Very, very scary seeing yourself on film, the presentations from the trade launch are up on BookRabbit.tv I can’t look at it. I look very cross indeed which isn’t great either.

We sent out about 400 invites today to the beta so I’m bracing myself.

We have a Facebook fan page so sign yourself up! It’ll make your profile page all that more hip.

New blog post on The Bookseller from me, running through the basic approach we’re taking, we need to do a load of work to make sure it all works for booksellers signing up.

Now we have the beta up – it’s doing the trick – I want to change loads of stuff. Nothing fundamental, just need to fine tune the bookcase application, it’s too tough to use, make the social networking more focused on the interact page, make bookcases more obvious, add tree structure to classification etc etc most of which is do-able before the consumer launch, and is a real benefit of trying it out first, knowing, that we will actually make changes.

The team have been great and are a constant source of fantastic ideas and solutions, I really don’t think we could have a better group of people.

Two news stories for us today – as a result of the interviews we did Friday, The Bookseller one I was a little disappointed with as I was hoping that our pretty unique approach could be used to question all of bookselling a little, we are trying to directly challenge some of the received wisdom within bookselling on and offline. Publishing News however I was very pleased with, I felt they really got it. Not that the Bookseller one wasn’t bad… just meh.

Unbelievable week. Absolutely tons of development done and the site has moved from nothing to something (although still quite a bit to do). Acceptances for the event have gone from a few to capacity and people asking for extra invites. Today Will and I have been up to London to meet with Publishing News and The Bookseller which is our first round of interviews before the trade launch. Difficult to judge how they went – we’ll have to just wait until the coverage next week.

We’ve only two working days (although quite a bit will be done over the weekend) now to make sure that the site does everything we want it to, and looks its very best for the presenation on Wednesday.

There are quite a few issues to be addressed between now and then, and I’m hoping we can clearly communicate on Wednesday that this is a beta release and a work in progress. We’re letting our book industry peers have access to play and make the whole thing much better.

Hmm PR company says don’t blog this and our offices aren’t that orange. Temptation is too much after a comment like that and frankly you’d make Stelios proud (last time promise).

Actually our media training was excellent – both Will (IT Director) and myself (Will feel free to reply if you think otherwise) completely changed character when a Dictaphone was produced and started to talk gibberish, despite being relatively normal up to then. Good to know such a basic piece of technology can defeat us.

Armed with the knowledge of our incoherence we now can try to work out how to talk to journalists, and tell them what we’re up to. This kicks off with the trade again in a couple of weeks.

It’s all getting quite close and a bit too real now, we’re visiting the venue on Monday too, which will bring home the rather nerveracking truth that we have to present our site to the real (albeit publishing & bookselling) World on the 19th.

What is v v cool (sorry Bridget moment) is that I’m getting e-mailed directly by people now asking for beta invites, I’ll be even more happy if some make it to eBay. I’ll be able to tick the secret list I have of new meeja things you must achieve.

Good meeting with our new PR agency today. They have a very orange office, which actually adds a gloss to ours (with no natural light), so now if anyone complains at least I can reply – well it’s not orange!

We have media training booked for the week after next. Bit like lion taming but more dangerous (sorry obviously a lie) reminds me that The Fourth Hand was an excellent book though – read it!