2024 was, admittedly, a very slow year for iktaPOP, mostly due to external factors.

2025 will, likewise, not be a year of rapid releases – although we do hope to make January and February interesting. It is the year that everything published in the USA in 1929 indisputably ascends to the public domain, and that will be celebrated.

Past the first two months, the pulp will continue to flow, albeit intermittently, due to editing (and writing) obligations. But there will be something else, something which I had intended from the very outset of iktaPOP, but up to now has had no follow-through.

Nonfiction is coming. There are at least two, possibly three, threads that the nonfiction line will follow.

The first thread is liberty. (Try to contain your shock.) These will be books by great libertarian, classical liberal, and other freedom-oriented thinkers. Some will be in the line of education, others will be more closely tied to self-help (there will be one book by a man who, in a scene no fiction author could get away with, discovered the book Self-Help, by Samuel Smiles no less, in an attic, and was inspired to create books to encourage other people toward success.)

The second thread, closely tied to the first, will be books aimed at homeschoolers and anyone interested in self-education. In time, these will include books on grammar, rhetoric, logic, the history of philosophy, and more. Some of these will be more work on my end than others, and two of them I'm experimenting with using AsciiDoc as the source format, rather than my usual Markdown.

The final thread — and this one may wait for a later time because, even though it's part of what got me into doing public domain books in the first place, it is the lowest urgency — is simply "books that catch my interest", typified by a history of a city I love, published in the 1920s.

Back in the pulp domain, there will be a few authors who will be getting a more comprehensive treatment than I've done to date. The Complete Works of Charles Cloukey is coming, in a single volume (given that he died at nineteen years old, it's actually impressive that the single volume will be as long as it is). If I can track down sources for a few things I've not yet found, a first volume of the complete works of Georges Surdez should appear. (That depends on sourcing, of course, so it may take longer.) And an early SF author will get a "The Chronological Works Of..." series beginning, though not a "complete works", because he lived to the late 1960s, and published a few things near the end that remain in copyright. The first volume will cover 1928 and 1929, which may sound slight, but covers one substantial novel, and enough novellas to count as at least two more novels going by pure wordcount.

In addition, I just recently discovered that several non-Conan early sword and sorcery stories are in the public domain. So there will be a few collections along those lines, coming, too.

As ever, 2025 looks like it's going to be "too much to do, not enough time or focus to do it".

For years, old Solomon Heiskell told anyone who would listen that his land had oil in it. After years of drilling, and finding nothing but dirt and rock, his son Ared gave up the dream and took up sheep farming, even as so much oil was being discovered a few miles away that Oil City sprang up overnight. But when his flock is slaughtered in the night, and his father vanishes, Ared uses his remaining capital to buy a drilling rig and hire out to any of the smaller landowners in the area that will have him. The big money doesn't want competition from wildcatters, they want control. And his father's reputation as an eccentric shadows the son.

But come what may, Ared Heiskell has signed on for — The Long Fight!

Available on Amazon.

First iktaPOP edition: 28 August 2024

There has been minimal activity from iktaPOP, a circumstance which, hopefully, will subside.

iktaPOP has published only three books to date this year, and those three were intended (perhaps insanely) to be published the first week or two of the year, with the rest of the year devoted to catching up on the (definitely insane) schedule that had been laid out two years before.

While I'm not giving up on bringing unavailable public domain books to ebook format, circumstances are changing in the coming year, which, combined with how ill-considered my earlier ambitions were for the project, does mean that output will never be at the level I would prefer, at least while I can only afford to be a one-man operation.

For one thing, I've been aiming to get back to editing novels by indie authors. As things stand, for various reasons, I've only been doing edits for Sarah Hoyt the past few years.

But then the editing became even more my future. Raconteur Press recently announced that, in 2025, they are going to begin publishing novels, and also kids' adventure novels. I am the lead structural editor for both lines. Which is going to become a substantial part of my time, going forward.

In addition, my muse has stirred recently, so the writing hose will start flowing again. (And yes, I plan on doing some writing for Raconteur Press, as well, which will probably go out with full copyright, rather than under Free Culture licenses, but there are reasons I'll be okay with it in that context.) Many planned, half-written series are coming back to life in my mind, in addition to an X-rated adventure series that will be published under iktaPOP, but with a separate pen name.

Thus, between indie editing, editing for another publisher, and getting some focus on my own writing, I simply cannot count on publishing a novel a week from the public domain. Even when I had time to devote to it, that schedule rarely instantiated in reality. For the moment, I'm going to hope for two a month, but will aim for one a month and see if I can go over.

For the remainder of 2024, there may be more than two a month, particularly for October, but given how pear-shaped things have tended to go, I make no promises.

The iktaPOP Media site is back online, under the founder's control, with new software installed. The catalog info is not back, and will need to be rebuilt by hand, and I'm almost certainly going to make the catalog a storefront so you can buy ebooks directly from me, in addition to Amazon. (The prices will be one penny higher, to comply with Amazon's requirements, but also subscriptions will be available which will give access to More Books.)

The new software is Ghost, which I'm excited about, but which I need actually to learn. So, February is for learning, along with writing, along with publishing new public domain books. We will see how this goes.

As far as subscriptions go, I will set up paid tiers later. I want to figure out whether to keep this site and Locals as separate things, merge them, or what.