One of the great problems in the modern world where distribution is (by historical standards) extremely cheap is discovery: it’s very hard to sift through all that is available in order to find things one wants. Russell Newquist, owner of Silver Empire Publishing (who has published several of my novels and will soon publish Wedding Flowers Will Do for a Funeral) has been wracking his brain trying to come up with a solution to it, and he’s hit on a partial one: he’s launching a book club for the modern era.

Book clubs, back in the day, sometimes worked and often didn’t because of technological limitations. In the modern age of ebooks and print-on-demand, the technological limitations which pitted the interests of the people running the book club against the interests of the people in the book club are gone. Book clubs can now be win-win.

Unlike Amazon, who ten seconds of looking at their website will prove doesn’t care about books, Russell is passionate about books. In his youth, he used to spend so much time in his local bookstore they jokingly offered to lend him a cot to save him the trouble of going home at night. One of his big goals is to make sure that the book club will enable readers to find books that they would enjoy reading.

Here is their press release:

Huntsville, AL March 1, 2020 — Today, Silver Empire, publisher of heroic, wondrous, adventure fiction, launches its new Book Club service. Fans of fantasy, science fiction, and other genre fiction will now be able to save money on ebooks, paperbacks, or hardcovers of their choice through our new subscription service.

“We wanted to give our fans a way to get all of our latest stuff easily and at the best possible price,” Russell Newquist, Co-founder and Publisher at Silver Empire confirmed.

Subscriptions come in the forms of monthly or annual credit allotments. Monthly plans provide a monthly allotment of credits suitable to purchase a book in the user’s preferred format – ebook, paperback, or hardcover. However, credits can be used interchangeably on alternate formats and they never expire.

Silver Empire found that Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service fails to provide many readers with books they actually want to read. Furthermore, it means that readers are only renting books rather than owning their favorites. Most of all, it had no options for those readers who still prefer the feel of an actual book in their hands.

Subscription services are live now and can be purchased here. Early subscribers will be able to score notable savings on hardcover subscription plans through March 31.

If you’re interested, you can find at more at https://silverempire.org/book-club/.