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.