadata and assets for their entire catalog (including print books, e-books, audiobooks, journals and packs), increasing visibility internally and reducing time spent managing and sharing metadata with distributors, retailers and customers;
Synchronize metadata, keywords, assets, peer reviews and more, ensuring the data remains up-to-date across all editions whilst minimizing manual intervention;
Automate metadata distribution to nine business partners (with more to come soon), supplying tailored ONIX 2.1 and 3.0 feeds for physical and digital products, plus assets, jackets and e-book files, to maximize discoverability and sales.
Generate jackets automatically in multiple sizes to tailor and enhance metadata feeds for third parties;
Leverage system-controlled ISBN allocation to ensure precision and eliminate the risk of duplication;
Augment author and supplier management, using BiblioSuite’s Contacts module to manage internal and external authors, contributors and vendors, with the ability to generate print mailings and print labels;
Auto-generate TIP sheets, catalogs, press releases and more in an array of outputs, utilizing metadata stored in the BiblioSuite system to expedite and enhance marketing activities;
Produce tailored reports, ad hoc and in a range of formats, to strengthen communications and relationships with retailers, websites, suppliers, and integrated systems, and meet the reporting criteria set by funding bodies beyond sales figures;
“Of considerable benefit to us is BiblioSuite’s capacity to manage and make legible for everyone the workflow within and between departments. Having the editorial data in one place and meaningfully linked to managing editorial and production processes, and to sales and marketing data, presents our work in a fully integrated way. Tracking, forecasting, and reporting in house and to internal and external partners, such as the university and granting agencies, will certainly be easier and will provide a new richness to our reporting that will benefit us.”
Siobhan McMenemy, Interim Director, Wilfrid Laurier University Press
“We’re thrilled that WLU Press has selected BiblioSuite to create tailored feeds and reports for its business partners and funding bodies.”
Rodney Elder, EVP, North America, Virtusales Publishing Solutions
About Wilfrid Laurier University Press
WLU Press, founded in 1974 and celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024, is a leading scholarly publisher in Canada, with over 700 titles in print in a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines and interdisciplines, published in a variety of formats, including printed book, e-book, audiobook, and scholarly podcasts.
The Press is committed to collaborative editorial engagement with researchers and writers, with particular interest in supporting and amplifying work produced by and for Indigenous, LGBTQ+, racialized, and differently abled community members. Our work is guided by the principles of equity and social justice, and we strive to make our publications as widely accessible as possible. In 2022, WLU Press became a Benetech Global Certified Accessible Publisher.
In addition to its publishing programme and the active role Press colleagues play as research collaborators, WLU Press also provides sales, marketing, and distribution services to a range of client publishers, thus extending its involvement in the larger community of writers, artists, and publishers.
About BiblioSuite
BiblioSuite is the most advanced suite of publishing software for optimizing workflows. It empowers publishers by enabling them to manage all their products – from books, journals and articles, to Open Access publications, eBooks, digital platforms and beyond – in a single system. Being content-led, the system allows publishers to fully utilize their IP and maximize their income (regardless of the publishing formats chosen).
BiblioSuite is proven to help publishing houses of all shapes and sizes to save time, reduce duplication of efforts and increase access to key information, documents and media files company-wide.
By choosing the BiblioSuite’s comprehensive system, your publishing house will be able to:
Manage multiple formats including books, eBooks, audiobooks, journals, OA publications, packs which include non-book products, merchandise and more;
Easily maintain high-quality metadata and enhanced ONIX feeds;
Create, store and distribute all your digital assets in a single system;
Create costings and schedules for production;
Raise purchase orders within the BiblioSuite system;
Manage submissions, advances, subsidiary rights income and third-party permissions;
Generate and authorize contracts with software that enables full rights management;
Handle complex royalty calculations and payments, using multiple currencies and generate statements on demand;
Improve operational performance, save money on excess stock, and spot new revenue streams;
Manage contacts, marketing and publicity in a single, comprehensive and integrated system;
Share review copies and reading samples digitally and securely with integrated digital asset management and distribution;
And much, much more.
Find out why you should join our growing community, and see what our client publishers have to say about BiblioSuite on our website: Publishing software for university presses.
About Virtusales Publishing Solutions
Virtusales is the creator of the industry-leading BiblioSuite publishing software. Working with some of the world's leading academic and scholarly, trade, children’s and novelty, educational and professional, content and licensing, and religious publishers – including Penguin Random House, Bloomsbury Academic, Kogan Page, Sage Publications, the World Health Organization, CABI and university presses: Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, and many more – Virtusales is streamlining publishers' workflows and bringing efficiencies to their business processes with innovative software, exceptional service and a collaborative approach.
Our leading-edge, web-based technology, rapid development cycle of new functionality and close working relationships with our customers ensure that our client publishers are able to manage and adapt to the industry's challenges more efficiently, now and in the future.
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