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!

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…

Read the rest of this entry

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!