Sharing Your Work

Today I'm going to list a couple of sites that I've found very helpful and exciting. Both of them can provide you, the writer, with a good vehicle for sharing your work and getting feedback and encouragement.

The first site is called Authonomy. It's sponsored by Harper Collins. Here's how it works:

You upload your book, or however much of it you wish to upload. Readers (I'm guessing most of them are also writers) judge what you've submitted and either put it on their "bookshelf," add it to their "watchlist," or "back it." There's some type of mysterious mathematical process that takes place behind the scenes that moves your book ranking up or down based on the reader responses. If your submission does well, it will move to the "editor's desk" where Harper Collins agents take a look. I'm not familiar with the complex details of how things actually work, but it's been fun watching the progress of my beloved Star Wishes. In fact, I've enjoyed it so much that I just uploaded a few chapters from Cannibal Island. It's especially encouraging to read the comments from the reviewers.

The other site is called WeBook. It works a little differently, but it seems to be based on the same principle of popularity among readers. I'll mention first off that there's a $3.95 fee for submission at the WeBook site. If that's not a problem, the area you want to go to is called PageToFame. The first round involves uploading your hook (like your one-sentence pitch), plus the first 250 words (or less, depending on where 250 words ends up.) The whole idea is to hook the reader. (Remember our drawn out discussions on that in the past?)

Readers rate the submissions. It's random, and there's no way to send your friends to the site to give you good ratings. It's the luck of the draw as to what excerpts come up for rating. If you do well, you move to the second round, where you go from 250 words to submitting a five-page sample. The same rating process takes place and, eventually, you may be asked to submit the entire manuscript. Many agents (most of whom you're probably familiar with) have volunteered to work with writers on this site.

Check both sites out and see what you think. You might enjoy the excitement of watching your work move up in the rankings on both sites. As always, any comments are always welcome here. Feel free to chime in below.