Articles: CompletelyNovel is a finalist for the UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur Awards

Some good news came in over the weekend that I can’t quite keep to myself…one of CompletelyNovel’s own has been shortlisted for the UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur Awards. Well, to be specific, it’s me …although obviously when you are in a small start-up everything is a team effort, it’s just somethimes you have to put an individual forward for something rather than the company. Unfortunately for the others however, there is only one place on the trip to South Africa for those on the shortlist…sorry guys!

The UKYPE award is run by the British Council, who run a series of other awards for entrepreneurs across the creative industries as part of their Creative Economy programme. They have a market focus each year, and this year it is South Africa; last year it was India. Also shortlisted are Daniel Crewe, Profile Books, Julia Kingsford, Foyles, Rachael Ogden , Inpress Ltd, Mark Searle, Elliot & Thompson Ltd and Gavin Weale of Live Futures Ltd

We will be going on an eight day tour of the South African publishing industry, covering Cape Town and Johannesburg. It should be a great opportunity to find out if the South African market would be a good one for CompletelyNovel to venture into. With a smaller book buying public, and a number of official languages print-on-demand looks like it could make a lot of sense there, but there’s also scope for looking at new distribution models too. I’m particularly interested in looking at the work from the likes of Arthur Atwell who runs Electric Book Works and has some interesting projects going on relating to using copy shops as bookshops.

After the tour all of the candidates will give a final presentation to the panel of judges who will determine the overall winner. You can follow the tweets from Andrew Senior, the head of the Creative Economy team at the British council here.