Welcome to Silver Bark Books Spring update for 2025. Massive updates for theme choices, page organizations and new pages are the flavor for the year… so far! So what works and what doesn’t work?
Previous updates on the site map were done to take into account new focus in a rapidly changing environment. We said no Journal Pages to reprint articles and journals because it would detract from the fiction we were publishing… only to discover as soon as it was implemented, that the Journal articles attracted more attention than the Fiction… who would have thought? So that was reversed.
Author interviews – we were meh! on the idea until panel invitations wanted to sniff out our moral compass before they invited us to attend… all this Culture War nonsense, none of us are archetypal Western authors; nor are we sometimes even aware of what triggers some of you. So we re-ordered the page to place ongoing interviews and guest slot information for the many bots and people running through our pages. (It saves on hallucinations from Chatbots, for one thing!)
So… what has 2025 brought with it? New title releases: Preacherman and Xylana Bells from Caldon Mull were out in 2024, as well as Keeper of the Gate from Marie M. Mullany. A re-design of the Web Site in preparation of our own Web Store because we are losing ground against the chaos and nonsense in the Publishing Industry Platforms and EcoSystems in your big Online markets such as, for example, Amazon. This follows account conduct, closures and pricing and royalty incidents, buyouts in Audiobook markets, Terms and Condition changes and Legislation; AI Training and web-scraping scandals notwithstanding – it’s all too much too fast.
We should all be WRITING books, not running around like headless chickens trying to stamp out problems that weren’t actual problems until somebody decided to create a problem… So we finally know what we have to do, and now just get on with it…
Omnibus editions… we have finally unlocked Caldon Mull’s reluctance to collate the Sol Senate Cycle – Future History into an Omnibus collection for ePUB. Yes, it will never fit into a print series, and yes the cost of a print series is beyond the pale… A 2nd Edition of each out-of-print title is going to be unfeasible at this point, especially looking at where the cost of printing paper is going. The same for the ‘Smithereens’ Collection reboot, with all the unpublished shorts that we have finally run through editing, plus new re-published shorts from the last few years. (Some are running down timers on options since they were last optioned… tick-tock!)
Rumor has it there is ANOTHER tale in the Sol Senate Cycle – Diaspora series. I can’t get too much information about it just yet… it might be simply an author notion, or it might be another short novel, or… we’ll see.
So here is to all good things in 2025!
Keep Writing!