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Nine Months Later

2008-12-29T16:22:00Z

It’s been a very busy nine months since we started working on CompletelyNovel full time and we’re now poised for launching to the public in the new year. It’s a poignant period of time – I can’t really speak for Oli and Jon on this, but I certainly feel a bit like an expectant mother who can’t wait to give birth! Of course, we don’t want to release it prematurely, but I’m really excited and can’t wait to see how it all goes. Hopefully getting this baby out into the open won’t be quite so painful as the real thing!

I really can’t believe how quickly the time has gone. Oli blogged about the life of the CompletelyNovel office in August this year. Since then we have published our first book – the CompletelyNovel Launch Anthology with the help of members of the SYP, and our competition winners. We’ve also been getting in contact with publishers and literary agents to introduce the website to them and explore ways that we can make the website work best for them. There should be lots of them popping up on the website very soon! We’ve also made lots of changes to the website and it is looking and feeling a lot slicker than we planned for back then, so we’re really pleased with the way things are going. I even managed to figure out what Twitter is all about and put a twitter update widget into the blog (see right) which I was impressed with, although no-one else in the office was.

Times are changing One thing that has struck me (in a very encouraging way) since we started building the website and talking to people within the industry is the change in attitudes and the steps taken forward towards digital strategy and the incorporation of social media. Even though it has been a relatively short time, I think there has been a lot of change this year. The arrival of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader has taken eBooks up a notch, and seems to have shaken those publishers who weren’t really paying too much attention to the rise of digital content into action. More publishers are investigating ways to make their content available in a variety of different ways, whether it be through online tasters, mobile apps or eBooks. Many publishers also seem to be coming up with ways to make their websites more interactive for their readers – there’s lots of fantastic content up there, from author interviews to book trailers and blogs on the process involved in actually making a book. These types of changes have already been blogged about in more places and more detail than I can mention here. But what’s particularly interesting about this change for us, is that the timing of it ties in very nicely with our own goals.

Lots to look forward to Basically, it seems to be great news for CN. Everyone can already see that enhancing their online presence and digital strategy is crucial. The main thing we need to do now is demonstrate that CompletelyNovel will be a great way to share and exploit their content and get in touch with customers, – it’s really important that publishers and everyone else in the industry realise that a site such as CompletelyNovel will benefit them. I think (though feel free to correct me on this) that the fact that CompletelyNovel is a more open forum might be a little nerve-wracking for some- after all, in the rights-ridden publishing world, it hasn’t traditionally been in people’s interests to be too close to their competitors. But being ‘open’ has been shown to be the best way to get the web to work for you – you have to use collaborative partnerships to reach the right people and deliver the right product (just look at Google, Amazon, Facebook etc). And it seems to make more sense now, when times are hard for everyone and it’s clear that publishing isn’t a recession-proof industry. It’s time to pull together and give the people what they want. I’m really looking forward to the New Year and celebrating the launch of CN!

Christmas Greetings!

2008-12-25T15:37:00Z

Books at Christmas: giving and receiving in harder times

2008-12-22T09:56:00Z

Christmas has become that time of year where I freak out; so much to get for so many people! Fortunately, it seems you can always rely on a book as a good present, and this year, what with the credit crunch affecting big booksellers as well as many of the rest of us, will the sale and purchase of this staple gift suffer? Or will it be embraced as a cheaper, more suitable alternative in these cash-strapped times?

Speaking from experience, I’ve found that younger people (particularly teenagers) who are not inclined to read books nor buy them have become fixated of late on the raft of celebrity autobiographies released every year; my sister showed interest in reading Sharon Osborne’s life story ‘Survivor’, despite not having any time for fictional books. With these cash-ins comes the inevitable boom in sales, and it seems that every year, a celebrity or eight release their autobiography to eager readers. Has our fascination with the cult of celebrity begun to influence our reading habits? Or has this same rabid need for knowledge of famous lives simply just brought non-readers out of their shells? The very fact that the celebs outsell fiction again this year, despite the financial climate, seems to suggest that the increase in reading has, and will not, abate as long as people can purchase their favourite celebrity’s autobiography. It’s sad to think that fiction suffers at the cost of these (financially-motivated?) tales of fame, and that in a time of financial crisis people will still be buying these highly-priced books. However, what must be remembered is that whilst the books may not be intellectually challenging, the very fact that people are eager to read something is something to be pleased about.

Moving away from what’s selling, the BBC points out that whilst this year’s Christmas will be different for the wrong reasons, books are easy to find at a cut price, and still remain popular even with a bargain budget. So what books have I purchased this year, and what books have I bought in the past? What was the financial damage? All the different types of books vary greatly in price, with the celebrity books are nearly always a ridiculous price, whilst the novels are far more reasonable – again a presentation of just how popular the autobiographies are if the stores are prepared to charge more, and if people are willing to pay more. Buying Osbourne’s autobiography set me back twelve pounds at the time – how cheap would it be now, not only in terms of time since its release, but because of the credit crisis?

Just thinking about these choices and purchases is interesting enough – it’s not always apparent how defined people’s choices of book are, yet it’s fairly easy for me to think of a book for each family member, and I’m no different myself. Last year, I wished to complete the final chapter of Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Tower’, where as in previous years I had asked for such diverse books, ironically, as David Beckham’s autobiography ‘My Side’ – reflecting my varying tastes at different points in my life. What’s interesting in thinking further about this is that reading habits, whilst ever-changing, will always reflect the public attitude – our desire to see inside the lives of others can be satiated through fictional or autobiographical narratives, and the need for solitude is something films and computer games cannot give as books can.

However, buying a book as a present is not always a success – speaking from experience, you can always be assured at some point in your life that someone will buy you a book you know you’ll never read, but for every time this happens you may be introduced to a book that you love – it’s all part of the magic. The shops may be failing and suffering from the economic crisis, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see that the sales data for the holiday is not as affected as it could be.

Special Agents Watson, Little Ltd

2008-12-17T13:48:00Z

We are really pleased to see our first agent profile on the website today….woohoo!

It is from the literary agents Watson, Little Ltd. It’s great to see agents embracing new ways to engage with readers of their authors’ books and also let writers know more about what they are looking for in the books they take on.

Watson, Little Ltd even have a Facebook page which offers some more info and pictures on the people behind the scenes. And of course, if you want to find out what they like reading themselves, you can check out their profiles on CompletelyNovel!

If you see that their tastes are similar to yours, then there is a fair chance that you are going to like a lot of the material that they take on as an agency – it’s a great way to get recommendations of books you might not otherwise come across.

Watson Little drew my attention to Halfwit Nation by Paul Stokes and Neil Rafferty. It’s a collection of news articles from their spoof news blog, thedailymash. It’s hilarious (#28 on Amazon’s humour list) and makes a great Christmas gift!

Iconic publisher profile!

2008-12-15T14:51:00Z

Congratulations to Icon Books, who are our first publisher to put a profile on CompletelyNovel! I’ve been getting in contact with lots of agents and publishers at the moment to let them know about CompletelyNovel and how they can get involved. Everyone has been enthusiastic which has been very encouraging. CompletelyNovel.com is going to be a hub for the whole book industry, so it’s really important for us to communicate with publishers and agents and let them know about all the benefits that having a profile on CompletelyNovel can bring both to themselves, their authors and of course all the lovely readers!

I mentioned to one of the publishers that the aim is for CompletelyNovel to be a one-stop-shop for all things book related. “That’s ambitious!” She said. Yeah, I guess it is. But the more I see what’s in the pipeline from Oli and Jon, and the more I talk to people from around the industry, the more convinced I get that we are on to a winner here. We do have a hell of a lot of work to do to get there, and lots more to learn about exactly what people want, but with enough determination, keen listening and chocolate hobnobs, I reckon we can make it.

Anyway, back to the point of this post…we will soon be adding lots more exciting features to the publisher and agent profiles to make them even more slick and useful. I’ll post more details about that shortly.

If you are a publisher or agent and would like to hear more about how you can get involved with CompletelyNovel, just email me on anna@completelynovel.com and we can discuss it.

Current state of play

2008-12-11T15:21:00Z

Here’s a quick update and a sneak preview of how things are progressing in CompletelyNovel. We’ve been working on a number of changes which are currently squirelled away on our testing site but will be rolled out to the live site very soon. Apologies to any techies for the general lack of technical language in this post (I am trying!)

Backend Rehaul (nothing to do with Colonic Irrigation) Yes, there’s been a bit of a rehaul on the backend of the website. To be more specific, Jon has been working on (amongst other things) integrating our listings for published books with the listings for CompletelyNovel books (i.e. books that have been uploaded to the website and can be read online). One of the outcomes that I’m looking forward to, is that it with this new book model (as it’s become known), authors who have had books published will be able to add them to their online portfolio. This will make it really easy for authors to promote their books to readers and for the readers who are browsing on CN to find out a bit more about the writer behind the work. Of course, the author will be able to link to their official website/blog too. It’s another step closer to the kind of one-stop-shop that we are aiming for, where you can find all the information you need about books and publishing on CompletelyNovel.

Publishing Process We are also working to make the publishing process a bit easier. PDF printers tend to be pretty temperamental when it comes to changing the page size so we’re developing a system so that you will be able to upload a Word Doc and we can convert it into a print-ready file for you. This should make things a bit easier for those who don’t have Word 2007 and aren’t too familiar with PDF creation either.

User Interface Oli, in the meantime has been working on our user interface. He is making it quicker to navigate round the website and easier to see lists of things (such as the books in your library) at a glance. He’s also changed the way profiles are displayed so that you can easily sort between the different info about people on the website, be it related to their activity, books in their library, their clubs or reviews. You may also notice a slight difference in the background which has been simplified so that it doesn’t distract from any of the lovely content our users are contributing!

The screenshot should gives you a bit of an idea of what I mean. All these changes, and more, coming very soon!

A Little Bird Told Me

2008-12-10T14:24:00Z

What do Jane Austen, Barack Obama and the BBC have in common? Although it may sound like the first line of a query letter for a time-travel-political-conspiracy-thriller, the real answer is Twitter, a microblogging service which users can update with entries up to 140 characters, sent from their mobiles or computers. Twitter enabled Obama supporters to keep up to date with the candidate on the election trail, lets “Auntie”http://twitter.com/BBCnews deliver headlines as they break, and helps readers to keep up with the latest serialised installments of Austen’s books.

Twitter is a great tool for writers, whether they want to keep in touch with their readers, or explore the new literary possibilities of 140 characters.

Long a niche pursuit, Twitter’s popularity has soared recently, with the number of users tweeting growing 600% between summer 2007 and 2008. Twitter was originally designed as a more immediate kind of blogging, with tweets answering the question “What are you doing now?”, but it has developed into something far more than this. Twitter ‘bots’ can help you count calories, keep track of how many miles your car can do per tank, and remind you of appointments. It’s also become the best place on the net to find Woody-Allen-esque snappy one-liners: has anyone ever expressed their view of the Kindle better than this?

My girlfriend wants a Kindle. She’s dead to me now.

Twitter can also be a fantastic tool for authors. A popular FanFic author tweets every update to her ongoing story – and responds to feedback tweets from her readers. Authors tweet their tour dates, publication dates and news of the progress of books towards publication, although readers tend to react badly to authors only using twitter to plug their work. Jenna Black and John Scalzi ’s comments about their experience of author events and writing maintain a personal touch but still keep readers up to date. Jennifer Banash has started twitter accounts for three of the characters from her latest teen novel, ‘The Elite’. Characters Casey, Madison and Drew make reference to real world events as well as interact with each other, and the twittering provides a great hook for readers. Stephen Fry, a serial early-adopter and advocate for new technology on top of being an author, actor, presenter and so on, is an excellent example of the wider possibilities. For a man who has had so many Facebook Friend requests he once started a group called “I am Facebook Friends with Stephen Fry” to cope with them, it’s no surprise that his twitter feed is followed by nearly thirty thousand people. He’s recently been posting pictures from the TV series he’s currently filming to TwitPic and sharing his thoughts on the weather, his joy at discovering the word “empinken” and how very crap he thinks Vista is. As with his blog, Stephen Fry’s twitter cements his fan base, converts the mildly interested into fans and offers a platform for him to promote his latest works. While his tweeted picture of a lemur may not thrill, it makes it more likely that I’ll watch out for his series’ arrival on screen.

There are more purely ‘literary’ uses for Twitter. Popular book serialisation service DailyLit has twitter feeds which announce the release of the latest installment of books including Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom and Pride and Prejudice, and TwitterLit takes a novel approach to book recommendation with tweets of the first line of a novel and a link to its Amazon page. Some literary twitterers are even writing novels in 140 character installments. 140Novel is a collaborative novel written by the contributors to Buzz Out Loud, CNET’s weekly tech news podcast, while Twittories are collaborative novels exactly 140 tweets in length to which anyone can contribute. Toby Litt’s contribution to Penguin’s We Tell Stories was told using a combination of twitter and livejournal entries. An ongoing work by a single author can be found at Small Places and a completed one at The Good Captain.

As with so many things technological, Japan is streets ahead of the West. While UK and US newspapers spent this summer thinking up funny headlines for their articles on Twitter Lit, other news sites were reporting the end of Japan’s love affair with “ketai shousetus” – mobile phone novels delivered in short chunks which have made unlikely stars of, for example, a college student who sends out installments between her classes. Last year, half of the ten bestselling books in Japan were those designed for mobiles.

The serialised novels on Twitter are not always successful: it can be irritating to wait for the second half of a sentence started in a 140Novel tweet, and baffling if you join the story half-way through, a problem tacitly admitted by the writers, who have set up a site with the tweets rearranged into a more traditional linear form. Yet the real time thriller (‘Twiller’) being twittered by Matt Richtel seems a perfect fit – the action packed, txtspk tweets have a adrenalin-pumping, Bourne Identity kind of immediacy, even if the character exposition comes across quite strangely: I am Lev Kind. razed in Slt Lake. Mockd in schl 4 big head. Shavd in Marines. Murdr framed in Colo. KIDNAPPED/TORTRD IN DC. ESCAPED! Payback.

Other Twitter feeds take advantage of the restrictions of the form and focus on creating tiny short stories or poems in 140 characters or less. Microfictions are nothing new (see the CN article to learn your way around flash fiction, nanofictions and drabbles) but with Twitter form and medium are perfectly matched, as can be seen from the miniature masterpieces which won Copyblogger’s contest for the best fiction in exactly 140 characters. Though originally published over 100 years ago, the New York Times’ tweets of the ‘news in brief’ articles written by Félix Fénéon, a French journalist writing the early 20th century, are an ideal way to encounter the poetic, insoucient and often blackly comic pieces. In a café on Rue Fontaine, Vautour, Lenoir, and Atanis exchanged a few bullets regarding their wives, who were not present. As noted on the Future of the Book blog, Fénéon’s hypercompression works better on Twitter, where each piece can be read and savoured individually. When published in book form, the pieces lose their quirky charm in the crowd.

Poetry is another popular choice for Literary Twitterers. There is a collaborative poetry Twitter feed as well as one that collects Tweet poetry from across the service. In addition, twitterers and bystanders, including Tom Watson, have noticed that Twitter appears to be ‘a poetry machine’, transforming the inconsequential chatter of the net into ‘found poetry’.

Whether you take the plunge into writing on Twitter, or merely use it to update your friends and readers on your personal love/hatred of the oxford comma, you’ll be missing out if you don’t at least play around with the possibilities.

Less Talk, More Action

2008-12-09T12:27:00Z

Publishing is very concerned with web 2.0, as everyone in Publishing is modishly calling it. Presses have websites, authors have blogs, people throw around names like LibraryThing and ReadySteadyBook and all the other exceptionally-well-known sites that make it into the Bookseller and the Guardian and places like that. So it was a little jarring, but really quite funny, to go to the SYP conference a few weekends ago and be told, very early on in the first panel by Mark Thwaite (of the aforementioned ReadySteadyBook), that most publishers’ websites are rubbish. And most authors only blog a couple of times before giving up. And, in a majority of cases, for all the talk, Publishing doesn’t know what to do with web 2.0.

Of course, there are some publishers who are doing interesting internet things- Penguin, for example, of We Tell Stories and The Shadow War – but a great deal of the very interesting things are happening on sites like CompletelyNovel. Site like CN are using the internet as a means to continue doing all sorts of things that people like to do already – reading books, writing books, hanging out with people who like books – but doing them better. CN is doing something particularly unique with its combination of reading and writing communities. My friends are, as Bill Hicks would have it, Readers, but I couldn’t have a conversation about first lines of great novels with them. My bookshelves in real life are not nearly so organised as they are on my CN profile, and I simply can’t get the hang of showing off my reading in such a stylish and natural way offline. And I certainly wouldn’t have come across a wonderful novel like Gateshead Grace anywhere but CN – I wouldn’t have picked it up without the reviews and recommendations of the people on the site, whose tastes I know are similar to mine because their profiles show me so.

All of which is a very long-winded answer to the question Anna suggested I write a blog entry about: why I was interested in doing work experience with CompletelyNovel.

It's cold...so time for a Hottest Book Competition

2008-11-28T10:14:00Z

The plumbing in our office/house is slightly on the strange side. By strange, I think I actually mean rubbish, because it seems to be very sporadic in the way it works. It mainly comes on when someone has a shower and switch off when the laundrette downstairs has a customer. Anyway, as temperatures seem to have taken a plunge recently, we are feeling it and the quest for warmth is on the brain…hence the search for the hottest book! OK, so these books aren’t actually going to keep my hands from turning blue (unless they induce some seriously energetic page-turning) but it will definitely warm my heart to see people turning their manuscripts into books on CompletelyNovel!

This is a competition for writers who are looking to get their work published. This is how it works:

Create your book on CompletelyNovel
Get Heat points
Win a copy of Bill Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors courtesy of Random House

Competition ends on 6th January. Read on for more details…

Publishers are always keen to encourage new talent, which is why Random House has teamed up with CompletelyNovel.com to offer an incentive to aspiring new writers. They are offering a copy of Bill Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors to the ten CompletelyNovel writers who achieve the greatest number of heat points for their book by 6th January 2009. We will also feature the top ten on our website’s main Books page and our blog.

What on earth are heat points? Well, every book on CompletelyNovel has a ranking according to how ‘hot’ it is amongst the community, i.e how many people have read it, reviewed it, discussed it in clubs and how many people have viewed the book online or bought a paperback copy. The hotter your book is, the more heat points it will have (and the more schmokin’ you are as a writer!).

So, it’s time to get your book ready for the festive season. Whether readers are too stuffed with mince pies to move, begging for a break from the family or just keen to indulge in a good book, there will be lots of reasons for them to check out your work on CompletelyNovel.

To get started, head to the Share and Publish tab on CompletelyNovel. You can upload your manuscript as a Microsoft Word doc, create a cover, set a price and your book is ready! Then you can start letting people know about it! Just tell them to go to www.completelynovel.com and sign in using the invite code cnbeta. Then they can start adding to the community too!

When it’s time for those twelve drummers to drum in the end of the competition, we will count up the points and announce the winners!

Self-published Successes - Part III

2008-11-25T14:48:00Z

Pauline Rowson has wanted to be a writer since she was eleven years old. Now, she is the owner of her own publishing company and the author of three marine mystery crime novels and two thrillers. Pauline’s background in marketing has been a great benefit in spreading the word about her books. Rowson’’s marine mysteries may feature the ‘flawed and rugged’ DI Horton but there’s nothing flawed about her company, Rowmark, which she set up as a Marketing Agency before branching into publishing. By drawing on her marketing skills and publishing her own brand of fiction and business books, Pauline has learned a great deal about the industry. She offers some tips on what worked for her when it came to building her books into a business.

Before becoming a writer, you did some work in marketing, has this helped you when it comes to getting your book out to the right people?

All authors need to market themselves. I use my marketing skills in my ‘business’ as a professional writer. It has helped me to keep my name in front of people, to network and build contacts and to spread the word about my books.

Your Marine Mystery crime novels are quite different from the business books you have also written – what made you decide to start writing that kind of genre?

I started writing fiction seriously twenty years ago. I began with historical novels but it wasn’t until I wrote my first crime fiction novel that I knew I was on the right track. In between writing fiction though I was running my own Marketing and Training company and I thought some of the training material I developed would make very good practical business books. So I wrote some books on marketing, which were extremely well received by readers. I set up a publishing division in my company. I learnt a great deal about the publishing world through doing this, and earlier this year I sold all my business titles to Crimson Publishing who are relaunching them in 2009. However writing fiction, and crime and thriller fiction, is my first love.

Your novel, In Cold Daylight. was shortlisted for the World Book Day Prize in 2008. What effect has this had on sales of that book?

It boosted sales of that book and hence sales of my other books, which I am delighted with. It also raised my profile in the publishing and book selling world and introduced my work to new readers.

You are a very active blogger, and have a website and use other social networking sites. How important do you think it is for a writer to have an online presence?

Hugely important. It is such a brilliant marketing tool and so cost effective. All it costs is your time. It is such a great way to keep in touch with my readers and to meet new readers. It’s also good for networking with other writers and sharing ideas and experiences. And it helps to spread the word about my books and raise my profile, not to mention stimulate sales. It is a must for all writers.

To begin with, you decided to start your own publishing company to publish your books. Many would consider that to be quite a brave decision. What made you decide to do things that way, and has it paid off?

I knew exactly how I wanted my business books to look and what they should contain, and because of my marketing background I wanted strong branding. Publishing them myself was by far the best option because it gave me complete control and it taught me a huge amount about how the whole publishing industry works. Therefore when my first crime novel was ready for publication I decided to launch it under a new imprint of my own company in order to develop the branding of Marine Mysteries, and to test the market place. It has paid off considerably. Because I could prove that my books were popular with readers, and I was generating sales, a publisher then approached me with a two book contract and I have sold translation rights, e book rights and audio rights. I am also now published in the USA and my novels are on sale worldwide.

What advice do you have for writers who are very determined, have received some good feedback on their books but aren’t having any luck with publishers?

Keep going, keep getting better and NEVER EVER give up. Take advice from a professional editorial service and if you feel your work is ready and you can’t get a publisher, consider self publishing.
For many authors who do not want to go to the expense of having many copies printed then I think CompletelyNovel is a good idea. Editing and typesetting is important and also ensuring the cover design is appropriate and good. The book size also has to be correct for the style of book. The most difficult part of self publishing is marketing. If the book is just for local consumption, or for friends and relatives, this isn’t such a big issue but if the author wants wider sales then having a really good product (the look and feel of the book as well as the content) and learning how to market it, plus setting aside money to do so, is very important. I think sites like CompletelyNovel are going to be extremely valuable to authors in terms of promoting their books, and networking amongst reading groups and others.

You have had experience of being on both sides of the fence in terms of the publishing industry. From your experience, how do you think publishers could change to make things better for the consumer?

That’s rather a complex question to answer and encompasses the whole book selling industry and not simply publishers. Publishing is a changing market with e books, print on demand and the emergence and growth of Internet book sellers and social networking sites. I believe all this is going to change the shape of bookselling and publishing to come.

From your blog it is pretty clear that you are a very busy person! Can you give us some insight into what are you doing at the moment?

I have just finished writing a murder mystery play, called Murder at the Pelican Club. I am revising three business books for publication in May 2009. I am seeing my new Marine Mystery crime novel, Dead Man’s Wharf, through to publication with my editor for April 2009. I’m waiting for the Polish edition of In Cold Daylight to be published on 28 November 2008 and I’m revising the next DI Horton Marine Mystery for publication in 2010, plus I’m progressing some overseas deals, which are bubbling along in the pipeline. So quite a lot to keep me busy!

CompletelyNothing to do with us!

2008-11-17T11:29:00Z

I received an odd application for the web development position we have been advertising recently. It started off fairly normally: ‘I have the following skills, experience…’ etc. Then, it continued: ‘My work with Diabetes has been little as I know a friend of mine who has this and I have an idea how painful it is to live with this.’

It’s not really the kind of thing you just throw into a job application. I checked the job posts I had put out… but no, I definitely hadn’t said that any knowledge of diabetes was required to work on our online book community. I thought a bit more. I do eat a lot of chocolate at work…perhaps Oli and Jon had noticed this and thought that it might be sensible to have a diabetes expert on hand, to try and encourage me to manage my sugar intake? I checked…apparently not.

Then the mystery was solved…and it’s that goddam Google listing a press release on the, Completely Novel Action of Insulin just below us in the search results. There was a big breakthrough recently which is all great stuff, but slightly confusing, it seems, for people trying to access CompletelyNovel.com. Previously, every result on the first page of Google search results linked to us. Not so now!

So, for your information…

A Ph.D. student at Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research has uncovered an important piece in the puzzle of how insulin works, a problem that has plagued researchers for more than 50 years. The research brings scientists one step closer to explaining exactly how insulin prompts fat and muscle cells to absorb glucose.

It is actually quite fascinating, though nothing to do with us at all. If you want to know more, just search for CompletelyNovel!

Self-published Successes - Part II

2008-11-15T13:27:00Z

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and recently long-listed for the 2009 World Book Day Campaign, Books to Talks About, Sade Adeniran has had an admirable start to her writing career. Even more impressive when you find out that her debut novel ‘Imagine This’ was self-published. Sade tells us why she believes that just because you get a rejection letter, it doesn’t mean your work isn’t good, it just means it hasn’t found the right home.
Imagine This is the journal of Lola Ogunwole which she starts at the age of nine; it charts her survival from childhood into adulthood. It’s a compelling story about one girl’s resilience against the odds.
We talked to Sade about why she decided to self-publish this highly original novel and what advice she has for other writers out there.

Imagine This is your first novel, what made you decide to start writing it and how long did it take to write?

I was made redundant from my job as a marketing executive, I was so mad at my boss because he made me work the whole day before telling me. So I went home with a lot of anger and hurt which I decided to express in a novel. The pen is said to be mightier than the sword, so it was my way of seeking revenge. Of course it didn’t work out like that, the story was boring and I’d only written about 100 pages before I ditched it and stuck with my characters back story which was much more interesting than the revenge quest she was on.

The story is told through a series of journal entries from the protagonist, Lola. Why did you decide to write it in this style?

The story started out in third person. As I mentioned above, Lola’s voice emerged very strong and determined so I went with her.

*You decided to take the step of self-publishing your book – many would consider that to be a brave choice. What made you decide to do it? *

I knew that there was an audience out there for Lola’s story. Publishers on the other hand were painting a different picture, I had to create the opportunity, the audience and the demand. I guess I did it because I wanted her story to be read and I had sufficient confidence in my skill as a writer – bolstered by great feedback – to build the door of opportunity myself.

What’s your advice to writers who have confidence in their work and have received some good feedback, and yet keep receiving the rejection letters from publishers?

All I can is what a wise woman said to me when my radio play was rejected by the BBC then subsequently made for Radio 4 when I resubmitted it for First Bite. “Just because you get a rejection letter doesn’t mean your work isn’t good, it just means it hasn’t found the right home.” Keep on sending it out to the relevant publishers and agents.

You have a well developed website about yourself and your book. How important do you think it is for a writer to have an online presence?

It’s the world we live in, gone are the days when readers want writers to be mysterious beings that live in attics. People want to know everything, plus the fact that in the age of technology where we spend a good deal of our time online; it’s a crucial marketing tool. One that has definitely helped Imagine This.

You won the Commonwealth Writers prize for the region of Africa and have now been long-listed for the 2009 World BookDay campaign, Books to Talk About. Has this made you relax a bit and enjoy the compliments, or has it made you even more determined to get your book out into the world?

Relaxed!!! Are you kidding. It never stops. Winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize was great because it raised my profile, people looked at me with a bit more respect. My name was being mentioned in the same breath as Chimamanda Adichie, Chinua Achebe and other great writers, I no longer had to hold my head in shame because I’d self-published. It was a huge confidence boost. The World Book Day campaign is an entirely different experience, I want Imagine This to get as far as the shortlist because the sort of publicity and profile it will hopefully receive is only afforded to books from mainstream publishers. Imagine This is a book that deserves a wider audience. But then I would say that, I wrote it. :-)

So, time to vote for Sade’s novel on the World Book Day website!.

You can see more reviews of ‘Imagine This’ here and here

Any Ajax/JavaScript (jQuery) experts out there?

2008-11-10T18:53:00Z

We need another web developer to help us out with the frontend of the website (for all my fellow non-tech people, this means what the users of the website see). Oli’s been learning all sorts of CSS and JavaScript tricks but as he is trying to get all of the other millions of things there are to do sorted, we’re looking for some extra help and expertise.
If anyone is or knows of any freelancers who might like to join the team for a couple of months, then send them in our direction! Oh, and apparently Ajax is nothing to do with Homer’s Iliad. Shame. Read on for more details…

*Frontend developer required – Ajax/JavaScript (jQuery) expert who can work with rails.

We’re a new start-up looking for a creative and dynamic developer to work on the front-end of our web app. The contract is for 1-2 months to start ASAP, working onsite with a small (but perfectly formed) team in based in Dalston, London.

The essential requirements are:
Excellent knowledege and experience of working with Ajax/JavaScript (jQuery in particular).
Sufficient understanding of Rails enabling you to write server-side Ajax calls.
Excellent design instincts and ability to create slick and intuitive user-interfaces.
Great communication skills and ability to convey your ideas to others
Experience with Flash is desirable but not essential.

We’re looking for someone with bags of initiative and a passion for making great-looking, user-friendly interfaces.
We’ve got a small central team at the moment (three full-timers working from our London office with external contractors developing discreet parts of the app) so having good communication skills is absolutely essential (you will be sitting next to a girl). We are preferably looking for someone who can work full-time from our office, but can be flexible about working arrangements.

Duration
An initial contract of 1-2 months, with the potential for follow-up work in the future.

Salary
Competitive salary based on skills and experience.

Contact
If you’re interested and have the skills required then please get in touch with Anna at anna@completelynovel.com or by phoning 0207 249 1850.
Please send a covering email and some examples of your work. Just drop us an email if you have any questions about the job.

Free publishing and 100% of royalties...how novel!

2008-11-07T11:31:00Z

One of the main questions that writers ask me about the CompletelyNovel is: “What makes you different to any other self-publishing service out there?” There is a large degree of suspicion regarding any mention of ‘self-publishing’. Having seen the extortionate prices and questionable services offered by some of the self-publishing companies out there, I can see why. So when we tell people that they can publish their work for free and keep 100% of the royalties, they think there must be a catch. But there isn’t. It’s just that CompletelyNovel has taken a new and different approach to the book publishing industry, based on an alternative business model. This means we don’t have to take money from the writers, the people who keep the whole industry going in the first place!

A CompletelyNovel approach
The way CompletelyNovel works is very different to all the self-publishing companies out there. It’s why we can offer writers a great deal on printing, no up-front fees, and allow writers to keep 100% of the royalties from the sale of their books. The key difference with CompletelyNovel is that we are, first and foremost, a community for everyone who loves books. We’re not a publisher, printer or retailer. We link everyone together. We’re taking a web-based approach to the way we run our business – we are looking to create the most useful service that we can, and profit by attracting a large volume of users. The more users, the better for us and for the community as a whole. One way to get more users is to give them a great service and, wherever possible, give it to them for free!

The current system
CompletelyNovel.com came about because we saw that there must be a better way for promising writers to be able to make a name for themselves. The current system involves sending off numerous copies of your manuscript to agents and publishers. These carefully-crafted works will often only be read by inexperienced interns, with very little chance of getting any constructive feedback. This process is not , by any stretch of the imagination, the most efficient way to find talented, fresh writers. You only have to look at the number of very successful writers who have been rejected by a number of publishers/agents and you can start to imagine the number of good writers who are being missed altogether.

Thinking like a rock star
When we were setting up CompletelyNovel, we started thinking about the way bands get taken on by record companies. Most bands have already built up a large fan base before they approach record labels. Sites like MySpace have been great for bands to spread awareness beyond their local area and reach fans of their particular type of music. Being able to prove that you are already popular and have received good feedback is crucial. We want to give writers a chance to produce a product and share it with people who are interested in their type of writing, wherever they may be. Something involving self-publishing and the internet seemed to make sense.

However, the more research I have done, the more I have been amazed and often slightly horrified by some of the self-publishing packages that are out there! There are a large number of companies demanding a lot of money to publish a book without many real benefits to the writers concerned. Yes, they will help you produce a book as you will undoubtedly be aware, but actually producing a book is only one small step towards being a successful author. You’ve got to be able to get it out to the people who will be interested in it, get feedback and, if you really want to send it out to the masses, be able to demonstrate to a publisher that it has a market. With CompletelyNovel, doing that just got a lot easier!

The key ingredients
We use print-on-demand (POD) printers and the great advantage of POD for new writers is that you don’t have to commit to buying lots of books in advance. By coupling this service with a community website, it means that when it comes to the hardest part, marketing, you’re not left on your own. The internet is a great, economical way to get your books to the right people, in the format that they want.

We want writers on CompletelyNovel to enjoy the full benefit of their hard work so it only seems fair that they should get 100% of the royalties from the sales of their book. There are a few other websites that offer free publishing – but all take a chunk of commission from the sale of all books. The books published with them will be available to buy through their own website but these are websites completely focused on writers – they don’t attract or cater for the broader range of readers, who need to see and enjoy the book to make it a success. However good the intentions of those websites may be, it seems they are missing a trick. By putting unpublished writers alongside published books we’re providing a better environment for readers and writers to interact with each other.

Our vision is to provide a hub for everyone in the book publishing industry, where they can easily interact and the journey of a new writer’s book, from concept to sale, is a much more straightforward and efficient one. Publishers, agents, printers (and soon illustrators, editors and translators) can all benefit from the website. CompletelyNovel provides the tools to link everyone who loves books together. By doing this, talented writers are much more likely to get a fair shot at getting their book noticed by the right people, read and published. That’s better for readers too!

CompletelyNovel Launch Anthology available on the website

2008-11-04T09:21:00Z

Hooray! All our beta users will be able to take a look at the CompletelyNovel Launch Anthology, which is now available to view and buy on CompletelyNovel.
Many thanks to our winners Ally Crockford, Alistair Daniel, Keira L. Dickinson, Michael Forester, Rhys Griffiths, Ania Leslie-Wujastyk, R. M. Morrison, Mark Spencer, Rob Stringer, Damien Warburton and Amanda Weeks for their fantastic contributions.

Here’s what the anthology is all about…

An anthology of brand new short stories to celebrate the launch of CompletelyNovel.com.

CompletelyNovel are proud to present twelve imaginative, humorous and innovative short stories written by talented new writers.

And now for something completely different…

This anthology contains the winning entries of CompletelyNovel’s launch competition, asking for stories inspired by the phrase ‘And now for something completely different.’ From recipes for retributive risotto and involuntary ventriloquism to pea psychology and the history of noncommitalism, the published entries are great examples of the wealth of innovative story-telling that is out there.

Edited my members of the Society of Young Publishers.

Despite being accustomed to a typical industry timescale of around two years to take a book from concept to printm these open-minded individuals rose to the challenge, putting it all together in just two months! Using the publishing methods available on CompletelyNovel, they declared it:
“A brilliantly simple process which has really challenged our traditional views on how publishing has to be done. In a publishing world that’s become more and more slick and technological by the day, we were quick to discover that CompletelyNovel’s finger was well and truly on the pulse of change.”

If you would like to read the anthology but you’re not yet signed up to CompletelyNovel.com then just pop over to our home page to sign up.

And here’s a bit more information about the winners…

Ally Crockford was born a healthy baby boy in 1862 in Leicester, England. At the age of three, tumors began to develop all over her body, leading her to exhibit her deformity under the stage name “The Elephant Man”. In 1985 she was reborn a slightly dazed little girl, and muddled her way to Edinburgh, where, in 2008, she published a short story.

Alistair Daniel has an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has held the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and is currently completing his first novel, ‘Augustan’. Two of his short stories will appear soon in The Stinging Fly and Stand.

Keira L. Dickinson works for the Oxford University Press as a production editor of academic titles she reads in the downtime. Her work to date involves a lot of half started magic realist novels, a few published short stories, and a children’s book about a cat, an old man, and a fish called Winkles that rolls across the surface of the world.

Michael Forester is a deaf writer living in the New Forest. He commenced writing in the 1980s. Since the turn of the millennium Michael has written poetry, fiction and mind body spirit works. His third book, If it wasn’t for that dog, about his first year with his hearing dog, Matt, will be published just before Christmas 2008.

Rhys Griffiths currently resides in Oxford where he works for a publishing company as an editorial assistant. He is also studying a Creative Writing masters at Oxford Brookes University. Originally from Liverpool, his background lies in Theology, comics and triathlons and one day he hopes to combine all three in some significant way. He’s not Welsh.

Ania Leslie-Wujastyk has loved writing stories since she was a child. She completed a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex. Losing My Voice was performed on stage by Sussex students. Ania is an Editorial Assistant at Continuum International Publishing Group.

Not much is known about R.M.Morrison, least of all his first two names. Born in 1982, he has spent most of his adulthood travelling in search of inspiration. From Wales to Washington, Mexico to Merseyside, Morrison has lived and blended into different cultures. After finally settling in Liverpool, he writes regularly for BadFormat! magazine and is Enter Publications chief copywriter.

Mark Spencer was born in the summer of 2008 in Oxford outside a boxercise class. He hails from the Midlands and the South Coast. He has four university degrees between himself, likes graphic novels and guitars, enjoys mornings, dislikes mornings and is twice the man you’ll ever be.

While attempting to work what to do with himself, Rob Stringer has studied classical civilisation, creative and media writing, worked with hackers, priests, metal powders, corpses, and in a castle. He’s written plays, composed a musical, bungee jumped naked, hitchhiked to Morocco, dived with sharks, learnt the recorder and likes profiteroles.

Damien Warburton only started writing this year and has until now hidden behind a pseudonym. This is the first story published under his real name. Soon to be added on CompletelyNovel.com are a new novel about a romance conceived in a maternity ward and an endless stream of short stories.

Amanda Weeks has had many short stories published in anthologies. Her first collection, Tracy’s Tits and Other Stories is out now and is available from Amazon. Her Welsh-language screenplay Catastroffi was broadcast on S4C in 2005. She won the Welsh Poetry Prize in 2007. Amanda lives with husband Carlos and son Travis in Pontypridd.

A big thankyou to Alan Crompton, Amy Jackson, Jo Godfrey, Kate Hind, Kate Walker, Claire Williams and Kate Leech, the members of the Society of Young Publishers who selected the winners and produced the Anthology, and also massive thanks to Amanda Leduc, who has helped coordinate and move the project along from start to finish. Many thanks to Charlotte Dobbs too, who designed the cover. All the work done on the Launch Anthology was as an extra-curricular activity on top of very hectic schedules so it is much appreciated!