Discussions: Share and Publish in CompletelyNovel

Daphne

How exciting! I spent half the day creating my “book” – which means I’ve now got half a day’s work to catch up on, but it was worth it. I’ve also ordered some copies, to see how it turns out. A question, though: is there any way (or a plan) to give non-users of the site access to members’ books, so they can buy them? Because at the moment you have to be logged in to access any part of the site…

Anna

Hi Daphne – thanks for uploading your book and we hope you like it!
Yes, as soon as we have done a bit more testing with our users here, we will open the website out so that anyone can see the books on it. You will need to log-in to participate (reviews, clubs etc) but you will be able to view all the books so you can decide to buy them without logging on. This is why we are giving our users their unique web address i.e. www.completelynovel.com/daphne_kapsali so that they can direct anyone on the internet straight to their profile page¬
Hope the work goes this afternnon – I think it was worth it too…your stories look great!

Daphne

Thank you!

Jonathan

Hi all,

I’ve hopefully just set my book up for purchasing. Couple of questions:

Is there a recommended price point for printing hardcopies? The printing costs of mine were 4.50, so I put the purchase price at 5.50 – this sound about right? I’m guessing the printing costs were calculated by the number of pages in the novel.

Secondly, what happens to the money? I haven’t had to enter any CC details, and I haven’t tried to purchase a book yet.

Finally, if you could reinstate the review I had from Lorna that’d be great. An ego twinge. :)

Thanks – things are really moving around here now…

Oliver

Yo,

Printers charge per page and then add a cover and bind fee. If you want to know more about their pricing structure you can look at the printer in the community tab or go to your ‘manage book’ page. There you will find a button to ‘edit sales option’. From there you can choose which printer to use and what price to sell your book at.

£5.50 sounds about right to me, the price you have to consider is the end price to a customer. The printers add a order handling fee of about a pound to each order so if someone buys your book on it’s own it will be about another £1 order handling and £1.90 postage on top of your book price. I think £8 for a book, delivered is a pretty good deal.

We will add more printers to CompletelyNovel soon which should keep the printing price market competitive. We will also hassle them to give better prices when the amount of business we give them increases.

Regarding your review, we’ll see if we can find it and get it back :)

Anything else, let me know!

Oli

Jonathan

Thanks for the reply.

How is the money handled? Say someone orders a hardcopy of my novel – what happens to the extra money after the printing/postage fees etc have been deducted?

Thanks again,

Jon

Anna

When someone buys your book, the writer royalty (i.e. the difference between the sale price and the printing cost) will be added to your account balance. CompletelyNovel will pay you this balance on a quarterly basis. We are developing this process to ensure that payments are quick and easy – there will be some updates added to the account page very soon.

Jonathan

Ah, OK. That explains it. Thanks!

Elisabeth

I just thought I’d say that I was confused as to why your site didn’t already include a section to upload work in progress, as this is how most of the other writing communities I have seen or been involved in operate, usually in the form of a forum like this. I would urge you to get on to making that happen as soon as possible, as I suspect most people who visit the site won’t have something publishable they want to put straight out there.
The system for review with stars and metering activity is good, and I think you should keep that in the work-in-progress section, so that promising stuff can be picked up on by more people and moved to the ‘publish’ bit!

Anna

Thanks Elizabeth – having a ‘work in progress’ area to the website is something that we would definitely like to introduce as we know that lots of writers would find this beneficial. We are working on building up elements of the website to attract both writers and readers so that the writers will have a wider audience when they do publish something. I’d be interested to hear opinions on exactly how people would prefer to discuss their work. We could link the work to a discussion thread like this (as other writer forums do). Another idea is to enable people to comment on each individual page of the work, so that the feedback can be more detailed. We were also considering having different privacy settings for clubs, so that writers from existing groups could have the option to workshop their work with just their peers if they wanted.
Alternatively, writers would be able to open their work in progress to comments from everyone on CompletelyNovel if they wanted too.
Let me know what you think.

Elisabeth

I think that having work in progress automatically open to all logged-in members would be best, as although you may have soemthing you only really want your friends’ opinions on, constructive criticism from strangers can be extremely beneficial and is rarely actually asked for.
As far as format goes, the one I used to use was called writersdock.org, which was layered from ‘fiction’ down to individual genres and then stories. The idea was that the writer made a new topic containing a link to the work or (for short stuff) the work itself, and comments went in the same thread. On the other hand fanfiction.net allowed its writers to create links to pages dedicated to their work which could then be thumbed through online like a book.

Oliver

As an update to this post.

You can now upload word documents or PDFs.

If it is a MS word document we can resize it to ensure it is print ready for you. We do recommend uploading the correct size initially though as it will preserve typesetting better.

If you upload a PDF file we will check it through (for sizes/ fonts etc) and then convert it the a specific type of PDF used for printing. This option is best if you have complicated typesetting or designed your text or cover on programs like Indesign or illustrator which export directly to PDF.

Hope all is well

Anna

Something that lots of people have found useful is having a quick flick through some of your favourite novels to see how the text and chapter headings are laid out. You can format the document exactly as you like – so you might like to find a format you think looks good and recreate it for your own work. It can make a big difference!