For a long time, I’ve been a huge fan of writing communities such as WEbook. It’s a great place for writers to post their work and get fast feedback, collaborate with other writers and maybe even find a literary agent. We posted a project on WEbook last year to gather submissions for our Eve’s Harvest anthology (available 1 September) and were thrilled to be able to publish a few stories submitted by WEbookers.

Worthy of Publishing is another great writing community, and I especially like this one because of the connection to Australian and New Zealand writers. This site is quite strongly geared to connecting writers directly with publishers, and connecting authors with readers once their book is published.

As a publisher, I find both sites incredibly useful for discovering new authors and to be able to preview writing without having to write those horrible rejection letters that are inevitable when you open the door to unsolicited submissions.

Then today I discovered Pubmission via Twitter and immediately signed up as a Beta tester. What I like about the concept so far is that potential submissions come to me in a digest format once a week (I picked Friday morning) and I can then preview those that jump out at me. This will save me a lot of time browsing (especially when my internet connection slows down) and I hopefully won’t get too distracted by other stories once I’ve read through my shortlist. Authors can submit directly to Odyssey via Pubmission, and submit to other publishers at the same time. So even if the book isn’t right for Odyssey, it could get picked up by a publisher the author hasn’t considered or even heard of!

I have signed some great authors via direct submissions, and haven’t ruled out re-opening to unsolicited submissions completely. But this could be an interesting opportunity to explore, and I will share my findings over the coming Fridays.

I’d love to hear from any authors who have been involved with any writing communities or slush pile services, and what your experiences have been like.