Anna Lewis is our host at BookMachine Unplugged on the 23^rd May– having successfully created Completely Novel (a publishing community) she is now co-founder of Valobox, a pay-as-you-go eBook platform. Through launching Valobox, Anna has lots of experience collaborating with publishers and is in an ideal position to host our Unplugged event in London, which celebrates the culture of collaboration in publishing.

We wanted to know a little bit more about Anna, so here are 5 questions…

Last year at Publishing Now, we were intrigued by Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks, and their plans to launch Valobox, a platform to allow bite-sized purchasing from books. A year later and they have just announced that they are working with O’Reilly in the US and Profile, Guardian Books, Constable & Robinson and SnowBooks in the UK. Exciting times for Valobox. Anna Lewis explains their model and how it works.

Last week I was really happy to announce the official launch of ValoBox.

Like a ‘YouTube for books’, with an iTunes purchase model ValoBox makes books available on demand through your web browser, and lets you buy individual chapters or even pages.

In the run up to the launch of BookMachine.me I’ve picked out some of the top publishing partnerships and collaborations around. I hope it gives you some inspiration to get out there and start collaborating! … and also to come to the launch of BookMachine.me at BookMachine Unplugged on 7th November.

This is a guest post from Anna Lewis, who co-founded the book technology company CompletelyNovel with Oli Brooks in 2008. Since then, they have created CompletelyNovel.com, a community powered book-publishing platform bringing modern publishing tools to an online network of readers, writers and publishers. You can follow Anna on Twitter via @anna_cn and @completelynovel.

There is endless advice that goes out to self-published authors about building their brand, identifying their audience and how to promote their work. This is all vital in the success of a book, but writers shouldn’t let it detract from other parts of the self-publishing process – namely, the technical and project management (let’s be honest, slightly more boring) side of things.

Working with self-publishers on CompletelyNovel has been massively inspiring. Every day we see new writers produce something that they have often been waiting many years to see in print. The advent of new tools on the internet has opened up so many doors. But, like anything, it throws up new challenges as well. So here are some dos and don’ts for aspiring self-publishers and their mentors to mull over, learned through watching the experiences of others.

Tahira Rahemtulla is one of the City University project leaders for Publishing Now 2011. A week on from the big event, Tahira reports on happenings over the weekend…

Link: Bookmachine publishing social – definitely well oiled!

Thanks to Anna Lewis, who attended our publishing social last Thursday. She wrote this review on her Website completelynovel.com – click on the link above to read about it.