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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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.

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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!

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.

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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…

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Well, I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that following some heavy development (and prolonged sleep deprivation) we are now ready to invite our next bunch of beta users onto the website. ..hooray!
I for one am very excited about this – not least because I’ve been slightly hounded by a number of friends and family, and writers who want to try out the website and find out what I’ve been banging on about for the last year!

I imagine Jon and Oli are even more excited about this though. They have been working really hard on the web development and especially on the interaction between us and other companies. As usual some of the easy-sounding bits of development have turned out to be the trickiest…who knew, for example, that PDFs were so complicated? And of course the most complicated-sounding parts have turned out to be …really complicated too (so unfair!). But there has only been a minimal amount of tearing hair out and swearing at the computer. If there was a Scout badge for ‘problem solving and bug-fixing’ then I would summon up the power of Akela (or whichever Jungle Book character is appropriate) and bestow it upon them both!

Whilst they have been doing that, besides throwing some suggestions their way, I have been busy driving the other elements of the business onwards and upwards. The Launch Anthology is almost ready and we have been building up a good stock of editorial content on the website. We’ve been contacting lots of people in the publishing industry to discuss the future of CompletelyNovel and how it can be used by the various different parties. It’s going really well so far and we have lots of ideas and plans for the next few months!

So…when is our public launch date? Well, we will wait a little while to see if there are any surprises following this batch of updates, but we will be releasing to the public very soon. We can’t wait to see what everyone thinks of it!

Well, after a weekend when we finally managed to get some sun and I went completely overboard and tried to fit in a month’s-wort of outdoor activity into two days. The result is that all my muscles ache and to be honest, sitting down in front of computer all day to get through emails, do some research, plan out my diary for the next few weeks and, of course, write a blog has been ideal!

So, time for an update!
It has been an been as exciting couple of weeks. I enjoyed my involvement with the Alrewas Arts Festival. Their Festival Anthology is being created on the CompletelyNovel website as we speak. There were some wonderful contributions made by guests and performers at the festival, and it will be a great opportunity for many of these people to see their work in print for the first time.

Oliver and Jon also made a trip down to a POD printer’s to have a good look at how their systems are interacting with ours and were really pleased with the result. Just a few more tests to put through and we should be ready to get the first CompletelyNovel books runnig directly from our site to the printers without any human interaction.

The Launch Competition
Members of the Society of Young Publishers and CompletelyNovel’s Amanda (remote working in Scotland) have been working very hard on the short story competition. After reading, re-reading and then discusssing all the entries, they have picked twelve short stories to appear in our Launch Anthology, ‘And now for something completely different’…hurray!
There were a considerable number of entries that were really impressive and trying to whittle them down to a group of stories that were both high quality, but would also work well together in the anthology generated quite a few heated debates! There was one story in particular that was described as being very ‘marmite’ i.e. love it or hate it, which polarised our editors somewhat.
Thank you so much to everyone who entered – it was a pleasure reading through your stories and seeing how much talent there is out there!

Once all the entrants to the competition have been contacted, we will be posting up the names of the winners, and will also be giving out further information on the launch of the website. To anyone who missed the deadline; don’t worry! There will be lots more competitions and opportunities to collaborate with others from the publishing industry ithrough CompletelyNovel.

I must be brief with this post as I am currently in the middle of Staffordshire in a village called Alrewas where there is an Arts Festival in full swing!
The weather has not managed to put a dampner on the enthusiasm here (although not for want of trying!) and there has been a variety of activities going on, from film-making, drama and painting to creative writing…which is where I come in.

I am producing an anthology for the festival – a book which will include creative pieces of writing from local residents and guests of the festival. There will be a mixture of spontaneous stories written under time pressure (Five Minute Masterpieces), pre-prepared submissions and memories and stories of the history of the village.
Recently, a film has been made about the history of the Trent and Mersey canal which runs through Alrewas, and I will be including some of the stories that were unearthed though the research of that film.
The anthology will be an example of the kind of things that you can do with completelynovel – where producing a book can be so easy and fun. And of course there is no up-front cost which is great for a community project where one has to keep a tight grip on spending.

So…off now to collect some poems from the village poet and then to grab some unsuspecting victims and get them to write a story in five minutes…there have been some fantastically random ones so far!

We’ve been talking about making some design changes to our website, here’s a preview of our new look!

This season I will be mostly wearing…
Blue. As you can see from this screenshot, the colours, logo and graphics on the site have changed. We’ve done a bit of re-organising and put a newsfeed into an enhanced sidebar so you can easily keep up to date with what the rest of the community are up to and we have also made the message board more accessible and user friendly. There are also quite a few changes to the mechanics behind the site which will be really useful for developing features for the future. Oli and Jon have been working very hard on sorting all of this out – well done guys!

Extra features

The Birth of the Badger
What you will also discover when you get onto the website (and we will be sending out more invite codes very soon!) is that we have also included more room for editorial content on the community and books pages.
The latest addition to our team is the CompletelyNovel Book Badger. This fine young creature is going to be alerting our users to the latest news in the book industry, recommending books and offering tips to writers. To help him out we have a keen and talented team of editors who will be contributing to the editorial material. We will also be looking for people to submit guest articles which will appear on the front pages of the website…more news on that soon.

Lists, lists, lists
I have to admit, I love lists. They mainly revolve around food i.e. my top five cereals to put in the microwave or best foods to eat with custard (which, incidentally, also includes cereal) but I recently discovered that books are another great thing to put into lists. If you have read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, you’ll be familiar with the idea of making a top five of pretty much everything. This collective respect for lists has meant that we have added a lovely ‘lists’ feature into the CompletelyNovel website. You can make up book-related lists as a way of sharing your knowledge, taste and thoughts with everyone. You could make a list of
- books you started but never finished (but really should)
- top ten reads for a beach holiday
- top ten books to use as doorstops
- books that made you laugh out loud
…the list goes on!

So, if you are not on the website yet, you can start thinking of your lists…I can see myself spending way too much time on this already!

Thanks again to everyone who has given their support to us over the last few months.

Following Anna’s last post ‘a day in the life of…’ I felt it appropriate to do ‘the life of’.

I have to say it is great fun being involved in CompletelyNovel. It is very satisfying to see more and more people showing support for our cause and all the helpful, constructive comments we get really help us to make the service better. We are creating CompletelyNovel on a shoe string so, as Anna says, we work from home. Working from ‘home’ has its advantages though. The commute is very agreeable, the creature comforts are all on hand and the kitchen is always stocked with enough for one of our tasty taste fusions. Our home however is rapidly becoming more office than home. Here’s the short story of how it happened.

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Here’s a little bit of an insight into the life of a start-up company…

08:30 – Wake up. Not exactly super-early I know…but then my commute is probably only about 10 metres. I would have previously descibed myself as an early morning person…but my timetable has been slightly skewed over the last few months! Still, not going to complain about being able to avoid the smelly armpit gauntlet that is the tube at 8 in the morning. I should explain at this point that CompletelyNovel HQ is where Oli and myself live as well as work. Technically, Jon lives somewhere else but actually, he spends much more time here than he does at his place. He will often arrive on a Monday morning and not go home until the Friday!

09:00 – having showered, dressed and breakfasted on nutritious and delicious muesli, I will join Oli and Jon in the office, which is located conveniently next to the kichen. Jon will get up and ask if anyone would like a cup of tea. This will be the first of many. Oli and I have started doing tag-team tea drinking just to keep up with Jon throughout the day – and I now drink tea that is so weak, I think it is probably illegal to refer to it as ‘tea’.

General daytime activities…

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There’s quite a few of you out there who have signed up for the private beta but are yet to receive a login-code so that you can get started. Don’t worry…we haven’t forgotten you! We will be sending this to you soon. We are adding in a bit more functionality to the website first, so you will have more to play with when you get on there, and that is taking a little bit longer than anticipated.

Incidentally…if you’re wondering, this is the fine astronomical clock from Prague. I think that this is probably influential in some degree to the clock that all techies follow when they say that something will take 3 days. They are not., of course, talking in Earth days, but in days of a slightly different astronomically influenced length. Inevitably these days are longer. However, as they involve much looking at screens full of incomprehensible code (well, it certainly is to me) and working in virtual ‘boxes’, I think they can be excused!