Flane contemplates his future...I was told about a new way of reaching publishers some months ago and ignored it because I had tried something similar a couple of years ago - I even forked out the princely sum of £25 but to this day no publisher has been seen or heard beating a path to my door (not even to tell me my work was rubbish and please take it off the site at once.)
A fortnight ago someone else spoke of the website that promised wonderful things, and I gave my cautious view on Disorganised Author. Now I see the same website has cropped up on Nathan Bransford's blog. This is his view:
HarperCollins has built quite a following behind its new site Authonomy, whose devotees are so rabid they make English football fans look like well-behaved choir boys. Anyway, Harper announced that they had given three book deals to authors they found on Authonomy. Meanwhile, one of the devotees of the site, Alexander McNabb, posted a great rundown on his experiences and thoughts on its future. (thanks to C. Michael Hall for the link). An aside: what's most interesting to me about Authonomy is how thoroughly populated it is with people who grew tired of the "gatekeeping" system of publishing and networking. So they upload their manuscripts, then participate in a Darwinian system of elimination and calculated networking that would make Machiavelli blush, all in the hopes of making it to the editor's desk and hopefully pleasing Harper's.... gatekeepers."
I shall check it out and see what is going on. As I sit here quietly contemplating the quirks of the world, it occurs to me that perhaps, with all these people rushing to send their work online, the agents/publishers in trays won't be quite so overflowing as they once where? It's an interesting speculation. There's no way of knowing if the intray rush is slowing. Just as there's no way of knowing how often HC actually look at the Autonomy website.
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