The Book Dating Agency

There are many lost and lonely manuscripts looking for a friend. Like finding a partner some are fortunate to have a good active social circle to help them, but increasingly many are now turning to the internet and the dating agencies. Imagine what Jane Austen would write about today’s ‘good man’ looking for a ‘good wife’ over the internet? So, if we are increasingly turning to dating agencies to find our partners why not a section ‘Books seeking a good reader’?

Serial Thriller seeks Readers:London, swinging 60s, the scene of music, murder and the macabre. The Rippers' groupies got more than they bargained for backstage. Will the bandever get out of the groove?

Last week we wrote about the gatekeepers within the industry that control the flow of works being published and how some appear to remain firmly fixed in the old world of print, ‘ The Suppression of Writing‘.

We are pleased that we are now starting to see others who are seeing new ways to match the mountain of manuscripts through new innovative ways in order to review, auction and promote them and ultimately help them find a partner.

Inkubate is one of these new online services that enables authors to upload full manuscripts, excerpts, out-of-print works for review and possible acquisition by agents or publishers. The model is free to authors while publishers and agents have pay a subscription fee for access material. Everything is fully tracked and audited searchable and filtered. Users can categorise material, receive alerts on new submissions, authors, genres. One could say it’s a super dating agency. This site is not about reviews but is firmly based at creating a trading marketplace which could lead to future wedlock.

Although the site is still in beta, it already has 350 authors on board, offering some 400 works for a date and some publishers and agents are reportedly eying up the candy. The full launch is still about a year away and the model is to be further enhanced by incentives to raise the profile of works and tier the access of publishers and agents.

PUBSLUSH Press is also encouraging authors to submit their book ideas and even creating competitions offering those chosen to win an iPad 2 and a chance to be published. To win writers simply submit the best ten pages and a summary of their manuscript at www.pubslush.com, through October 15th.

PUBSLUSH Press use a social network approach that aims to connect authors directly with readers. They have an unfortunate name for their registered users , calling them ‘Slushers’ . These so called Slushers, review and share their favourite works and when a certain level of clear interest is indentified against an individual submission, PUBSLUSH then takes over and provide a comprehensive publishing process; editing, design, marketing, distribution, etc. PUBSLUSH can also acts as an agent, allowing editors at major publishers to easily browse the top submissions and extend deals to authors.

The term ‘slushpile’ is a derogatory and a rather supercilious and ‘holier than thou’ way the industry describes the mountain of unsolicited manuscripts they often dismiss as not worthy or are incapable of digesting. However the internet and technology changes all and itself encourages all to express themselves and to create. As we have said before we are moving from listeners and readers to creators and we are no longer restricted to the physical work. The democratisation of writing is a given and not all will be well written, or even read, but connecting writing to reading should be the first goal and these new dating agencies and others, maybe will help free us from yesterday’s gatekeepers.

The Suppression of Writing

More and more authors are now considering digital publishing opportunities and are taking control of their own works. New ventures such as Unbound, are inviting them to submit their unpublished work to into a social media lottery. Barnes and Noble Pubit, Wattpad, Lulu, and Kindle publishing, are among others all offering new ways to get published. We now even have agents embroiled in heated debate, as some of their numbers are starting to wear two hats and become publishers. We also see the publisher now creating new digital ways to socially capture and sift through the mountain of submissions. Although these routes may not offer the financial rewards of the more traditional one for authors, digital is now importantly enabling everyone to be published. The democratisation of writing and storytelling is arriving.

The old world has a series of gatekeepers which conveniently stand between the hoards of aspiring writers and the infamous ‘slushpile’ and the author goal of being published. However these roadblocks are now being increasingly questioned, tested and removed, but even in this new digitally evolving world, the old world of suppression, narrow selection and often closed ‘who you know’ circles still exists and are still supported by some in the establishment as the right way to do business.

We recently attended a new literary festival and were intrigued to listen to a talk from a leading literary agent and UK publishing personality. The subject was on how to get published, but the reality was that it should have been titled ‘why you are not going to get published’.

We heard many anecdotal stories about why agents matter, the difficult task they, or their interns face, in sifting through mountains of submissions. The fact that less than 1% of their submissions they receive actually even get to the consideration phase of selection. This poor agent already has a backlog from an obvious holiday in August and basically is in shutdown with Frankfurt for ‘two months’ and then no doubt Christmas will have its impact. It was hardly surprising that they had only taken on one new author and the last few years and were clearly focused in working their existing lucrative stable. Apparently, even agents get upset when they get knocked back from publishers at the next gatekeeper post!

It appears we have built a risk adverse approach to publishing.

There are, and always will be, good and bad agents and those which are more appropriate for an author than others. However, this image of ‘X Factor auditions’ would be fine if they at least promoted writing and worked in this digital, switched on and networked community, but the reality they don’t promote but suppress writing and are still clearly based on the physical book world, lengthy lead times to market and the 256 page economic model.

‘Don’t publish digitally and expect an agent or publisher to be interested second hand,’ was delivered, not so much as advise, but as a veiled threat. ‘Every clause in a contract should be reviewed by the agent,’ was then countered by the claim that boilerplate contracts are the way forward and many clauses can now be waved through. ‘Digital royalties should be greater than the 15%,’ but the figure suggested was still somewhat shy of what many believe is appropriate.

The point is that, if we were aspiring writers then the contradictions and ‘holier than thou’ plaudits on offer would have been more of a switch off than an encouragement to write.

Agents have many valuable contributions they can make a real contribution to the creation of more works and support new talent, but this talk demonstrated what some would suggest is how out of touch some are to the world today.

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Agents In A Digital World June 13th 2011

Place your bets on the next best seller

So its official publishing is a gambling business and spread betting is real. A very well respected consultant James Lichtenberg who I once had the pleasure of working said the publishing was like two frogs mating. They created millions of spawn, which turned into thousands of tadpoles, which turned into hundreds of tiny frogs, of which a handful made it onto the bank where one was kissed by Oprah and became a best seller. The story being you needed the millions of spawn to make the selection process.

So we hear today that the founders of Media Predict (www.MediaPredict.com), and US publisher Simon & Schuster, plan to select a book proposal based on bets placed by traders in the new market.

Media Predict is soliciting book proposals from agents and the public and posting pages of them on the site. Traders, who are given $5,000 in fantasy cash, can buy shares based on their guess about whether a particular book proposal is likely to get a deal, or whether Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will select it as a finalist in a contest called Project Publish. If either happens within a four-month period, the value of the shares go to $100 apiece; if not, the share price falls to zero. Traders are not voting on the book they like best, but rather are placing bets on which they think will do well. The success of the site is dependant on it attracting enough traffic to make the bets meaningful. Similar sites in other sectors such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange, are reported as capturing about 25,000 traders a day.