[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

Steve, as always, your take on things is well considered and intelligently presented.

Thank you. ^_^;;

I'd disagree on one point, though: NEVER send a publisher or an agent a full manuscript without invitation.

Oh, I fully agree. My system however was completely automated, and allowed you to post information about you, your book, and up to two chapters of it for publishers to look at. And you're not forcing them to see anything. You simply put yourself on the site, and if they like what they see and are interested, they'll dig further, and if they really like it, then *they* will ask *you* for the full manuscript. You never get the opportunity to directly approach the publishing houses. You only get the small blurb I mentioned above, something akin to a glorified classified ad, and if a publisher is interested, they research you and your book further. If not, oh well.

Advantages:
1. You get greater exposure for yourself and your book.
2. You get your book in front of more eyes. (IE, publishers)
3. You increase the chances that (assuming you have a good entry and a good book) your book will be picked up by someone.
4. Publishers get access to a much larger based of potential authors.
5. Publishers can eliminate their slush files by using this system.
6. Publishers can glean through submissions faster and with greater accuracy, and find the authors they want.

Disadvantages:
1. You're just one of tens of thousands of submissions. (nothing new there)
2. You as an author really have to sell yourself well to get noticed. (Again, nothing new there.)
3. All submissions are electronic. (only bad if you or the publisher prefer the old fashioned paper submission method)

So in short, it's really a win/win all around.

Originally Posted by jimhanas

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.

Danke.

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.

Yeah, that was one of the big hurtles that a couple other people (both online and offline) suggested, and that I fully knew would be it's biggest hurtle from the beginning. Plus, it's not just publishers you have to convince of this, but also writers. The door swings both ways on that. You could have every single publisher in the world on there, but if writers don't embrace it, it'll fail, and vice versa. That's why I've only suggested the idea, and *not* actually attacked it. Sure, I could write a killer site that'd do everything necessary (I do php/mysql development on the side), however, I'm not good at the kind of marketing and business savvy that would be required to market something like this.

And it'd require quite a bit more than the typical marketing that you'd use to sell a book. We're talking some really heavy duty, boots on the ground corporate marketing. And that's only the beginning, because once you start getting companies onboard, you next need to get authors onboard as well, and that's no easy task either. So I'm leaving this project to someone else to handle who knows how to do that kinda thing. I'd gladly help code it, but without the specialized marketing knowhow to promote it, I'd simply be spinning my wheels.

Originally Posted by neilmarr

Yup, Steve and Jim: But publishers and agents do NOT trawl for material. They don't need to. They already have more than enough.

Yes, through slush piles. But the idea here is to eliminate the slush piles and make it a lot easier to bring good authors/books and publishers together in the quickest and simplest way possible. And knowing the pain and suffering publishing houses go through just to manage their own slush piles, I bet they'd kill for the chance to actually use a system like this that eliminated that pile and allowed them to pick up good authors and books in a fraction of the time.

And yes, maybe I'm being too idealistic in thinking that, but having been in the corporate world for so many years, both as trench grunt and management, I know from experience that anything you can do to reduce your workload (or in the case of publishers, their slush files) and streamline productivity is well worth transitioning to. Case in point. My publisher used to do everything via paper files and notepads. Being the geek that I am, I wrote an author management system called "Author Tracker Pro". He liked it so much that he's fully moved to it already, and actually suggested quite a few extra features that I've since added to it to further increase his productivity. So that's why I'm saying that this system, if done right, would be such a benefit to publishers that I'd actually be surprised if they didn't switch to it.

Now I'm not trying to say that my idea is the ultimate godsend to publishing, but rather that I think it would help to vastly improve things from what they are. And heck, for all I know someone else has a better system out there than even mine, and if that's true, I'd gladly step aside and let theirs prosper. But since I don't know of something like that, this is the best alternative I can give.