What we are looking for
We are fortunate enough to have a talented development and design team. However we could always do with more help. Most important at this stage is to get some early user feedback from writers and reviewers as well as some exploratory discussions with a handful of literary agents who are excited by The Frontlist's potential.
Expert fiction reviewers
Our priority is to ensure reviews on The Frontlist are fair and effective. Fair reviews focus solely on the content, free from prejudice, bias or agenda. Effective reviews help writers improve and distinguish great writing from good.
Our process helps reviewers to focus on uncovering promising, marketable material. We aim to keep assessments fair and focused and will continue to refine and improve our process.
We assess all users' reviewing skills using set texts. The goal is not to judge taste but to discern an ability to recognise human, original, well-written work.
Somewhat bucking the trend, we want this process to be driven by humans rather than algorithms. We want to collaborate with skilled reviewers and writers to help achieve our goals. We can't pay, but we can offer you a seat in an exciting initiative.
Progressive, respected literary agents
Though we will be reaching out independently to a few agents, we'll consider partnerships with respected, established agents who like what we are doing.
Partnerships are typically informal. We offer genre exclusivity, with only one agent or agency viewing material in their genre. In return, we ask agents to prioritise and carefully consider highly-regarded submissions. Our job is to ensure only the best material reaches this stage.
We assess all users' reviewing skills using set texts. The goal is not to judge taste but to discern an ability to recognise human, original, well-written work.
Please get in touch if you are interested and we will provide you with more information. If you are an agent you may be interested in reading our analysis of the approaches to unsolicited submissions across agents in the UK.
Early adopters
We have spent significant time and effort designing our system and learned plenty when we ran a similar initiative back in 2006. However we know we won't get it perfectly right first time round.
We're looking for some early adopters (writers) to use The Frontlist and give us feedback. As we're testing, your work will not be sent through to an agent, but you'll be in pole position once we are underway.
