Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
I'd actually recommend something like a clearing house for literature. Almost like a Craig's List or a shopping mall for manuscripts. Just create some simple submission guidelines that all or most of the publishers could agree on (IE, how it should be submitted, in what format, what extra items are required, such as a synopsis, character list, author bio, etc) and then have the Author submit their manuscript to the site. It would then be sorted by genre and some other criteria. Publishers then come in, browse the manuscripts based on genre and those same criteria, and then pick out the ones they want to review.
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I love this idea and have been thinking along similar lines. While sending individual manuscripts to individual publishers might seem like an inevitable system -- since we've been doing it for so long -- it is almost certainly the result of inefficiencies that the web can now do away with. I think the system you describe -- or something like it -- would work.
The problem? Convincing a critical mass of publishers that the old system isn't inevitable after all. It would probably require a YouTube-sized publishing catastrophe to get the Big Six to start thinking like Hulu, but obviously it's happened before.