Goodbye Castle Hill, Welcome Castlehill

The total censorship war that I wrote about in the editorial to the previous issue has forced us to completely rethink how, or rather from where Castle Hill Publishers operates. Since business has become pretty much impossible for Caste Hill in the UK, with Brexit making exports to EU countries borderline impossible and banking being canceled, we decided it is time to pack up and leave the country where Castle Hill Publishers was established in 1998.

Caste Hill Publishers was officially sold by its UK owner (identity undisclosed) to CODOH on April 8, 2022, and CODOH reorganized it as a single-member, non-neglected limited liability company as “Castlehill Publishing LLC.” By some fluke, the person on CODOH’s board who created this LLC did not pay very close attention to the company’s original name, so now we’re stuck with a name that’s only similar to what we used to have. However, we have decided to keep using the old name Castle Hill Publishers as our book imprint anyway. There’s no need to confuse people.

Castle Hill’s office cum warehouse is now in Dallastown, PA, just a few miles from where I live. Since Ingram won’t print and ship our books anymore, we’ve contracted with another printer. Although our new printing partner does order fulfillment as well, we’ve decided against putting all our eggs into one basket. Hence, we let them print the books, but ship them in bulk to us, and we then pick, pack and ship each order ourselves. This way, if that printer bails out, we simply switch to another one, hopefully without any major disruption. To fill our bookshelves with sufficient inventory for half a year, we had to spend some $15K, but the money was there, so we’re good.

This new setup will make us more flexible as to what we can offer. We can now stock audio books on CD, we can add promotional material to our orders, and we can resell the books published by third parties. So, if we do it right, we can come out of this winning – at least for the U.S. market.

As Brian once said: “Always look on the bright side of life!”