stuartforsyth

So as quickly as I put the first 10 chapters of my book up on Harper Collin’s Authonomy website, I’ve yanked it down again.

As a writer I’m in the all-to-familiar limbo of ‘undiscovered’ and I’m looking for avenues to generate interest about my work. The market is literally awash with thousands of unpublished writers looking for the same thing - access to publishers - and publishing houses couldn’t hope to justice to all their submissions. Only now do I begin to understand the scale of the problem of getting your work out there and why many publishers will only take manuscripts from publicists and talent scouts who do the heavy lifting for them.

I now count myself among a brethren of eager and mostly naive writers who believe that having a great story is enough.  That’s okay, it’s a little disheartening but I’m learning and like many artistic endeavours it’s only the very first step on what appears to be a long and arduous path.  Publishers have positioned themselves well in the digital age to feed on that desire and hope by offering services that ‘may’ get you the attention you so eagerly want to find.

Harper Collins entered late to market with Authonomy; other, more entrepreneurial companies have got there first. Time Warner promotes iPublish, Pan MacMillan backs its MacMillan New Writing Program and so the list goes on on. All services tap directly into the hopes and fears of writers by promising a chance to get noticed and possibly published.

Authonomy provides a peer review service where large quantities of your work are uploaded and then critiqued by other members of the community. The idea is that once you have something to promote you actively engage the community to drive interest and ratings and thus push your book up the ladder where eventually someone will look down from a loftier vantage point and take notice.

I lasted twenty four hours.

In that time I had my inbox spammed by authors seeking reviews, ratings or offers to ‘exchange’ books - the more your book appears on other peoples virtual bookshelves the more it positively affects your rating. The forums were also awash with an air of self-promotion desperation with writers peddling in a new form of information currency. Something just didn’t smell right and it wasn’t just my first comment of welcome alluding to the community being something akin to the Big Brother house.

I jumped on the internet and did some more homework on these services and the verdict, I’m afraid, is not good.

On their FAQ page, Harper has this to say:

HarperCollins, like all publishers, is inundated with new manuscripts, and cannot hope to consider them all fairly. We don’t feel that our current, closed ‘slush pile’ system is fair to authors themselves – nor do we believe it is giving us the best chance of finding the brightest new talent. authonomy is a genuine attempt to find a better way to determine the books on our shelves – and it hands selective power to the readers who will ultimately be buying them.

Problem is it’s a feeding frenzy in there and various sources on the Internet point to the fact that since its inception, none of the top five ‘winners’ in any month have had a formal publishing contract from the service.  In fact, Authonomy seems to be sidestepping the whole issue of publisher intervention by beginning to promote an ability to sell your work to the community directly - something other services like Lulu or Fastpencil do much better.

So it seems, unfortunately, Authomony is yet another example of a company service that doesn’t really understand its audience and its behaviour is hinting at a worrying alternative agenda.  My wish was to beat the slush as the Authonomy tagline promises, to generate interest in my book and possibly get the attention of a reputable publisher, not get a couple of comments and the possibility of a handful of sales to a small closed community.

So where to from here.  To be honest I don’t really know.  I think I will continue to try some of the more formal avenues until I’ve exhausted those options, or decide to self-publish and self-market.  One thing is sure, if I want to self-publish then it certainly won’t be through Authonomy and I challenge the service to be truly transparent about what its long term intentions actually are.