Out of curiosity, do the contracts at Silver have audit clauses? Every reputable publisher should have a clause in their contract that allows the authors to independently hire an auditor to review the finances of that publisher regarding their titles. So... if there's an audit clause, why don't a bunch of you unhappy authors pool your resources and hire an auditor from a firm to address all this?
If there's no audit clause... then I don't know what to say other than that really really sucks.
If there is an audit clause, though, a little bit of research that I just looked up:
The owner of Silver Publishing (Lodewyk) lives in Michigan (that info is listed on Silver's website, given as the business address at the bottom of the page). Grose Pointe Farms, Michigan. There's your starting point.
From there, I went to the Michigan Secretary of State website and looked up Silver Publishing in their entity search. Every business has to register within the state in which they do business. So, no matter where Lodewyk is from, because he is doing business in Michigan, it has to be listed there. The type of business is registered as a "Foreign Limited Liability Company" (aka LLC). This doesn't mean that the company itself is out of the United States jurisdiction when it comes to taking legal action. It does mean that the company was formed in a state that was not Michigan.
Lower on that same screen, it tells the jurisdiction of origin for the company. In the case of Silver Publishing, it was originally registered in Delaware. Delaware, y'all... not Africa.
This led me to Delaware's Secretary of State website, which I searched the entity list again. The original formation for Silver Publishing was listed there as DOMESTIC. That means that the business is, indeed, within United States jurisdiction. It was also officially founded on January 24th, 2011, so it's not like Silver's been around forever.
These are all public records that I was able to access with... truly... minimal effort. And I'm not even an author with Silver.
If you want to go into a class action suit against Silver Publishing, you can. You can file it in either Delaware, where the business was originally established (and still has an active LLC), or in Michigan (where the current LLC is located).
Publishers like this will continue to do stuff like this until authors stop letting them and fight back.
Go for it! Play hardball!
--Kara--
Just wanted to get that information out there for everyone.