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!

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.

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…

Well…it was the best pun* I could come up with to introduce the news that we have now added in some more functionality so that now on CompletelyNovel you can review any book, by any writer. So…if you fancy yourself as a bit of a critic, or just want to help people out when it comes to choosing their next bit of bedtime reading, CompletelyNovel is the place to get those thoughts down and out in the open. If you’re not on CompletelyNovel yet, you can still start working on some right now…so they are all fit and ready to be published when you log in. We’re looking forward to reading them!

*I did think of ‘Review to a Kill’...but that made even less sense, so I abandoned it. I probably should have given up after that!

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!

This is a taster of some of the cool little images being created by our favourite illustrator, Natalia Aldana Echeverria.These will be available for users to select if they haven’t got a handy photo that they want to use for their profile picture.

We’d thought we’d call them our CompletelyNovellors on account of them being quite cute and mini…like borrowers. They should definitely add a bit more character to the website. Let us know what you think of them. Also…we are looking to name them. At the moment we are using ‘green dude’, ‘purple glasses dude’, ‘grey haired iPod dude’...you see the pattern. But this doesn’t seem all that imaginative. Any literary references you can come up with would be much appreciated. I seem to keep coming back to naming them after characters from little women…not quite sure why!

More of Natalia’s creations will be available to see on the rest of the site too so keep an eye out for them.

Wow…it feels like much more than a week since my last post. Lots of stuff has been going on recently so this could be a long one!

We are really excited to have our first users on the website, having a bit of an explore and helping us to develop it into the best service for books and book-lovers ever! It’s fairly raw as a website at the moment and it’s been a little strange for the first users to be on a community website…where there is a limited amount of community! But they are coping very well so far and the important thing is that the framework is all there for us to add lots of things in, which is exactly what we will be doing over the next few weeks. Already we’ve noticed a few things that we will be changing to make the site easier to use. So, what else has been going on…?

Well, after a very intense week, we managed to get our site live…just by the end of our target launch date! We are very excited to see it up there and can’t wait to see what our users do with it! We will be sending out invitations from now on to the participants in our private trial. If you signed up but haven’t yet received your invitation, don’t worry…it is on its way! We are bringing people onto the site gradually so that we can easily iron out any kinks in the system. Our private trial users will be able to use all of the core elements of our service immediately. We will then be introducing other exciting bits of functionality over the next couple of months…so keep checking back to see what has been added in!

If you are a writer and would like to hear a bit more about the private trial, just get in touch by dropping an email to anna@completelynovel.com

We are very excited to announce that our private beta trial will be launched on 24 June…we can’t wait! For everyone who has signed up – we are very please to have you with us and we will be sending you the log-in details from 24 June onwards. If you signed up with a gmail or hotmail account, be sure to check your spam as emails may be filtered into there…we wouldn’t want you to miss out on the chance to be one of the first people to benefit from CompletelyNovel! If you haven’t signed up yet, don’t worry there are still some places available – just sign up online and we will be in touch.

CompletelyNovel are very happy to welcome Jon into the team. Coming from the company Professional Nerd Ltd, we were pleasantly surprised to find that not only is he a great Rails coder, he also has social skills….BONUS!

So, it’s full steam ahead on the technical front…we should be launched in no time.