PUBLISHER'S NOTE
"Getting published is easy. Writing well is what's hard." Gary Provost
Whether you've published with Bear Creek Press before or are making your first proposal, you should be aware of some significant changes in the business.
In the summer of 2006, the cost of paper rose 30 percent. To absorb this increase without raising the price of our books, we cut expenses wherever possible, limited the number of new releases, from approximately twelve to six per year. That number was further reduced to four per year, and many of these consist of historical reprints and reproductions. In addition, we began using a larger format for as many titles as possible (8.5x11 instead of 7x8.5 inches). So far so good.
But then in January of 2008, our printing costs doubled. Now we're faced with making more changes if we're to stay in business. Unfortunately, all the fat has already been trimmed, which leaves us with the meat of the operation -- the writers themselves.
Because we have reduced all the materials we can, what's left for us to reduce is time. This means we will no longer be able to edit manuscripts extensively for either their mechanics or their content.
As far as a manuscript's mechanics are concerned, no longer can we afford to spend hours adjusting indentations, deleting tabs, and converting double-hyphens to em dashes, periods to ellipsis, all caps to sentence case, underlining to italics, or -- perhaps the worst culprit -- eliminating thousands of double spaces used throughout a manuscript to separate sentences or to center headings. And if at this point you should feel compelled to whine that, "I just don't know how to use the computer," then either hire it done or learn it yourself: take a class, get out the manual, lock yourself away for a weekend with just you and your monitor and keyboard. But learn this most vital technical tool of the writer's craft, or take up something less important to the job, perhaps figure skating or synchronized swimming.
This brings us to the more important change: the content of a manuscript. Unless we're so in love with a project that we can't imagine living without it, we can no longer perform surgery on a writer's work to make it publishable. The record for such a thing here at Bear Creek Press involves a manuscript of 36,000 words that we trimmed to 12,000 before it was acceptable, even readable. This kind of carnage, however, is not unusual. In fact, it's been typical for us to cut word-counts in half. But no more. Although we will continue to provide fine-tuning to manuscripts so they are consistent with our house style, we can no longer afford to overhaul them. That job, authors, now falls to you.
Therefore, before you send a proposal or submit a manuscript, be sure it meets a professional standard for publication. Then you can expect us to give it the consideration it deserves.
Bear Creek Press
With its World Headquarters located at the old Abbie Riggle Place on Bear Creek Road just one mile from downtown Wallowa, Oregon, Bear Creek Press is the largest publishing house on the southwest bank of the Wallowa River.
"Well-designed and well-printed books."
Statesman-Journal (Salem, Oregon)
"There could be nothing so important as a book can be."
Editor Max Perkins in a letter to author Thomas Wolfe
