Bellevue Publishers

Proceed with utmost caution if you want to print or publish a book with Bellevue. I'll start with the positives: My hard-cover books are beautifully bound using good-quality paper, and printed in a crisp, clean type font. Somebody at this company clearly went to a lot of trouble with photo layout so that the overall appearance is very attractive. Moreover, the last project manager I worked with was very efficient and completed the work in about three weeks. However, these good points do not outweigh the bad. First of all, they lie. Second, they are hopelessly disorganized. Lastly, they are very expensive. From the beginning, the individuals working on my book misrepresented themselves as being a large well-known, UK-based publisher, even creating fake email addresses and receipts using that company's name & logo. I did NOT work with the same project manager from start to finish, and -- claims on their website to the contrary -- the work almost certainly was NOT being done in the US. And while neither fact is relevant -- the world of work has, after all, become global -- I don't understand why they lied. I DO care that this project -- 20 copies of a little, 54-page book -- took over eight months to complete. Their disorganization bordered on incompetence, and under no circumstances will they admit fault. For instance, although my contract included editing, they not only overlooked my errors but made their own which they would fail to fix despite my pointing them out repeatedly. They asked me twice for additional money which I paid. I did finally receive my books but discovered that the back cover and dust jacket had an entire line of text omitted. I asked for the omission to be fixed and to have 20 corrected dust jackets overnighted to me -- a very reasonable remedy which would have satisfied me at very low cost to the publisher, but the project manager refused, stating that I had "signed off" on the book. This is false; I approved a PERFECT cover and jacket that did not contain the omission; what I received is NOT what I approved. When I referred to the project manager's supervisor with emails and jpeg that support my claim, she promised to look into it. As of today, however, I have not heard back and honestly would be quite surprised if I did; they all have a funny habit of not returning phone calls, of needing to take emergency leave, and passing me on to yet another "project manager" when I become too irksome. In hindsight, I should probably have just taken the manuscript to a printer rather than a "publisher" but I wanted help with formatting and typesetting, and hoped, as well, to receive genuinely useful editorial assistance -- so I shelled out nearly $3,500! I cannot recommend this company.