Bundoran Press, owned by Prince George resident Virginia O'Dine, has been sold to one of the authors published by the company that specialized in science fiction and fantasy.
Award-nominated author Hayden Trenholm, from Ottawa, bought the business that's published 12 books since 2006.
O'Dine started with a partner, who wishes to remain anonymous. He had publishing experience, she was a journalist.
"So we decided to go for it in an industry and community that we really enjoyed and it was worth a shot," said O'Dine, who took over the company a couple of years after that.
Bundoran Press has had a few accolades with an illustrator, Dan O'Driscoll, winning a Prix Aurora, a Canadian science fiction and fantasy award for book cover illustration.
All authors and most illustrators of Bundoran Press were Canadian.
"I even had two illustrators from right here in Prince George at one point," said O'Dine. And Neil Godbout is the local author whose Broken Guardian trilogy was published by Bundoran Press.
The company grew to a point where O'Dine could not keep up.
"As the press grew, it just demanded more of my time and financial commitment and it's impossible for one person to do it on their own," said O'Dine. "I felt like it deserved more time than I could give it and I didn't want to throw away all the work I'd done over the past seven years. I wanted to see it continue. I just couldn't do it on my own anymore."
O'Dine will turn her attention to managing Godbout's third book of his series, due out this summer.
"So this spring we'll go through the editing process and finding a cover artist, so that will be exciting," said O'Dine, who is also a writer of short stories and a novel. "I'm looking forward to reading that."
Then it's more editing as it's what she loves to do.
"I just really love the process of working with an author and helping them get super excited about their work and really making it shine," O'Dine explained. "The most fun part of this whole thing is traveling the country and having people say 'there's a publisher in Prince George?' It was so nice to be able to provide those opportunities for authors and artists to do what they love and to watch it all come to fruition. When you hand an author their book for the first time and there's tears in their eyes, it makes all the hard work worth it. So I'm really hoping to do more work in that field."
