Information for Customers

Edith Framed Art Print Types of art products you can buy from Castle Sefton Press Although we – Emily Tellwright and John Blake – perhaps feel ourselves to be primarily authors these days, we are both also artists with a variety of background and training. You can read more about the Castle Sefton Press idea of a complete creative experience in another article. Here we'll be telling you about the type of products that we create from our art and how you can buy those art products from Castle Sefton Press. Art products All of our art is created with physical media. The materials we use most are pencil, charcoal, chalk, soft pastel, acrylic paint, oil paint, clay, gouache, wax crayon, ink and marker pens. We scan the finished works or sometimes photograph them to create digital files for printing. A selection of the art materials we use. For book covers further digital design is necessary using the art work as a base. For our art products, the only digital adjustments are sizing to fit the product, and tweaks to colour-match the printed image with the original. We may add borders and labels. The finished digital files are then uploaded to our printing company, Prodigi. We match them with details of the specific product we want to create. Prodigi specialise in art printing, with superb colour reproduction and a choice of high-quality papers and products. And they have excellent sustainability and environmental policies. Greetings cards A sample of our fine art greetings cards. Greetings cards are popular with customers who buy Castle Sefton Press art products. They are high-quality 15.2cm x 10.2 cm (6" x 4") cards that are left blank for your own greeting. Printed on 324gsm Mohawk card or 280gsm gloss card, whichever best suits the artwork, they come in a biodegradable OPP sleeve with a kraft envelope. As delivery for a single card works out relatively expensive, we offer a reduction if you buy four together. This way you save on delivery costs too! Prints and Frames All of our art works are available as fine art prints. These are either A4 size on enhanced matte art paper, 240gsm or 23cm x 30.5cm (9"x 12") on smooth art paper, depending on which best suits the art work. The print quality is superb, perfectly capturing the colours, textures and life of the original. You can display your A4 print in one of our DIY frames. These are wood with a perspex glaze and come in a range of colours. We offer a discount if you buy a frame and print together as a package. For the best display, or as a gift, you can also buy all of our prints professionally mounted in a wooden frame and float glass. And if you want to create an art collection display, we have bundle offers on prints and framed prints too. Fine Art Print, DIY Wooden Art Frame and a ready-framed print Homeware and other Castle Sefton art products In line with our ideas about the function of our art, we are developing a range of homeware and other useful products featuring our designs. There will be more items in this section of the shop very soon. Original art works We have a limited number of original art works for sale. These are handmade by us here in Stoke-on-Trent and are unique. Prodigi are not involved with these items which will be dispatched directly by us. Fulfilment of your order when you buy Castle Sefton Art products General information about delivery is available on our shipping page. As above, we dispatch original art works directly from Stoke-on-Trent, UK. Unfortunately, for legal reasons some of them are not for sale to the EU. Print on demand Any other art work that you buy from Castle Sefton Press will be printed to order by Prodigi and dispatched by them. The process works just like print on demand books. Global service Prodigi have several factories worldwide as part of their sustainability policy and to reduce shipping costs for customers. If you scroll down to the bottom of the product page and click the tab 'Country of Manufacture', you will see details of where that particular product will be made for shipping to your location. The product page will also have details of how the item will be packaged. We think that a global / local service is a great idea. This is a way that we can share our work worldwide with reduced environmental impact. And it's a way that people can buy Castle Sefton Press art products and still support their local economy. Shipping models have moved on. Hopefully the manufacturing model based on mass production by sources of cheap labour will die out in the near future. Many industries move on from exploiting workers in a country as those workers gain more rights and higher expectations. Soon they may run out of places to outsource to and things will have to change. Global fulfilment through local manufacture could be a big part of the new model. Can I buy Castle Sefton Press art products in shops? Not at the moment. But you can find some of our most popular products in our Etsy shop. Original art works by John Blake.

Computers can struggle with tasks they are not suited to. AI and creative industries Everyone is, to use a colloquial expression, getting their knickers in a twist about AI. They are either horrified and seeking to protect themselves, or excited and dashing to engage or even invest. We thought it was time to state Castle Sefton Press' AI policy and explain how we use technology. We don't think AI and creative industries go together. Use of Technology Of course we use technology; brilliant technological developments have made a small enterprise like ours viable. Apart from the internet, our websites, all the major sales platforms and social media, we use a great piece of software called Vellum for typesetting, the super Affinity for cover layouts, logos and image processing and LibreOffice for writing, editing and proof reading. Some of these third-party apps and platforms may make use of robots, but we never do directly. We turn off any AI integrations we can. Tools, not masters We are not digital artists, and even our book covers are initially created using physical media. (You can read about the media we use in another article). That still involves technology: pencils, easels, modern acrylic paints and brushes are all technological developments. I never ask a pencil what it thinks I should draw, or to draw something for me. I would as soon ask a computer the same questions. That's because technology gives us tools and not masters. No one here uses it to create content. Every word in every book and every article comes from the authors' brains, possibly adjusted according to the human editors' suggestions, and nowhere else. At Castle Sefton Press we are not convinced that computers do create content. We suspect that they are doing what they have always been good at, processing data. They are doing it much faster and more powerfully than before. And true they are mapping a different kind of data, relationship data. But they are still just information processors and that means AI has no direct role to play in the creative industries. The things that go on in a writer's head Machine errors ... I notice when reading that mainstream publishers, who are aways so quick to suggest that independents like us are not 'proper publishers', often now use machines for proofreading. This is one example of several in On Nationalism, by Eric Hobsbawn, edited by Donald Sassoon, published by Little Brown in 2021:   '...little but common economic backwardness untied what we know about the Yugoslavs...and the very concept of Yugoslavia was the product of intellectuals in Austro-Hungary...' This arrests the reader because it makes no sense, and should surely read 'united'. But as 'untied' is properly spelled and grammatically correct, the machine left in charge cannot possibly know that it is a nonsense. I can assure you that our proofreader would never miss such a mistake. If it ever got to her after extensive perusal by the author and editor. ... and human ones This is not to say, of course, that we never get things wrong, only that you won't find systematic errors like this. They are due to leaving a machine to do a human being's job. If you do find a mistake in one of our books, please let us know. The beauty of print on demand is that errors can be corrected immediately in all editions. Worries about AI and creative industries There is a lot of concern about AI and theft of intellectual property among creatives in the UK. Understandably so given the government's recent enthusiasm for the idea of AI bots crawling copyright material to learn from it. To explain our views on this issue, we'll share the story of a friend who, some years before AI was talked about, wrote an excellent biography of an important, though not very famous, British man and published it through an independent publisher. Plagiarism The book did reasonably well but was not a bestseller. A few years after it was released, our friend the author came across a novella presenting a fictionalised version of his subject's story by a US author. It published by one of the five huge global publishing corporations. Not only did the fiction author not reference our friend's book, but he claimed that the novella was based entirely on his own research during a trip to the UK. Our friend could prove this was not the case as the fiction author had used conversations with and recollections from people who had died before his visit. The only record of these was only in our friend's biography. Our friend wrote a courteous letter to the huge global publishing corporation, suggesting that the author might like to credit his book in future. In return, he received an aggressive official letter from US lawyers threatening him with legal action if he ever mentioned the issue again. Of course, he let it go. He could barely afford legal action of any kind, and was certain to be defeated by corporate lawyers backed by vast funds. It's about power not technology The point is that theft of intellectual property is an issue of power, not technology. Those power structures were sadly in place before the advent of AI. Yes, the technology makes it much easier and faster to steal stuff, but it is only the power structures that we live within that allow it to happen. I'm fairly sure that if an individual – Ethel Smith, say – developed an AI bot in her bedroom in a terraced house here in Stoke-on-Trent and used it to trawl and borrow from the works of high profile authors across the country, the UK government would enthusiastically support her prosecution under existing copyright legislation. The Castle Sefton Press AI Policy We don't believe AI is creative, or should have a role in creative industries. Nor is it the cause of theft of intellectual property. But because we can only do our best to survive in the world we live in, we have to accept that other people will be using AI. Castle Sefton Press has developed a robust AI policy: avoid smart devices as far as possible. turn AI assistants off wherever possible apart from technical assistance such as bot support for various computer applications. These are computer tasks for which the software has been labelled 'AI'. deny access to our creative work for AI training when possible. don't worry too much if we can't manage any of these because of power imbalances – we can only do our best. allow AI bots to understand our website by use of LLMs.txt. People are going to be using AI search results and answers whether we like it or not. In which case, it's better that they receive accurate information about us. use AI for routine tasks when appropriate such as creating subtitles for our social media videos which can then be checked by a human. These are computer tasks for which the software has been labelled 'AI'. Here at Castle Sefton Press, we'd much rather talk to the pencil than ChatGPT. At least it's honest. Declaration of Uses of AI We use AI to generate subtitles on our social media videos. These are then checked by a human (usually me!) before publishing. Some of our product images on the website and online may have AI generated backgrounds. We are a tiny business and cannot afford expensive photo shoots for all our products. Stock image or computer generated backdrops show our items in context, but our product designs themselves NEVER use AI.

Close up from An Author's Desk © Emily Tellwright, 2024 Types of books you can buy from Castle Sefton Press These days books come in lots of formats: audiobook, ebook, paperback and hardback are probably the most common. There are special formats like large print. And then there are illustrated books, box sets and special editions often with decoration of edges or foiled covers. At the moment, you can only buy Castle Sefton Press paperbacks and ebooks. We plan to add audiobooks and large print editions at some stage in the future. All our books are fiction for adults and our paperbacks are printed on demand. Buying Castle Sefton Press ebooks The best way to buy Castle Sefton Press ebooks is from our own online book shop. You can receive your book in whatever form is compatible with your favourite app. When you go to the book's product page, simply select 'ebook' from the format dropdown menu. Once you have checked out, you will receive an email with the link to your ebook from our delivery partners BookFunnel. From there you can download the book to your usual book app or use their own app, which is free. BookFunnel have their own excellent customer service to deal with any issues that may arise. (We at Castle Sefton Press are not experts on ebook delivery). If you prefer to buy Castle Sefton Press ebooks from a major platform, you can do that too. They are all available on Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and many others. Scroll down the page of the book you want to buy until you see 'Alternative Buying Options'. Clicking on the link in this section will take you to a choice of all the online stores where you can make your purchase. We set the standard retail price for each book to be the same everywhere our books are sold. However, we don't have full control of pricing on all the platforms, Amazon for example. Buying Castle Sefton Press paperbacks Once again, the best way to buy Castle Sefton Press paperbacks is through our own online book shop. Our paperbacks are all print on demand, so the copies are printed to order. This is why you will have to wait for a few days before your order is dispatched. Choose 'paperback' from the dropdown menu on the product page. As soon as you checkout, your order is automatically sent to our printers, BookVault. They will print it and dispatch it directly to you using your chosen delivery service within five working days. Clicking through under 'Alternative Buying Options', you will see that you can also buy paperback copies from Amazon, Waterstones, Blackwells, Barnes and Noble and Foyles online. All these options are also print-on-demand. Amazon copies will be printed by Amazon, while the other stores sell copies printed by industry giant IngramSpark. There may be some print quality differences between printers, but otherwise the books are identical apart from the barcodes: Amazon barcodes will look different, although the ISBN of the book remains the same. Why is buying from our own online shop better? It's better for Castle Sefton Press because we don't have to pay a percentage to the shopping platform. Saving that fee helps us to stay in business and create more new books for you to read. That's true for all authors. If you have the option to buy directly from them, or from their own publisher, that is the way to support them best. On our own site, we are also free of the big stores' rules and algorithms, and you are avoiding any questionable practices they may have. We can also deal directly with any problems that arise, rather than you having to go through the platform. We are not against you buying Castle Sefton Press books on the big online stores though! If that's where you prefer to buy, please do. That's why we make our books available there, to give you the choice. More about print-on-demand Traditional methods Traditional publishing relies on large print runs that have to be warehoused and shipped around in quantity. That involves large upfront expenditure that is not practical for small businesses. And it requires expensive storage and transport. Once the initial marketing period is over, unsold copies are usually pulped or otherwise destroyed in considerable quantities. That is obviously undesirable, and not something we would ever want to do. And, unless the book is a bestseller, when the last of the print run has been sold, remaindered or destroyed, the book will no longer be available. Most books' sales stabilise at a level such that traditional publishers consider it unviable to pay to print, house and ship large numbers of new copies. Then the book goes 'out of print'. Print on demand Print on demand titles, in contrast, need never go 'out of print'. There are set-up costs for a new book – editing, cover design, ISBNs for example – but once the book is published those are sunk costs. In future, there is only the marginal cost of printing and delivering individual copies. That is covered by the purchase price. There are obvious environmental benefits in not printing and then destroying large numbers of books but only printing exactly what customers require. And in not transporting those books across large distances, or using the resources of storage premises. Another benefit is that necessary changes can take effect from the very next copy sold. Though our books have been rigorously edited and proofread, sometimes unforeseen changes are needed! Independent content The most well-known feature of print on demand is that it makes tiny publishers like us, single-author businesses, and even hobby authors viable. It means that a vast range of qualities and types of book are now available to you, the reader, and that it is an independent selection that has not been filtered by the tastes and unconscious biases of traditional industry professionals. There are loads of exciting new books out there to discover. Some of them are right here to buy at Castle Sefton Press. Global Service BookVault print in the UK, the US, Australia and Canada. This means that your book will be printed reasonably near to you to save on shipping costs. You can read more about global service in another of our articles. Criticism You will come across quite derogatory criticism of print on demand, often claiming that authors who use it are not 'proper writers' (whatever that means) and their books are not 'really published'. This usually comes from those who are ignorant of this realm of publishing, or who have a vested interest to put it down. I'll write more about types of publishing, and what type of publishing we do, in another article soon. Can I buy Castle Sefton Press books in bookshops? Yes, you can! With a few exceptions, neither independent nor big chain book shops stock print on demand titles. Neither does Bookshop.org (although they do sell our ebooks). But you can order our books from any UK bookshop and most bookshops worldwide. Under 'Alternative Buying Options' on the book's product page, you can download an e-card with the details to take to your local bookshop. Or you can just write down the title, author and ISBN (make sure it's the paperback one!). If you have any problems ordering from your bookshop, please put them in touch with us at contact@castleseftonpress.co.uk. Libraries Getting our books from libraries is a great way to read them, usually for free! In this case it's the library which buys Castle Sefton Press books on your behalf. Our books are in our local libraries will be focussing on getting our books into more libraries in future, as we are keen to support this kind of access to our work. In the meantime, if your library doesn't have the title you want to read, please ask them to order it! For the paperback, the information you need to give is the same as for bookshops. Our ebooks are also available through all the major library services, so you can request them too. (Try to give the library the ebook ISBN in this case. It's in the 'Product Specifications.') Second-hand books At Castle Sefton Press we love second-hand books! You may find used Castle Sefton Press books in shops or online. (You can't buy them from us). If you don't think you will read a book again, then please do pass it on so that someone else can enjoy it. This is another sustainable practice that we support. Eco Scheme There are expenses involved in publishing books. Many thousands of hours are taken to write and publish each book, as well as all the time it takes to run Castle Sefton Press. The down side of this sustainable practice is that we don't make anything from second-hand sales of our books. So, if you pick up a used copy of one of our publications and enjoy it, please consider our Eco Scheme and make a donation. There's a QR code link in the back of our books too. A very small amount is fine. It makes a difference to us! Doing this supports sustainable use of physical books and the creation of original new ones, so please consider it.