Articles: CompletelyNovel feature update August 2010

July was a busy month for us – we’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes to create some great new features over August such as a new checkout system, better promotion tools and personalised journeys to help guide you through publishing and getting the most out of CompletelyNovel. Here’s a quick overview. I’d love to know your thoughts, feedback and any ideas you have around this.

Journeys

You’ve written a book, and the question you are sure to be asking is: ‘What now?’ Book publishing is no longer a single track industry where the only option is to search for an agent. The rise of self publishing, digital distribution and the increasingly fuzzy definition between agents and publishers means writers have more choice available to them. However, all that choice can make it hard to know what is best for you and your book. Enter our Journeys – a journey is a series of steps, tips and advice designed to help you get the most out of your book, CompletelyNovel and web publishing.

There are three different journeys to explore.

• A reader journey – to help everyone make the most of their reading experience through finding new books and then reading, discussing and sharing them. This can be found in your ‘my home’ – ‘news’ page.
• A writer journey – to suggest how you might like to publish your book and promote it using various tools on the internet. This is found on your ‘my home’ – ‘portfolio’ page
• A book journey – to help you get the most out of your book once published. It shows you how to use social media tools to promote it and our book analytics to track and improve your books performance. This journey is found in the ‘book’ – ‘manage’ page.

Each step is accompanied by tips and a short video as to how to perform that task. Once that task is completed you will be able to progress through the journey.

If you found something really helped you and could also help others while publishing your book then please let us know and we’ll add it to the journey!

Secret book promotion tool

We’ve been working on a (semi) secret project to weave book promotion and retail into the very heart of social networks. The project is going to be launched with quite a few well known publishers (announced soon). Avid followers of CompletelyNovel may have some idea of what I’m talking about. This should be launched around the end of the year but if you’re keen to test it before hand please let us know.

Checkout upgrades

Over the last 2 months we have been upgrading our checkout by combining everything you purchase into one cart and checkout. All your orders now appear in your orders in ‘my account’. Although this may not sound spectacularly exciting it means we can start doing some cool stuff such as:

• offering the option to purchase virtual goods such as eBooks and credits at the same time as real goods such as paperback books
• enabling writers to offer discount codes to friends (coming soon)
• providing the ability for organisations to sell services such as proof reading, cover design and editing (coming soon)

Things we’re working on in August:

• Improved branding- updating our landing pages
• CN Credits – releasing our CompletelyNovel currency
• eBooks – public beta of eBook publishing
• Merit badges – you’ve been great, soon everyone will know just how great!

If there’s anything you’d like to see please let us know. Just pop it in the discussion below.