December News

You might have been expecting something a bit more festive from me than a post about December news. Don’t worry, I promised two blog posts in December, and the second one will be seasonal and celebratory. Today I’ll be bringing you up to date with recent developments in my author, artist and publisher life. And refreshing the blog with a change of emphasis.

Recent Developments

Marketing

In October, I finally began marketing Castle Sefton Press. There had been some book marketing before then, but nothing on the art side of the business at all. Very few people knew it existed! And I was about five months behind in getting started.

We had a few strange setbacks in setting up the Castle Sefton Press store. That meant there were a lot of delays in launching. In addition, I was learning the whole process of WordPress and WooCommerce as I went along, which meant that some times I had to go back and make changes. By the time we were ready for marketing, my work rate was slowing down.

I think I am a reasonably good learner, but when I came to learn the various social platforms – not being a natural user of social media – I was struggling because my mind hadn’t fully processed all the previous year’s new information. I had already learnt so many new technical skills in that time.

Marketing is also a difficult subject because there is far too much information available. Most of it is poor quality and a lot of it expensive. So simply finding good, clear learning material on how and where to start can be very time-consuming and involve multiple false-starts. And you are chasing a moving target, because all the platforms and their algorithms are changing all the time and the pace of that seems to be accelerating.

Meta

As I was embarking on this final process in getting the art and book business off the ground, Facebook changed its algorithm completely. That included the way Meta advertising works. (Meta owns Facebook and Instagram along with other platforms that I don’t use such as Threads and WhatsApp). This was a great blow as not only was it more to learn but there was uncertainty as to whether Facebook ads, which had been planned to be our primary paid marketing, would work at all for us any more.

In fact, after a stressful few weeks I have abandonned Meta. (I still make an occasional Facebook post for our small group of followers). As a business, Meta was suggesting adding content on average nearly three times a day across Facebook and Instagram in return for ‘reaching’ about 40 people. Our existing followers were not being shown our posts. There were bugs in our business portfolio that were going to cause issues with advertisements. There is no technical support available, not even a robot.

I had begun on Instagram getting a hundred or so views on a post. By the time I stopped, I was getting around five views per post. The algorithm seemed to be punishing me for not adhering to its posting demands or paying for adverts. I decided enough was enough. I don’t mind working to build a following, but this is no longer an option on Meta. You are participating in a control game designed to force you to comply and spend.

Enshittification

The collapse of Facebook as a platform with any real use or purpose is a good example of the process described by Cory Doctorow in his book, Enshittification. Through greed and stupidity, the internet is destroying itself. One example he gives of this is AI search results. AI produces search results by crawling other articles on releveant topics, and these are then shown at the top of the search results.

This means that you are most likely to click on the AI results rather than on the articles with the original information. But many of the sites hosting those articles depend on clicks and the corresponding advertising or purchases to survive. They are starting to disappear as the AI search results that have used their information take their traffic. So the range of information available for AI to crawl is reducing and hence so is the quality of its output.

Amazon

Amazon is another great example of the degradation of online platforms. For all it’s many ethical issues, Amazon still functions fairly well as a bookshop. I’m not saying that I recommend it as a bookshop – I certainly don’t – but in most cases you can still find and buy the book you want on there with few problems. And I don’t believe that it is the only villain behind the demise of bookshops. (You will be able to read more about this over on the Castle Sefton Press blog as soon as I get round to writing the article!)

But Amazon has destroyed many other kinds of shops and producers, particularly in technology and electronics. If you try to find a small item of electronic kit – a small microphone, say – you may never get beyond the hundreds of Amazon results, peppered with those of eBay and other massive shopping platforms. Most of the products look similar and have indistinguishable reviews. Indeed, they probably are all the same mass-produced rubbish. If there are genuine products in those pages of search results, you will never be able to find them. Anyway, the chances are that the genuine sellers and manufacturers have been driven out of business by a combination of Amazon’s aggressive charges and proliferation of cheap, fake products.

New plans

All this means that it’s more difficult for a small online product business to get established than it has been for a long time. I have new plans for December onwards, but it means growth will be slower than expected and there will be even more work, trial and error involved. It is a tremendous relief to be free from dependence on Meta, though.

New Plans for December Onwards

Alternative Platforms

Pinterest

I have hopes of Pinterest as a long-term growth platform for Castle Sefton Press. I have some good resources to help me start building our profile there. One of the other difficulties of starting the marketing late has been that I was beginning in the run up to Christmas, and the special demands of that season have got in the way. I have learned a lot to prepare me for this time next year, but it’s meant that I haven’t got far with Pinterest yet.

TikTok and YouTube

I’m now active on TikTok making short videos. Actually, they are not always that short, being up to ten minutes in length. I’m not sure how effective this will be for the business, but I enjoy it and unlike Meta, TikTok gives you reasonable exposure with no conditions at all. I am also adding all the video content to YouTube, and I’ll be improving the quality of our channel there over the next month.

Other Options

Alternative social media platforms, shopping platforms like Etsy, in-person events and collaborations are some of the options available that I’ll be considering. I will be trying to get our books into some libraries.

Bookshops remain largely a hostile environment for us. If you buy your books mostly from physical bookshops, it’s worth remembering that they only stock the most mainstream works, and that there is a vast range of books available that they never consider, ours included. (There are exceptions of course, but this is still generally true).

New Creative Work

Art

We already have a lot of new art products planned for 2026. This will include the Fred and Ginger Collection, one of which is the featured art for today’s post. John Blake has been developing some fun and creative ideas in the run up to Christmas and we are hoping to add those as product ranges too.

I plan to concentrate more on painting for my regular art practice immediately after Christmas. So more colourful images will be coming your way.

Books

I am determined to begin my next book in January, and it may be part of a series. Beginning is always difficult, but once I start I am generally a reasonably fast worker. It would be nice if it could be published before the end of 2026, but that is probably optimistic. However, now the business is established I hope to carry on writing and keep producing books without the long break there has been since Ghost Train.

A Change of Emphasis

I see the future of this blog as being more focussed on the process of my work. That will include writing, once I’ve started again, art and the business. I want to outline some of the reasons behind the change.

A Consequence of TikTok Videos

Making short videos means that I am chatting about the random ideas in my head into the camera, rather than writing them on this blog. I have never felt lost for words or ideas, but this month I found that all the current themes I would have written about here had been spent in videos.

You can watch all the videos on our YouTube channel, where I am currently chatting about gift wrapping and books.

A Consequence of Marketing

Castle Sefton Press is a marketing nightmare. We produce fiction and art, and there are two of us but only I appear in the publicity. Given that focus and consistency are the two main requirements for any marketing programme, most advisors would tell us to restructure our business. Perhaps into separate businesses. I am strongly in favour of keeping it as one, because my original vision was of a complete creative business.

John Blake and I have both been musicians, writers and artists and in the course of those experiences we’ve both met and worked with many very talented creative people. In every branch of creativity you find those for whom that is their whole world. All those authors who insist you must write every day, for example, and musicians and artists whose every waking breath is centred around music or art.

It’s never been like that for either of us. Since a child, I have always been widely creative: writing prose and poetry, music, visual art, dance, cookery, gardening, home decor and design, knitting, embroidery and more. Neither of us writes or produces artwork every day, but we are creative every day even if only in simple domestic or business tasks.

Creative Business

The way forward with presenting our business is to focus on this approach and diversity. And that will require some creativity from me! There’s no guarantee of success of course, but I’m happy to carry on anyway. It’s very hard to get anything unusual and outside current trends noticed at all, though of course if something different does get noticed it will often take off.

I feel that if I make the focus of this blog part of that new approach, it can support me in doing this.

Consequences of Writing

I haven’t been in the process of writing a book since I started this blog, because I have been busy setting up the Castle Sefton Press business. Once I am writing again, the blog is bound to have more about the writing process and an author’s life. (That doesn’t mean there will be no more recipes and food talk!).

December News: Starting as I Mean to Go On

Latest Art

Ginger No 2

Today’s featured artwork is the second Ginger in my collection of six Ginger Rogers poses taken from dance sequences in the films she made with Fred Astaire. Charcoal and chalk seemed to me the perfect media to capture these active black-and-white images, and so far I am pleased with the results.

Resemblance

The most difficult part is capturing a vague resemblance. The source images are blurred, being stills taken from digital reproductions of 1930s films (which have not always been well restored, depending on which film in the canon it is). The drawings are quite small – around A4 size – and this makes getting exact detail with charcoal challenging.

Fred Astaire has a very idiosyncratic head shape, and once that is mastered, he becomes recognisable. Ginger is far more difficult. She has distinctive features, but they are masked by prominent make-up which changes as the fashions progress through the films. In this pose, the shadows cast by the powerful studio lights leave only her heavy eye make-up visible.

In the previous drawing, last month’s featured image, a different and thought-provoking issue of resemblance came to light. Ginger, as a major Hollywood star, was generally photographed and filmed, in more static scenes, from particular angles which were thought to favour her. When you take a still from a dance like this, you can end up with a view of her face that is very unfamiliar. And that is just what has happened in last month’s drawing. It is a fair representation of the shot, but not instantly Ginger-like, because you are simply not used to seeing her features stretched in profile.

Distinctive Pose

One of the things I have found about drawing Ginger that is very distinctive, and that I had never noticed until I began drawing her, is the way she combines perfect stillness and movement in one pose. Both the poses so far show this beautifully. I think I have managed here to portray the perfect, motionless poise of her right side, while her left is still active. In the previous drawing, her upper body is statuesque while her feet are still alive.

At first I thought that this was just the effect of her dresses – they keep moving after she has stopped – and they certainly accentuate it. But I have decided that it definitely a feature of her dancing.

It’s actually quite different to Fred Astaire. You can take a still at any point of Fred’s dancing – I have done quite a few! – and he appears perfectly still and poised throughout his body. Quite astonishingly, he seems to move smoothly through an infinite series of perfect poses when he dances. Like a living animation.

Thoughts turning Christmas

The real December news is that I have just been putting the almond icing on the Christmas cake. Very badly! Like so many tasks that you only do at long intervals, just when you think you have finally mastered it (last year I did it perfectly), you have a lapse. Happily, it will still taste good.

I am also about to write Christmas cards having finished this year’s seasonal art work. You will be seeing it in progress in the next post as it marks some interesting technical developments in my painting. And there will be December news of a different kind, with plans of all kinds for the new year.

So until then, I hope you are enjoying the season and not finding it too tiring or stressful. Or making too much of a hash of your icing!