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! Here at CSP, we have a few things in the pipeline for 2025 and we thought you'd like to know what's coming.
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 his, 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.
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 Another Day in 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 skill whatsoever. It's dark, deeply funny and original, so you won't want to miss it.
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 themselves.
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 direct to you as well as print, offer bundles and special offers, and reward our supporters like yourselves with free gifts, such as a short story to download. We hope this will happen in the autumn.
Finally, something that will not appear 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.
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, this is the place to do it.