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!

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.

Read the rest of this entry