Grease and Sunlight
The Frontlist's ambition
[go less hard on the frontlist at the start..] The traditional, unsolicited manuscript route to publication is creaking. Neither loved by writers nor literary agents, it is both achingly slow and opaque. The Frontlist has been carefully constructed to add a little grease and sunlight to the traditional process. Other than that, it's business as usual. We do not poke our noses into contracts and relationships that may develop between agents and writers. We do not charge writers to submit or agents to search.
With The Frontlist, great work will find its way to an appropriate literary agent without writers or agents having to pay a penny just as the traditional process expects. The project is funded by writers' voluntary payments to access the full detail of reviewers' feedback.
Adding the grease
It will typically take three months before an agent will review an unsolicited submission. Or more accurately, it will typically take three months before a submission reaches the front of a queue, ready for an agent to take a first glance. This is not great, nor is it an agent's fault. Caring for existing proven talent will always trump the search for new.
Our goal is to help agents to focus their talent search on pre-filtered, promising submissions whilst also offering writers a much faster path to an outcome. We don't use AI and we don't use clever algorithms (we have the nerd power - but humans are still better). Instead we use a meticulously designed two-stage , crowdsourced review process.
You have read this far so it's time for us to admit something.We tried this 17 years ago. Back in 2006 we launched the first incarnation of The Frontlist - the precursor to Harper Collins' Authonomy. Both sites had successes; both have long-since closed down. Scott Pack, who ran Authonomy, chatted to us about reasons for its demise. We learned what we already knew: "One big issue with Authonomy was that users were fighting to get to the top of the pile and it was not a nice place." He then added a refreshingly frank observation:"Oh, and another issue was that so much of the content was shit."
"One big issue with Authonomy was that users were fighting to get to the top of the pile and it was not a nice place."
— Scott Pack
Adding the sunlight
The traditional submissions process is so damn mysterious. The norm is no response (due to the large number... we cannot reply...if you don't hear anything...assume) or a standard template. It's often too much to hope for a little feedback that at least feels as though it came from eyes on the page.
This is where The Frontlist excels. And so we come to our second and final admission. We are colossal data nerds. We have designed our submissions and reviews process to live in the sunlight. Every click, eyeball, feature and thought will be captured and displayed to reveal an exciting, noisy, furious and enjoyable process. We will offer insight on a submission's literary credentials and marketability as well as who has read what and for how long. This is what excites us. This is how we will, as we'd always intended, drag the slush pile into the Internet age