Some exciting upcoming changes at Silverthought.com

I’m thrilled to announce some upcoming changes at Silverthought Press. As many of you know, our Executive Editor Paul Hughes has been on paternity leave since early this year after welcoming his son Jacob to the family. During this time, I have done my best to maintain the rich community of creative people that are such an integral part of Silverthought. Though 2010 has been a quiet year for us, Paul and I have been working behind the scenes to re-envision what Silverthought means to our authors and fans. I’m happy to say that with the re-launch of the site in August, we’ve got several new features in the works that we’re confident you’ll love.

Many of these things are still under development and the details have yet to be worked out, but our list of planned projects includes of course recurring monthly updates of the best indie speculative fiction we can find, as well as past favorites like interviews, contests, and critical reviews of current independent and mainstream sci-fi and speculative fiction. We continue to slowly integrate the main site with various social media sites as well, and we hope to improve our overall presence in places like Facebook and Twitter in the coming year. Additionally, we are developing a database of resource materials for our established authors to use when taking their first steps toward gaining visibility and distribution for their work. These resources, such as mailing lists, how-to articles, and ideas and guidelines for budget-effective book promotion, are our effort to reaffirm that we stand behind each book we publish and that we are committed to your success as an author.

We are also thrilled to announce “Breakfast With The Author” an episodic, guerilla-media-style video podcast show featuring independent writers, critics, and industry professionals having breakfast with me and talking shop. Excitingly, the first episode of this show is filmed, edited, and ready to go and will be made available on the site very shortly, so stay tuned!

Lastly, I will be assuming the duties of full Editor and sharing with Paul some of the responsibility of managing and editing the work received from our contributors. We will be opening up the submission queue once more following the Fall publication releases, and we’re currently testing a new submissions framework that will allow us to track and respond to your submissions in a more timely manner. That’s right: no more bottomless slush-pile. Believe me, as someone who has seen the submissions file, we’re just as happy as you are about it. We believe that undiscovered authors still represent a core component of our purpose and we want to do our best to give them the shot they deserve. With this new submissions framework on our side, we hope to be able to provide each submitter with some sort of substantive feedback in addition to our verdict, all in better time than we were ever able to manage before.

I highly encourage you to stop in and see what’s going on in the weeks to come. Silverthought is alive and well, and despite this tedious economy there has never been a better time to be an indie writer or fan of independent fiction.

Mark R. Brand
Editor, Silverthought Press