News

Christmas 2025 It's our first Christmas selling our full range of items: paperbacks, ebooks, art and products featuring our art, and I won't pretend it hasn't been a rush preparing. I was only just beginning marketing the online store at all when it was upon us. But we still have managed a few good things. Christmas Products for 2025 We have brought out a Christmas range featuring our artwork. There is a selection of art Christmas cards available singly, in packs of ten and packs of twenty. The Winter Bird design also appears on gift wrap, gift tins and a ceramic Christmas tree ornament, and the Santa's Tea Break picture appears on a festive jigsaw available in a range of sizes. We also have a special seasonal tote bag/gift sack. I was particularly pleased with the Winter Bird tins and ornament. The design transfers to those gentle gloss materials beautifully and looks both peaceful and elegant. I also launched my Harlequin Collection in the autumn and this is a very festive, colourful design that is perfect for Christmas. You can hear more from me about the inspiration for the Christmas collection and the new Harlequin design over on our new YouTube channel. Christmas Offers for 2025 We have been experimenting with some Christmas offers. One is a festive version of our regular bundle offers. The other two are focussed on encouraging customers to shop early, as the last ordering date for Christmas is earlier for our made-to-order items than it is for items held in stock. Christmas Gift Bundle We have some regular bundle offers always available and from mid-November until the last order date for Christmas, we are offering a special Christmas Gift Bundle. Pick any four items, including repeats, from our selection and get £10 off. That's a really good saving to introduce you to our new Christmas items and we hope you'll enjoy using it. Free UK Shipping on Christmas Cards until 1st December We don't generally offer free shipping, because the only way to do that is by adding the cost of shipping – there are costs such as packaging, fuel, staff, vehicles etc – to the price of the products. And we would rather be transparent about what you are paying for. However, we do sometimes offer free shipping on specific products as a promotion, and this is designed to encourage you to buy your cards early and get writing! Small Business Saturday It probably won't surprise you to learn that we don't do Black Friday. We don't make massive profits on our products, and the only way we could offer huge blanket discounts is by charging our customers more the rest of the year. (I'm not saying don't buy in the Black Friday sales, but it is worth doing your homework and making sure that you really are making a saving, and that it is a genuine product that you are buying and not an inferior one that's not normally for sale. Dodgy things go on in business!). We have decided to run a Small Business Saturday offer instead. Small Business Saturday is 29th November in USA and 6th December in UK. This makes it a perfect time for you to shop with us, as we have an early cut-off. We will be offering extensions of some of our usual bundle offers: £5 off all art prints, rolled and mounted. A big saving on our usual buy four to get £5 off bundle. Buy a paperback and get a second half price. Our usual bundle offer is 33% off the second book. Buy any hardback notebook and get a second half price. Our usual offer is £3 off when you buy two. We think these are good options for gifts (perhaps for yourself!). The offers will run 29th and 30th November and again on 6th and 7th December. Half-price Ebooks Because we do have an early cut-off for Christmas, from 16th December until 24th December our ebooks will be half-price. This means that if you missed out on shopping for our physical products for Christmas gifts, you can still give an ebook. Remember our ebooks are suitable for all formats and devices, so the lucky recipient is certain to be able to enjoy them. Last Ordering Dates for Christmas 2025 Please note that we can't guarantee delivery in time for Christmas. Things sometimes go wrong at busy times, especially with courier services. However, if you stick to these dates you should get your order in time for the big day. Paperback Books At the time of writing, I still haven't had the Christmas cut-off date confirmed by the paperback manufacturers. I'm recommending 14th December for UK, Europe, USA, Canada and Australia. For other countries I would order earlier if possible. If you need exact information, please drop me a line at contact@castleseftonpress.co.uk and I will ask the manufacturers. Original Art Works UK: 20th December Europe: 16th December All other destinations: 15th December Other Artwork UK Greetings Cards: 12th December Art Prints: 16th December DIY Frames: 16th December Framed Prints: 16th December Mugs: 14th December Notebooks: 16th December Coasters and Placemats: 10th December Teatowels: 10th December Aprons: 16th December Playing Cards: 14th December Jigsaw: 15th December Wrapping Paper: 16th December Tote Bag: 10th December Christmas Tree Ornament: 10th December Storage Tins: 14th December USA Greetings Cards: 16th December Art Prints: 11th December DIY Frames: 12th December Framed Prints: 8th December Mugs: 12th December Notebooks: 10th December Coasters and Placemats: 1st December Teatowels: 1st December Aprons: 8th December Playing Cards: 8th December Jigsaw: 16th December Wrapping Paper: 11th December Tote Bag: 1st December Christmas Tree Ornament: 1st December Storage Tins: 1st December Europe Framed Prints: 27th November Notebooks: 10th December Coasters and Placemats: 27th November Teatowels: 27th November Aprons: 8th December Playing Cards: 27th November Jigsaw: 10th December Tote Bag: 27th November Christmas Tree Ornament: 27th November Storage Tins: 27th November All other destinations We recommend ordering by 26th November. In Australia, Canada and New Zealand some items may be available later. Contact us for more details. Finally Thank you for your interest in and support of our small creative business in 2025. A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New YearfromJohn Blake and Emily Tellwright

Via Paradise is unveiled All new! Finally – a bit later than we had planned! – the new Castle Sefton Press online shop is here, and our second publication, Via Paradise by John Blake is available to order. New Website and Online Shop When promised you a new online shop just over two months ago, we didn't think it would take quite so long! In fact, we thought we were ready to launch it two weeks ago. Then a last minute technical problem held things up. I'm sure you know the kind of issue, when your technical expert scratches their head and says they've never seen that before. Happily, everything is now running smoothly (we hope! – do let us know if you find anything that needs adjustment). All our products are manufactured in the UK for UK customers, but some of the printing will be done in the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and the USA for customers in other countries to help the environment and save on shipping costs. Ebooks As well as paperback books, you can now buy the ebook editions of our publications directly from us. These are delivered by specialist service BookFunnel. They will deliver your ebook in a format to suit your particular device and provide all the technical assistance you need. Art Products We now have a range of high quality products featuring our art work, including greetings cards and fine art prints, framed and unframed. We'll be adding more of these soon. A selection of the items available in our new online art shop Original Art Works We also have a limited number of original art works for sale. Skins with Dog, a unique sculpture available in our new online shop Bundles and Offers We are excited to be able to offer product bundles. In the bundles and offers section, you can choose a selection of greetings cards, prints or books and make a saving against buying them individually. There are also some offers on combinations such as prints with ready-made frames. We hope to have more product ranges included soon. Via Paradise by John Blake Fast on the heels of the new website launch, we have a new publication, Via Paradise by John Blake, coming out on 21st April, 2025 – Easter Monday, in fact. You can preorder it now in paperback or ebook. George Croft decides to have a lie-in. So, apparently, have a lot of other people as Britain has come to a complete standstill. The workforce, particularly the lowest paid, have not turned up for work. With parliament in summer recess, the cabinet secretary can only find the Prime Minister – somewhat the worse for wear after a clandestine liaison at a country spa – and an assortment of hastily-chosen assistants to tackle this national emergency. Plans to take back control go awry as the Prime Minister is unable to find his clothes, his wife is besieged in their house, corrupt financier Josh Ford loses himself and his money, the over-zealous security guard proves a bit too keen for everyone, and there are only cartoons on the news channels. Lost in the countryside, will they ever get away from the vigilante vicar of Eden village or will they fall victim to the strange goings-on in Paradise Woods? This hilarious, action-packed, modern farce, full of biting satire is an entertaining read and a clever comment on the times we live in. (There is offensive language and some violence, so not for you if you will be uncomfortable with that.) If all the workers here in Britain stayed in bed, how well would our leaders cope? What do you think?

Perhaps yours isn't as blank as this one. Happy New Year A rather belated Happy New Year to all our customers and followers. I'm sure that you will have some plans in place already for the year ahead and your calendar won't be looking quite as empty as this one! 2025 at Castle Sefton Press is bringing new things and we thought you'd like to know what's coming. Ghost Train Firstly, as you probably know, we are a very new business and only issued our first publication in December 2024 – Ghost Train, by Emily Tellwright. We will be working at marketing this book across all the major platforms and building our social media presence, so we hope you will be hearing more about it over the next few months. It's no small task getting a book noticed, even a good one like this, when you are competing against the big budgets of the traditional publishing houses and established authors with dozens of titles behind them, so we really appreciate our supporters like you. If you can leave us a review, or share your enjoyment of Ghost Train, then please do. A new book! Secondly, we will have a new book coming out later this year, and we will be announcing a publication date very soon. This will be John Blake's comic novella Via Paradise. This is a fast-paced farce set in a Britain where the only people who have bothered to get out of bed are those in charge, and they turn out to have no useful skills whatsoever. It's dark, deeply funny and original, so you won't want to miss it. Online art shop Thirdly, we will soon be launching our online art shop where you will be able to buy greetings cards and prints of our original artwork, some book-related items and some original works. New website Fourthly, later in the year we will be upgrading our website to offer more services. Hopefully, it will look and work almost the same, but we will be able to sell ebooks directly to you as well as print and offer bundles of selected products at a reduced price. Audiobooks Finally, something that will not appear in 2025 at Castle Sefton Press this year is an audiobook. We are still keen to offer audiobooks – I'm a great user of them myself – as they bring our work to those who have not time or space to read, and those for whom reading is difficult or impossible. And they're fun! I love having a story brought alive by a great narrator. We plan to bring them to you in 2026, by which time the changes to our website will mean that you can buy them direct from us. 2025 at Castle Sefton Press That's a lot of work we have to do, as well as creating the books and art, but we enjoy it. Thank you for reading this and being a founding supporter of CSP. If you haven't signed up for our news directly, sign up below.

They've arrived! Our first publication is available to buy! Ghost Train publication day is especially exciting for Castle Sefton Press, as it is our first book. My new novel comes out today in ebook and paperback. You can buy it now in the Castle Sefton Press book shop. Those of you with pre-orders will be reading it very soon, although if you have ordered a print copy there is a chance you will not get it in time for Christmas. We know that this is not ideal timing, but it was due to various factors involved in the opening of our business, this being our very first publication. You will have something to look forward to brighten the dark January days after Christmas. If you enjoy the book, please leave us a review. We would appreciate that very much. If you buy from us, you can leave a review on the product page. And do tell your friends! If you like my work, subscribe and follow my latest writing. Here at Castle Sefton Press we would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and look forward to sharing some great new books, art and associated products with you in the New Year.

I'm sure I've read this before ... Ghost Train is published. Ghost Train is published today – and will be on its way to those of you who have pre-orders – just fifteen months after I began writing it. I'm excited that it is finally on offer to readers everywhere, because all those who read it as part of the production process found it to be enjoyable and entertaining, and I'm sure that most of you will too. So I thought I'd say a word about 'enjoyable and entertaining' fiction. Snobbery J B Priestley, whom most in the UK will know as the author of the school examination set text An Inspector Calls, was a great defender of 'middlebrow' literature – he liked to call it 'broadbrow' – which in the twentieth century was seen as the intermediary between the 'highbrow' or intellectual works and the 'lowbrow' popular culture; it was a period of staggeringly vicious literary and social snobbery. I hope such nonsense is no more. A thing can, of course, only be judged as what it is: a circus clown may be good or bad depending on how successful he is at clowning, but whether he is practising a more valuable art-form than an actor giving his Hamlet is entirely a matter of personal taste and perspective. Categorisation If we are no longer victims of judgemental social and literary theories, today authors are swaddled by categorisation. In order to promote our books to the world, we have to put predefined labels on them and liken them to the works of other authors. This is sensible and necessary up to a point – shops and platforms need to know where to shelve our work, and readers need to be able to find books that they want to read – but like all rigid systems, it can be restrictive. Ghost Train is officially 'Contemporary Fantasy Fiction', which has made perfect sense to some readers and astonished others. If you write a novel that does not really belong to one of the existing categories, you are stuck with 'General Fiction', and that will be the last anyone sees of that book, as no one types those two words into a search bar. The hole where the middle ground should be. There does seem to me to be a great gaping hole in the middle ground of fiction categorisation, just where the books that Priestley described would be. Spread around the outer ring on one side are the 'cosy', romantic and trivial and on the other the tragic, terrible, dark, horrific and 'literary'. These are all valuable and popular types of book across various genres – crime, fantasy etc. – and of course there is often some cross-over; but where are the books that have a little of all those things, what we might describe as the texture of life if we are lucky enough not be living in some traumatic, desperate situation? I'm sure they're there, but it's hard to find them because they don't have a label; it's time we found a name for them, one without the hierarchical implications of 'middlebrow'. Ghost Train So, you will see Ghost Train quite righty categorised as 'Contemporary Fantasy Fiction', and 'Literary Fiction'; in some classifications it may also be under 'Magical Realism', 'Contemporary British Fiction', 'Small Town Fiction', 'Traditional British Mystery' and a few others that I can't remember without looking them up. It is a well-written book with a supernatural element; it is also a mystery – sometimes thrilling, sometimes funny – set in an unfashionable region of England and steeped in recent history that encompasses conundrums about home, work, relationships, how to organise one's books and what to have for dinner. Just like life really. (There is more to J B Priestley than An Inspector Calls. If you are interested in discovering some of his other works, I recommend Lost Empires, Bright Day, The Other Place and this terrific BBC Radio Collection.)