At the Dennis Cass Wants You to Be More Awesome site, in a thread about dispensing with the whole query-an-editor/agent process, member Paul Mikos pointed me to an experiment by publisher HarperCollins UK.

The experiment goes by the name “authonomy” (a cute neologism I’m still trying to make up my mind about). From the authonomy page of Frequently Asked Questions:

authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project — and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read.

Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions — and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books — and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.

We hope the authonomy community will guide publishers straight to the freshest writing talent — and will give passionate and thoughtful readers a real chance to influence what’s on our shelves.

The reason Mikos pointed me to the authonomy site was that I’d earlier commented on the same thread that writers should form online marketplaces to which agents and publishers would come, seeking writing samples.

I suspect I’ll soon be lurking in the authonomy wings for at least a little while, and if so I’ll report back here about the experience.

For now, as I said to Mikos, I’m concerned about the time commitment required to participate fully and fairly. I know about myself that if I posted 10,000 words of my own writing, I couldn’t just sit back and wait to hear reactions to it. I’d want to read at least one to five thousand (or more) words of the contributions of five or more other authors, and I’d want to try maintaining an active involvement in the authonomy forum(s), and, and, and…

But it may also be too tempting to pass up, especially this early in the experiment.

For the record, as I said in an earlier post about blurbs, the whole business of writers trading public responses to one another’s work seems heavy with potential for abuse. I’m still not 100% comfortable with it at authonomy; that the mutual reviewers aren’t compensating one another with cash seems a minor point, since the real coin of an unpublished writer’s career is that of attention. The authonomy FAQ deals with this question, to some extent:

Just like the books market at large, there may be a few flutters and fads at authonomy. And in this day and age, there’s no denying you need to think about actively promoting your book to readers by networking if you want to gather a healthy army of support.

But with thousands of members at the site to impress and some stiff competition, it will take more than schmooze and a winning smile to reach the top. We believe quality of writing and book construction will be the ultimate test to sustained support and success on the site. When your book is assessed by the editorial board or by any visiting agent or publisher, quality of work is by far the most important consideration.

We’ll see!