Feedback on my idea please

[Derek_S]

Hi Folks,

I have an idea for a website that I hope you will find interesting and useful, and I'd like your feedback on it please. Apologies if this would be better suited in another forum, but hopefully if you are writing a novel you will find it relevant.

The idea is a website that brings together writers and publishers. It would create a marketplace in the way that eBay does for goods. Writers can publish sample chapters of their work, visitors to the site can read these and rate the work. Publishers who are interested in a writer's work place a bid; the highest bidder wins the right to publish the work. The writer pays a fee for listing their work, and a fee if a publisher pays to acquire the right to publish their work.

Advantages to Publishers:

1. They don't have to read through large amounts of rubbish to find quality work.
2. There is in-built market research provided by the review system.
3. The opportunity to discover new authors and bring their work to the marketplace.
4. An inexpensive and effective way of discovering new authors.

Advantages to Writers:

1. Getting feedback on work from readers.
2. The opportunity to have publishers read and buy work.
3. An inexpensive way of getting publisher exposure for your work and the chance of getting it published.

Thanks for your time,
Derek

[icerose]

I don't mean to sound like a downer but editors don't really have the time to scour the internet for manuscripts. They already have a slush pile from both authors and agents. Those who don't want to read slush do exclusive agent submissions only.

Also as a writer you're not supposed to pay to be read and there are a great many scams that already do this but they are scams because they take money and give nothing back.

So how would you guarantee that quality editors would be reading and buying manuscripts from the site? And if it is quality work why isn't that writer getting an agent or straight submitting it?

It's good in theory but in practice I don't think it's possible.

Also the publishers have their own statisic and marketing people who run up the numbers, I doubt they would rely on a system that hasn't proven itself. Review systems can easily become slanted just as statistics can.

[Gray]

Sounds good to me, especially for unpublished authors who have a hard time getting some one to read their work. Also the exposure and subsequent responses could only make for better writers. I had to start letting my friends read my novel ages ago because I'd spent so much time on it and wanted to make sure it wasn't a waste. In short; this sounds like the kind of place I'd go for feed back and exposure.

[CrankItTo11]

Interesting idea. I think this would appeal more to writers than to publishers. For instance, I think publishers would need to see more than a few chapters before they'd be willing to bid money. Also, I think they receive more than enough solicitations from writers and agents that the website wouldn't do anything but add to the slush... and finally, many writers already publisher their work for free online in the hopes of attracting a publisher.

Sorry to sound so negative. I like a lot of things about your idea, in theory... and I love anyone who is willing to 'think outside the box' and *insert other corporate motivational sayings here*... but I'm just not sure this would fly.

Don't let my opinion shoot down your idea, though. Maybe I’m just too old to understand how this fancy “interweb” could be used in such a manner. If you believe in it, give it a shot!

[alices]

A big issue would be if the site accepted anything (i.e. anyone who pays), and it is rubbish, the reputation of the site and all of the good writers goes down the tubes.

[CrankItTo11]

A big issue would be if the site accepted anything (i.e. anyone who pays), and it is rubbish, the reputation of the site and all of the good writers goes down the tubes.

Exactly... I don't get how this isn't just more slush.

[Judg]

You're not the first one to have the idea and they aren't working too well. although I think the auction wrinkle is new. But probably not new enough to make it fly. Various agents and authors have discussed this on their blogs. Here's a link to get you started. It will give you an idea of what you're up against, as well as a list of links to other opinions.

Enough submissions already (http://arcaedia.livejournal.com/108688.html)

You would have to surmount an enormous amount of skepticism on the part of publishers. I don't see any significant advantage to publishers. You're not offering any functionality at all that the agenting system doesn't already have. And if there's no advantage to one of the main players, it isn't going to work.

Sorry to be negative, but I figure it would hurt a lot more if you tried it and got shot down and I honestly can't see anything else happening.

[alices]

You would make a fortune if you could develop a system for/with a major publisher, to weed out what they are already receiving.

[Bufty]

A great idea in theory but I suspect it would end up as an enormous Internet slush pile through which most Agents and Publishers would be loathe to trawl. Their existing slush piles are big enough, I'm sure - why should there be any better pickings via the internet?

And samples or excerpts only give half the story -there would have to be another admin level after that.

But what a wonderful feeding ground for scammers.

Back to the drawing board, Derek, I fear. Oh - and welcome. :hi: You'll find a lot of helpful info in this huge site. And who knows - you may live in the same street as I!

[Bufty]

I think the present system works fairly well - it's called 'Readers' - - unless you are envisaging Robots. Just kidding - forgive my sense of humour, Alice. :Hug2:

You would make a fortune if you could develop a system for/with a major publisher, to weed out what they are already receiving.

[blacbird]

Publishers are going to ignore this with deafening silence.

caw

[Elektra]

Oh, goodness, isn't it too early for a Bookner reincarnation?

Someone (and probably quite a few other people, but this one I actually witnessed) has tried this exact same thing within the last year. Got tons of publicity, but never even got off the ground from lack of interest--and he was even offering it for free.

Though if you do decide to try it, here's some free advice: don't alienate the people you need.

[blacbird]

You would make a fortune if you could develop a system for/with a major publisher, to weed out what they are already receiving.

Uhh . . . isn't this kind of like what literary agents do?

caw

[farfromfearless]

Your idea hinges on acceptance by publishers as a legitimate source for publishable work. I confess, I make no claims to understanding the mentality of publishers, but I do know that the single biggest hurdle you will need to overcome is established process - tradition. As it stands, the industry relies on writers submitting TO agents or publishers who vette the work. There is process involved in making those decisions and every publisher and agency is differs in that process at some level.

You also have to consider volume. If you launch a site like this, you accept the potential that the volume exceeds the capacity of the site. Take monster.com or workopolis.com - they had the same premise in mind, offering a premium service to employers and job seekers that promised exposure and better selection. The reality is that both services experienced a deluge of job seekers and employers - to the point that effectiveness for either party decreased exponentially. The irony is that it became easier to find jobs or find employees through traditional advertising and head hunting.

Now, I'm not saying this is a bad idea or any such (I work for a company that builds these kinds of services from the ground up), what I am saying is that in in my experience in order to be effective, you have to be focused on a niche (one thing to one type of person) rather than global (all things to all people).

Let's take your pros list for example:
1. They don't have to read through large amounts of rubbish to find quality work.
- What is the qualifier, as in who will vette the work and deem it worthy for publisher's eyes? Niche or global, there are different standards that you will have to accommodate.

2. There is in-built market research provided by the review system.
Who provides the research and does your target audience find value in that research? This sounds as if you are letting a automated system handle a job that requires more than complicated calculations and ratings - as a consumer, I would be hard-pressed to be convinced that a non-human system is capable of providing satisfactory results.

3. The opportunity to discover new authors and bring their work to the marketplace.
This particular process is a relatively passive one (with exceptions) in that writers submit TO agents and publishers. The later rarely if ever needs to go out and head hunt for talent. Who has the time when you're buried under mounds of manuscripts?

4. An inexpensive and effective way of discovering new authors.
SASE costs less than a dollar. Email is free. Bandwidth can cost thousands. How do you propose to get publishers or agents for that matter to sift through hundreds - potentially thousands - of submissions. It's difficult enough to sift through hard copy.

As for consumers:
1. Getting feedback on work from readers.
I cannot argue with the value in this, but then again how much is too much?

2. The opportunity to have publishers read and buy work.
See #3 in previous.

3. An inexpensive way of getting publisher exposure for your work and the chance of getting it published.
Email is free, mailing in most cases is inexpensive. See #4 in previous.

I think the auction aspect is interesting, but where do you set your threshold? What is the base price for a new author and who determines that market price? If you take ebay as your example, then you are essentially asking your users to put a price on their work - how do they determine that? Again, same example: if I post my work and set a base price for the auction of 200.00, and I have no publishing history behind me, what kind of response might I expect. What happens when Stephen King, who grosses millions in endorsements and movie and broadcast deals (I'm exaggerating), becomes a member and posts his own work for auction?

My advice, keep it simple - keep it niche. Focus on the consumer and relegate publisher or agency interaction to sponsorship or advertising. Sometimes the traditional route is best, but who knows, maybe you might surprise someone with this.

[victoriastrauss]

This has been done. (http://www.sfwa.org/beware/services.html#Manuscript) It hasn't worked very well.

- Victoria

[CaoPaux]

Writer Beware's blogs re: YADS (Yet Another Display Site)

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2006/01/victoria-strauss-more-dubious-writers.html

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_accrispin_archive.html

[farfromfearless]

Oh, goodness, isn't it too early for a Bookner reincarnation?

Ha! I had forgotten about that.

[PeeDee]

Publishers will still have to read just as much as they do with a slush pile. It just changes the format they're reading it in, and changes what they do about it.

Anyway, the sort of bidding war you're probably envisioning wouldn't actually occur very often. I don't think publishers quite have to start battling it out to get first novels yet.

[greatfish]

Why isn't there a site with a comprehensive list and rating of authors the way Allmusic.com lists and rates musicians? You could search authors, read a short bio, view a list of their catalogue, and get a rating and a short review of each work.

To make money, you could set up a deal with amazon so that clicking on each book title would redirect you to amazon.com for purchase.

Make that website, I would visit it all the time.

[FergieC]

You could search authors, read a short bio, view a list of their catalogue, and get a rating and a short review of each work.


Youwriteon does something like that for new/unpublished writers. Work is rated by writers and readers, then the highest rated gets a critique from a professional - agent, author or editor. It's fairly new, so there's no links to books yet, but will be eventually.

The main worry I'd have about this idea as pitched is how and where are you going to find all this publishable stuff, that's good enough and commercial enough for a publisher to bid for, but isn't already out round agents and publishers? And for the writer, if they believe they have an MS good enough to be published, never mind bidded for, why would they want to pay to be on a website rather than simply submit it direct to a publisher or agent?

Fit like, by the way, from another Aberdonian... :welcome:

[Shadow_Ferret]

What icerose said.

To which I'll add, it'll be a cold day in Heck when I pay someone to read my work.

[Garpy]

Personally I think it's possibly the way things are headed. What your idea effectively is, is a digital slush pile...instead of a paper and ink one. But, with the huge advantage that the contents can be analysed and categorized. Thus these digital submissions can be grouped by genre, or various subject tags.

Additionally, phrases or terms could be parsed for. So if a publisher is looking for an idea that might be about Lady Diana, popping that into the search box would list all the submissions that would contain her name.

Given that eventually books will end up being a digital product, it's not silly to think that at some point in the future (and maybe not to far down the road) publishers would be searching through digital slush.

I would say the income model should be weighted towards publishers paying for access to the submissions, rather than writers paying to submit. And also, you'd really want some kind of quality filter in there....

...there again you see...digital pays off. Punctuation, grammar and spelling could be easily analysed for a percentage hit rate. If there's over a certain percentage of spelling/punctuation/grammar errors, then it fails and gets filtered out, because clearly the author needs to go back to school.

[Jamesaritchie]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The problem with getting published is that agents and editors aren't getting enough material worth publishing. And it isn't because this material isn't up on a website, it isn't because it hasn't been reviewed, and it isn't anything digital is going to help.

It's purely because it doesn't exist in sufficient quantity. A writer who can tell a good story, filled with good characters, each of which speaks good dialogue, has no trouble getting published. The work is looked at by agents and editors, and they will take on the good stories/writing/characters.

They don't need websites to find it, it's been tried over and over, and there's no reason to believe it offers a single advantage to teh present system. And God help us if they every start accepting anything by parsing fiction for this or that or the other. That's certain death to good writing.

Slush is slush is slush, and whether it's on paper, on a website, or digital, nearly all of it is going to be bad, and the good will still stand out like like a cut diamond in a pile of coal.

[farfromfearless]

Like most rating systems, it means nothing - averages are only valuable when you're doing mass market research on a single product. If you get 24 readers who give a particular manuscript a 4/5 rating that constitutes only a minuscule portion of the overall market. The challenge is trying to convince publishers that those 24 people opinion actually matters more than their own experience.

[Garpy]

James, there's a very interesting essay on the ineffective nature of the quality filtering system we know as 'the slush pile'. You may well have come across it.

http://www.kingsfieldpublications.co.uk/rats.PDF

In summary, the central thrust of the essay is that, publishers get it wrong almost as often as they get it right. Ie: they pull as many turds out of the pile as they do gems. And of course there have been some spectacular slushpile stings carried out in recent years.

I could see a digital version being a very useful tool for publishers, apart from flushing out writers who can't spell, punctuate or form proper sentences, with one digital swipe, it would allow tired editors to more accurately target what they're looking for.

For my money an online slush depository with proper tagging, and some sensible analysis software would prove invaluable for agents, editors and good writers. For plagiarists and lame writers - it wouldn't be such a good thing

[Shadow_Ferret]

Analysis software? So now the machine will be analyzing our fiction and rating it on some sort of merit system?

It's bad enough being rejected by a human, are you suggesting we let machines decide on the worthiness of our material to be published?

[Carrie in PA]

Analysis software? So now the machine will be analyzing our fiction and rating it on some sort of merit system?

It's bad enough being rejected by a human, are you suggesting we let machines decide on the worthiness of our material to be published?

Oh, THAT is scary.

How is software going to be able to see a *spark* or that something that just touches the agent/editor/publisher? Ick.

[waylander]

Oh, THAT is scary.

How is software going to be able to see a *spark* or that something that just touches the agent/editor/publisher? Ick.

It isn't. But it could replace the intern/junior assistant who screens out the subliterate junk for the agent/editor

[Garpy]

*sigh*

yup Shadow/Carrie, just take two words right out of context, and run with that, why don't you?

[greglondon]

An inexpensive way of getting publisher exposure for your work and the chance of getting it published.

Erm, allow me to introduce you to Yog's law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yog's_Law

"Money flows toward the writer."

Any system that violates Yog's law is automatically suspect.

There are many ways to filter through the slush pile that do not violate Yog's law. The legitmate publishing industry uses them already. Agents who do not charge reading fees but get paid only on a sale, is one. And interns, those tireless editors in training who get the thankless job of reading slush at minimum wage so they can get some experience in the industry, is another. Hard working editors is another.

[Derek_S]

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to reply, I'm very grateful for your opinions. As always other people can see the things you miss yourself!

All the best with your writing,
Derek

[Shadow_Ferret]

*sigh*

yup Shadow/Carrie, just take two words right out of context, and run with that, why don't you?
If I misunderstood your meaning, maybe you need to explain it better. What exactly would this software be analyzing that would somehow benefit the writer?

[Carrie in PA]

*sigh*

yup Shadow/Carrie, just take two words right out of context, and run with that, why don't you?

Excuse me? I was simply responding to the idea of using software to read manuscripts. I thought it was an interesting thought. And not to disappoint you, but I was simply replying to Ferret - I didn't even read your first post about it until after the post I'm quoting.

*sigh*

[Garpy]

my apologies to you Carrie, you're right.

[PeeDee]

It would be like the software (Flescher-Kindkade? Is that it) which analyzes your work based on readability. Really, what's the point? I mean, Ray Bradbury's work would be unreadable for a computer, likewise the works of John Steinback. Certain stories such as "Repent Harlequin! said the Ticktock Man" by Harlan Ellison would be called gibberish by the computer, simply because at certain points, he does away with punctuation and even sentence structure in favor of an effect.

The publishing industry may publish duds, but they also publish successes. There is always going to be the one as well as the other, simply because it's all being done by human beings. The thing is, an electronic system is not really going to do any better sorting the pap from the chaff, simply because it all boils down to humans submitting to other humans who read and accept or reject. There's no way around that.

[icerose]

Not to mention as much as half a book is dialog and real dialog rarely follows the rules. In fact if it does people complain that it's stilted. How would a computer filter through the poor grammar of an uneducated southern man's dialog vs the narrative?