I am among the great legions of the unpublished (in print), and like many of my esteemed colleagues, I wish to leave said group. I recall reading somewhere, perhaps here, that publishers can be very picky about how you have presented your work, particularly online, in the past. My impression from that discussion/article/debate/whatever was that a "writers' forum" such as this one was okay, but posting large portions of your work online could easily be a deal-killer, even if you were so fortunate as to have your work seriously considered for publication.

I read the FAQs on authonomy, and several of them address the fact that HarperCollins makes no claim on any work submitted on Authonomy (nor any guarantees), and that they believe gaining an audience using their service is a good idea for new writers. Of course they might have rose-colored glasses about their own site and I would ordinarily be inclined to dismiss such talk... but... they're a real publisher. A big one. If Tor told me that they'd like me better if I tried publishing 40000 words of my work in progress online first, I'd sure do it.

So, my question is... is authonomy a safe thing to do? After many aborted WIPs, I finally have one that I'm nearing completion on and I absolutely love it, want to send it to publishers, etc, and it sounds like this would be a great proving ground, if it didn't kill my ability to publish.

Writing industry veterans - I beg of you to impart your vast knowledge upon us poor, unwashed n00bs. Have mercy oh experts!
 

Of course, I'm not there yet. So who knows?
 

To mix a metaphore, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Your work is worth $. Believe it.
 

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Why give it out for free when you can get paid for it?

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I'd be inclined to agree, if I thought I could get paid for it.

The idea at Authonomy is, according to their site:

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authonomyTM is a brand new community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins. We want to flush out the brightest, freshest new literature around - we’re glad you stopped by.

If you’re a writer, authonomy is the place to show your face – and show off your work on the web. Whether you’re unpublished, self-published or just getting started, all you need is a few chapters to start building your profile online, and start connecting with the authonomy community.

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The site has two advantages that I can't easily dismiss:

• It is run by HarperCollins. For reals. They are way more credible than joshchmo's random house of crits as to what's good for you online.
• It provides a chance to get potentially massive crits on a work in progress. For someone who isn't finished, that's a hard thing to get. I get crit help here, but only 10K or so words at a time, and I often go back and make changes, but then it's quite a bit till I redo the process. In no way do I mean to demean the excellent feedback I've gotten from people here - I'm very grateful for all the wonderful crits I've gotten. I'd love it, though, if I could leave up the most recent version of the doc, and people who were "fans" of my WIP would (at their own leisure) read and crit, and then perhaps recommend reading and critting my work to others, or come back and see updates. It would be a tremendous feedback loop.
  

I'm inclined to take a stab at it if it won't block me from offering the finished product later to publishing houses... like HarperCollins. You do have the ability to remove stories from the site at any time, and if you get crowdsourced up (lots of people like your stuff) real editors at (and I can't say their name enough) HarperCollins take a look at your stuff and give you professional criticism. From time to time they take stuff off the slush pile there and publish it.

I know it's a crapshoot, but no more or less of one to the submit-and-wait traditional method. I like the feedback I've gotten from online communities such as this one, but my chief complaint is that it's hard to get volume. Perhaps Authonomy will have the same problem, or it has an iPhone app store problem of it being impossible to get noticed (though there are strategies for doing exactly that which aren't too onerous).

Anyhow - do any publishing pros here know whether or not this is likely to be a dealkiller with non-HarperCollins publishers? That's the unique veto for me; if it would prevent me from submitting to other major publishers, I would never use it.
 

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Anyhow - do any publishing pros here know whether or not this is likely to be a dealkiller with non-HarperCollins publishers? That's the unique veto for me; if it would prevent me from submitting to other major publishers, I would never use it.

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I don't know the answer to this, but you may want to search agents' blogs like Nathan Bransford and pub rants. If they don't have an answer to this question, you can submit te question to them. They both frequently answer readers' questions. I think this is a question that really needs to be answered by publishing experts.
 

My uneducated guess is that it would be a deal breaker for other publishers. It makes sense on Harper Collins side, they don't lose anything and get to pick up anything they like, while the authors probably won't be able to send that story anywhere else.

I agree with Map too, ask a publisher or editor.

If I had an MS that I had already shopped around to death I would consider putting it up there, or if I had a surplus of stories I would consider sacrificing one to Harper Collins publishing. Getting lots of crits would be worth it.
 

[This message has been edited by Teraen (edited March 23, 2010).]
 

The question wasn't answered in that forum thread, so i posted the question on the forums here.