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Spring Updates – 2025

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 The same for the ‘Smithereens’ Collection reboot, with all the unpublished shorts that we have finally run through editing, plus new re-published shorts from the last few years.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!

New Journal Pages

So here is another thing we said we were not going to do… and as soon as we said it, as soon as the words hit the screen – we did it anyway! Sometimes being a publisher is like herding wet cats. What brought this on, you may ask? I was attempting to retrieve an article from some time ago and was proudly informed that ‘404-page no longer exists’ by the handy error messenger. Frustrated, I went back to all of the other bookmarked pages in this thread to receive the same message. It turns out that the Internet is transitory and much of what we think is carved in stone (or ought to be) is just a collection of magnetic bits and bytes that wink out of existence as soon as someone changes their minds, or decides to move on or… whatever.

This happens to be the case for a number or South African pages relating to, or involved with Literary or Artistic trends or insights which seldom last in the public mind. As over most of Africa, any contribution along these lines is part-time and this impermanence is often leveraged by the West as ‘it does not exist’ and often, this is true enough because it ‘no longer exists’. Journal and topically critical articles that have been published in the past seldom endure long enough to move into canon, or survive in print or in e-format to be able to build and argument for their existence. This state in itself – feeds louder, better funded and more durable conversations. Literally hundreds of posts about the state of Gaming, Science Fiction or Fantasy have just fallen by the wayside – never to have been just because a domain was changed, or a similar reason.

So, what to do? With the current state of Academia falling foul of accusations of inappropriate data manipulation, outright fraudulent claims, curated contextual misrepresentation and simply bad research, where are all the articles that I have put out over decades calling them out? Well… nowhere, that’s where! Locked in a print run twenty years ago in the bottom a a dusty trunk, discarded by any of the 10 people who ever got to see it… If that wasn’t depressing enough, the discussions it generated online now disappeared as the author collapsed their discussion page without ever archiving it and any reference long gone into Internet afterlife.

So… here are new pages to run concurrently with the Fiction pages, and hopefully a dedicated Page to the threads (not just upload posts and ICQ logs – yes, my logon with ICQ still only had 5 digits…) Hopefully these articles will make the wayback machine this time around.

Hello world!

Welcome to the re-re-re-boot of the original Caliban’s Isle Writers’ Guild. While it is interesting to trace the History of this effort over the years (Quite possibly only the way-back machine, and only if it was ever archived) back to the mid-90’s, this is not who we are anymore.

As an enterprise, Silver Bark Books is all about a journey from a frustrated Author-Entreprenuer, to an Independant author-Publisher, through to a bona-fide Micro-Publisher. This is where we find ourselves at present. I hope you enjoy your visit, and find out in these pages the many new and exciting Worlds that are currently being described here.

The biggest difference between Caliban’s Isle and Silver Bark Books is the extension of reach that is currently underway from a single author (Caldon Mull) to other authors and Titles. While this is not always a smooth transition, it is certainly necessary. Hopefully, by visiting this site over time, a longer list of more diverse authors and their titled works. So, stay tuned and come back frequently and check our catalogues.