The CompletelyNovel blog and news from the website can all be found on the main website at

http://www.completelynovel.com/articles

Please pop over there to see what we have been up to!

Yes…it’s been pretty full on over in CompletelyNovel HQ, especially for the last week which goes some way to explaining the lack of updates to the blog. There is also another reason, however…the blog will be moving! We will soon be integrating the blog into the rest of the website more fully, so that you can easily find out our latest news. The blog will feature on the page dedicated to the team , and the posts will also appear on the Community page of the website.

We’ve just created a press section too on the website where you can find out what people have been saying about us (well…the ones that we know about!) and there was an update last weekend that has increased the speed of the website.

Check out the video below of Keira Dickinson’s book lanch. Held in a pub in Oxford, there was much fish, beer, fish and fun.

For those who missed it, here’s the recording of Keira Dickinson talking about her ‘Anthology for Fish’ on BBC Radio Oxford!

Howdie – here are a few more updates about us that have come out of the blogosphere, journosphere and ‘le web’ (as they call it in France).

Interview on The Next Women, Business News for Female Internet Heroes (I have spent today mostly dismissing all of Oli and Jon’s comments on the basis that they are not internet heroes…whereas I now clearly am. This also means taht any tech-based questions I ask are officially not stupid)

Review on Juxtabook, blog on all matters bookish:

Completelynovel.com, which went live to the public on January 27th, is going to add a new twist to the new book trade. If BookRabbit was a cross between Amazon and Facebook then CompletelyNovel is a cross between BookRabbit and Lulu: it combines book buying, social networking, and self-publishing. The self-publishing is in a much more attractive format than Lulu.

Have a look at the article for more… it includes a review of Alan Baker’s book, which features on our website – The Lighthouse Keeper. It also refers to a ‘rather demented looking red haired badger’ that features on our site. I entirely agree – the badger looks demented, but Oli has grown unreasonably attached to it now and won’t change it….though he insists on animating it. It’s not healthy.

And an article in Printweek, the premier website for news and in-depth features from the printing industry

Listen in to BBC Oxford Radio today at 3pm to hear more about it! Keira Dickinson, one of the winners of our Launch competition (her story, The Barman and the Gargoyle features in the CompletelyNovel.com Launch Anthology) will be launching a book of her own on Friday 25th February in Oxford. She has produced this intriguing and magical book with the help of Cally Gatehouse, whose illustrations tie together the four short stories. Brought together through a combined love for fish and salt water, Keira and Cally make an unusual and excellent team.

I have been assured that the launch of Umm and Ah and the Problem with Chlorine: AN ANTHOLOGY FOR FISH will incvolve not only beer but also a fish dance (something along the lines of a ‘jive on a deep sea dive’), someone in a fish costume, real live goldfish and maybe even fishfingers, although hopfully not placed too close to the goldfish: we wouln’t want them to get upset. There will also be a reading from the Anthology and of course, everyone will have the opportunity to buy a signed copy.

If you’d like to take a look at Keira and Cally’s wonderful creation then you can check it out on CompletelyNovel and even read it online or buy a paperback copy direct from the website. As this is CompletelyNovel, all proceeds will go straight to the author!

WARNING: Prepare to enter unchartered fictitious waters!

The Anthology for Fish is like a sandwich for the television. It will tempt, tease, and try to provide you with nutrition, but the only way you’ll grasp it is to get out of who you are and become completely submerged. (Which is not really how a television would get a sandwich)

I’ll be speaking at the fabulous BAD IDEA Butcher’s Shop on Thursday, February 26. The event is from 7pm – 9pm at the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, 9a St. Thomas’s St., London SE1 9RY:

“Prepare your prose for the taste of cold editorial steel: The Butcher’s Shop, BAD IDEA’s unique writing workshop, returns on Thursday February 26 for a recession themed special. Broke, destitute, disillusioned? Dreaming of bankers’ heads on spikes? We want to hear all about it in stories of 350 words or less – simply send your writing to info@badidea.co.uk and we’ll make it part of the evening’s entertainment.

We’ve also invited news editors Alyssa McDonald (New Statesman), and Jean Hannah Edelstein (BAD IDEA) to pore over one lucky story and investigate what makes recession rage translate into good feature journalism!

Special guests from CompletelyNovel.com will also be in attendance to lead a debate about HOW TO SAVE PUBLISHING FROM ABSOLUTE ANNIHILATION BY THE 21ST CENTURY’S DIGITAL TSUNAMI!!”

For more information on the event and details on how to send submissions please visit here. And check out the video below – you can see the kind of spectacle you will be letting yourself in for!

Hey there – we’ve had some coverage in the publishing industry press which has been good news. The CN word is spreading! Check out BookBrunch and also Book2Book There will be more to come!

It’s great to see lots of new users popping up on the website – and we’ve been having lots of great feedback which is even better. My favourite is probably the following:

“What a fantastic site! As you can see, I have completely lost it, bombarding you with my latest recommendations and high hopes of getting through the many new books I’ve added to my ‘library.’ Ha ha. Well done. This looks absolutely fab and I have no doubt you are going to make a big splash. Have already got local WAGS book club razzed up the walls about it. The sky is the limit lads.”

Yes…someone actually wrote that, which is fantastic. Not sure exactly what ‘razzing up the walls’ involves but I’m confident that it is a good thing.

And, to top it all off, there is a new coffee shop opening downstairs from us which promises great cakes. Big win!!!

Hi there. I hope everyone has been keeping safe in the slippery conditions. Well, we are very pleased to have reached a significant milestone on the CompletelyNovel road to revolution. We’ve now taken the need for an invite code away which means that everyone is now invited to come and join us on CompletelyNovel. I have been celebrating by doing victory lunges enthusiastically round the CompletelyNovel kitchen. Oli and Jon just had a beer, which is probably more normal. We’ve also addeed in the CompletelyNovel Rapid Review to the site (more about that in a later post).

In other news, I had a lovely chat with friendly booksellers Crockatt and Powell, well, Mr Crockatt at least! Looking at ways we might be able to tap into their expertise for CompletelyNovel. Also bought a copy of Michael Rosen book for Oli’s newly arrived neice. I guess it will be a while before she can read it herself but it’s cardboard so she can always chew on it for a good few months. I felt a little odd reading it on the tube but I did find it more entertaining than looking at more pictures of Lily Allan! Michael Rosen is great.

To follow up Cathy’s post on the Publishers Question Time, I though I’d write a bit about what happened after the Q&A.

Fuelled by wine, the SYP members moved on to the task of selecting the new Chair to take over from Jon Slack. Despite the large crowd and tropical temperatures in the Waterstones penthouse each hopeful did very well. Although I wasn’t wearing my glasses, I’m pretty sure that there weren’t any papers shaking in hands! Congratulations go to Angie Soloman who was elected for the top job – it looks like the SYP is in for an exciting and very sociable year with her at the helm!

After the elections and general chatting that followed, there was quite a large crowd who headed out to a pub round the corner. It was a satisfyingly traditional kind of place with good old fashioned toasted sandwiches (none of your overpriced fancy paninis thanks very much!) Sadly, it not the best place for any kind of crowd as it was as narrow as the profit margins on a supermarket best-seller. Next stop, some other bar round the back of Waterstones. Much more spacious and the ability to turn round without hitting someone. Bonus.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that any one time, there must always be at least two people debating the future of the book and the opportunities or threats presented by digitisation. I remember, last year when I was just stepping into the publishing industry, I attended a talk on eBooks at the London Book Fair. It was quite an eyeopener to see how scared and unprepared a number of publishers and booksellers were. I popped along to the Galley Club last night to hear their debate on eBooks. The panel members included Peter Crawshaw, co-founder and Director of Lovereading.com, David Kohn, Head of e-Commerce and Digital at Waterstones, Angus Phillips, Director of the International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University and George Walkley, Director of Digital Strategy at Little, Brown Book Group (who has said he will be posting a transcript of his speech on his blog.)

The speakers made some salient points and the stats given by Waterstones on eBook sales were interesting – they have seen a very large growth over the past months in line with the introduction of the Sony Reader. Essentially, there was not much contention between the panelists – it didn’t seem that any of them saw the rise of digital books as a threat to the existence of the printed book. However, it was clear that publishers need to be imaginative in the way they approach the eBooks themselves, and the relationship that they have with their tangible partners, the paperbacks, if they are to keep up with other online players, and keep the attention of the customer.

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A massive thanks are in order for photographer/teacher/ICT guru Peter Ralley. He has been very generous and donated a stack of photos for the CompletelyNovel stock photo library. If you want to find out more about Peter, have a look at his website. Here is a sample of his wonderful pictures that will be available for CompletelyNovel users to choose from when they are creating their book covers. Hopefully we will be seeing more very soon!

Since the New Year our office has been buzzing with activity. We have had someone popping in to help us out with some research into the Spanish publishing market (a little project that I am working on in my spare (?) time), another programmer in to talk about things I don’t understand (I’m still nagging Oli and Jon to start posting about tech stuff up here so you can have a better picture of what’s going on!), and one of our favourite illustrator/designers, Natalia, has been coming up with some more cool graphics for the website. So we’ve started the New Year at a fair old pace…and I’m sure it will continue that way!

In other news, I was particularly pleased to find out that Jon’s resolution was to cut down on chocolate and general sweet stuff as that means I have had a whole Toblerone pretty much to myself. Mmmm…healthy.

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!

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!

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.

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:

1. Create your book on CompletelyNovel
2. Get Heat points
3. 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…

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