Archive · Updated 2026-11-12

Barking Rain Press: a short history of the former publisher

What the former Barking Rain Press was, what it published, how it accepted manuscripts, when it closed and what its authors reported happening to their books. It also explains how this independent site, which is not the publisher, keeps its records.

An independent site, not the former press

This website uses the domain that once belonged to Barking Rain Press. We are not that publisher. We are not its successor, we hold none of its contracts or rights, and we don’t sell its books. The pages here are independent records written from public sources. Where this page describes the press, it describes the past.

What Barking Rain Press was

Archival. In its own press releases from 2013 to 2016, Barking Rain Press called itself a non-profit fiction publisher. A 2013 release said it published both general and genre fiction, in print and electronic formats. It was one of three imprints run by BRP Publishing Group, a non-profit based in the greater Portland, Oregon / Vancouver, Washington area. The other two were Virtual Tales and Nitis Books. Releases carried a Vancouver, WA dateline. A March 2013 release named Sheri Gormley as President and Executive Director. Her own professional biography describes BRP Publishing Group as a Washington State non-profit. The sources we read don’t name the press’s founders or give its founding year, so this page doesn’t state them.

The press released print and digital editions together. A typical title came out as a trade paperback and as an eBook in ePub, Kindle and PDF formats, and the press offered the first four chapters free on its website. The releases we read announced mysteries with women sleuths, time-travel science fiction, paranormal dark fantasy, chick lit and contemporary romance, and a millennial novel about a recent college graduate.

Authors described a structured submission process. A 2015 account by Judy Penz Sheluk, one of the press’s mystery writers, said it read submissions only in February and August and did not accept simultaneous submissions. The package included a synopsis, promotional copy, an author bio, a marketing plan and the first four chapters. The same author noted that the press appeared on the Mystery Writers of America’s list of approved publishers.

Timeline

Only dates given in a source we opened are listed here.

• September 2011: Virtual Tales was reorganized as an imprint of the BRP Publishing Group non-profit, according to Sheri Gormley’s biography. Open Library has Barking Rain Press titles dated 2011.
• 2 March 2013: The press announced that it had acquired Slip Sliding Away by Sean Mulcahy. This is the release that names Gormley’s role.
• 2013: Releases and catalogue records cover Eine Kleine Murder (Kaye George), The Revolving Year (Vanessa Furse Jackson), The Celibate Succubus (Barton Paul Levenson), The Devil’s Blues (Ricky Bush) and Postponing Armageddon (Adele Abbot). That last novel had been shortlisted in manuscript for the 2011 Terry Pratchett First Novel Award.
• 29 July 2015: The press announced The Chronocar by Steve Bellinger.
• 23 August 2016: The latest press release we found, for Levenson’s Dark Gods of Alter Telluria.
• 2016–2017: Some authors got their rights back before the press closed. James M. Jackson wrote that he regained Bad Policy in 2016 and Cabin Fever in 2017.
• 7 July 2019: The press announced it was closing immediately, according to an author’s account dated 8 August 2019. A 2022 interview with the same author gives July 2018 instead; see below.
• August 2019 onward: Authors reported that their books had gone out of print, and some began republishing them.

The catalog

Several of its releases introduced debut authors. Open Library records more than two dozen titles under the Barking Rain Press name, dated from 2011 to 2018. Mysteries and crime fiction make up a large share, including several series, alongside fantasy, science fiction, young-adult fiction and contemporary novels.

We’re building individual records for the books whose old pages lived on this domain. Each record separates the original Barking Rain Press edition from later editions. This page isn’t a sales list, and none of the books can be bought from this site.

Closure and what happened to the books

Archival. Judy Penz Sheluk wrote in August 2019 that the press had announced on 7 July 2019 that it was closing immediately. She described it as having become, in practice, a one-person operation. She reported that authors were to be paid any royalties owed by the end of 2019, and that they were responsible for recreating their own book files and commissioning new cover art. A September 2022 interview with the same author gives the date as July 2018, which conflicts with her account written in August 2019; we treat the 2019 date as more reliable because it was written at the time, but the conflict is unresolved. That interview also says authors received their rights and outstanding royalties. Ricky Bush wrote in August 2019 that his three novels from the press had become “orphans overnight”.

Current. Many of the books now exist in later editions. Judy Penz Sheluk republished hers through her own imprint, Superior Shores Press, starting in 2019. An independently published edition of Steve Bellinger’s The Chronocar, credited to the author, appeared in 2019. Kaye George’s Cressa Carraway mysteries were reissued by Untreed Reads in 2023 under her original titles. The Mystery Writers of America now lists Barking Rain Press as out of business. For any particular book, check the author’s own website or the current publisher, not this domain.

How this archive is maintained

Every book record here is AI-assisted desk research. We don’t read or review the books. Each fact is tied to a source we opened, such as a publisher’s press release, a library catalogue, an author’s own post or an archived page. Each record lists those sources with the date they were checked. Records start as drafts, and only versions that pass an independent review are published. Where the sources disagree, as they do on the closure year, we say so rather than choosing silently. Archived copies of some of the old publisher’s pages are held in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Related book records

• Eine Kleine Murder
• Postponing Armageddon
• The Chronocar
• The Revolving Year