Any news on this?

Pete

OK, I can report back on my experience with this. A little disingenuously (and cowardly) I submitted some chapters of a book already accepted by an agent, just to see what would happen, and have something to judge the results with.

Essentially your work is allocated to five reviewers, and you are allocated five works to review. You have to review the samples based on five categories (Concept/Characterisation/Appeal/Setting/General), each with a score out of ten. You can therefore allocate a maximum of 50 points to each work, with a total maximum of 250 points being allocated by the five reviewers. Anything that scores over 225 will be seen by an agent/publisher.

I dutifully spent a couple of hours agonising over the reviews allocated to me. Although the reviews are anonymous, I tried to be kind, something I usually have to work at. My efforts were tested by some poor writing and synopses that made no sense, and I became more Simon Cowell-like with every review. I now understand how slush-pile readers quickly learn to look for reasons to dismiss manuscripts early on. Should one read on if the first sentence is incomprehensible, or worse, boring? My worry was that these same people would be reviewing my work, although there is nothing to say that a bad writer can't be a good reviewer, or indeed vica versa.

You can see your work in the rankings as reviews are attached to it and if you don't pay £10 that's all you will see, you won't get to see the actual wording of the reviews. But who doesn't want to see what people think of their work?

Although I scored fairly well comparatively, I fell well short of the magic threshold, and one reviewer brought my average right down, scoring 2 & 3's in every category. I asked my wife to judge the reviews of my work. She says two of them were articulate, thoughtful and fair. One was rude and very dismissive, and the other two obviously dashed off quickly with no thought for coherence or sentence structure (a bit like some of my posts on here).

One can appeal if a particular review scoring is inconsistent (as was one for my work), and it will be assigned to someone else if Frontlist agree. I did not bother, simply because even if a new reviewer had scored a maximum 50 points it would still have put me a few points short of the threshold.

In conclusion I think the process is flawed, in that you do not know who is reviewing your work - what their fictional interests are, whether they have the critical tools with which to do it, etc. A more generous person than myself might say that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it is not something I happen to believe - I hate radio phone-ins for that reason! I suppose you could argue that published work would be subject to a similar variability of review, but I would counter that at least these would be done to a certain standard and that it does not affect your chances of being published.

In order to reach 225 you would not just have to have good writing, but you would need to be lucky with your reviewers, and all five would need to like it and score it highly. I'm not sure what sort of writing would appeal to five different people with differing tastes, it would have to have general appeal (Dan Brown?), and mine obviously doesn't :-)

It is early days for the site, so it may become more sophisticated; specifying a minimum wordage for reviews might help for instance.

It is tempting, as a naughty experiment, to submit something very good but obscure (something in the public domain) or something very bad, just to see what would happen. My wife tells me this is a stupid idea. She is usually right.

Mischa

Mischa, that's absolutely fascinating, thank you for such a full report. If nothing else, let's hope the site educates some as-yet-unblooded aspiring writers to the reality of the slushpile - the vast size, the hugely variable quality and the inevitable subjectivity of the reader.

I'm interested that the threshold mark for the work being looked at by an agent is so high - it means [pause for maths] that you've got to average 9 out of 10 for each category for each reviewer. Which is fine unless, as you've found, you get a reviewer who just completely doesn't get it, or likes dishing out low marks out of machismo.

A more generous person than myself might say that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it is not something I happen to believe

I think everyone is entitled to their opinion, but no one's obliged to listen to it (which is where the radio phone-in is at fault) so I'd agree with you: if the critting assignments are random, then the ratings need to be taken with great caution. And I agree, even among professionals it's still subjective, but they do at least have to try to see it from a broader standpoint of 'will enough people like it?' not just 'do I like it.'

But I'll still be watching the project with interest. Imagine the ballyhoo they'll manage to make with the first book that gets published off it!

Emma

Emma,

I think everyone is entitled to their opinion, but no one's obliged to listen to it

I should qualify by saying that I think that one needs to earn an opinion, and we need to know how it was earned to decide whether, as you correctly put it, we are obliged to listen to it.

M

Yes, I think that's right - it's not worth much unless you know the person's qualifications for holding it, and the information on which they're basing it. And I'm with you on the radio phone-ins.

Emma

I gave The Front List a try too. Mischa has already done an excellent job of explaining how it all works. We had very similar experiences: I submitted some samples from my first novel, which generally gets fairly positive reviews. It scored higher than average, but not above the 225. The quality and attitude of the reviews was highly variable. Three were reasonable, if a little brief, one was cursory - the reviewer complained that my work wasn't the right genre for them to mark! - and one was a vicious hatchet job. I appealed against the worst review and the site manager agreed to allocate it to someone else. I'm still waiting for that to come in. I didn't receive any great insights into my own work from the reviews that I had, although the good ones were quite encouraging (a few 9s). I think I could have saved myself a tenner. WW is a much better place for honest critiques.

Aside from the flaws of anonymous reviewing, I pointed out to TFL that they may need to work on a better mechanism to control the tendency in some people to want to rubbish the 'opposition' as a way of improving their own chances, a sort of literary The Weakest Link. He said he'd look into it.

Four of the five pieces that I reviewed were not particularly good, but one was excellent. When I dug a bit deeper, I discovered that it was an extract from a previously published book. Maybe someone beat you to it, Mischa, or perhaps they were trying to attract the attention of a big publisher, as their current one looks vanishingly small.

The success threshold seems very high at 90% plus; it would be interesting to know how many, if any, have made it over the bar so far.

I'm in two minds about whether to re-submit, but I probably won't.

Cheers
Tony

Mischa and Tony - yes, that was almost exactly my experience as well. 3 positive but one line reviews and one rude hatchet job that screamed 'I'm only reviewing this because I have to' from every sentence. As far as I can tell, no work submitted has yet got over the magic 225 out of 250 and I can't see how anything would, if only because few reviewers would give at least 9/10 in every category to anything, however brilliant. Call me bitter and unpublished, but to be honest I feel slightly bilked of my £10!

In order to reach 225 you would not just have to have good writing, but you would need to be lucky with your reviewers, and all five would need to like it and score it highly.

This is absolutely true. So far I've only received two reviews of my work, so I'm still waiting for the other three to come in...but they'll have to be pretty darn amazing to boost my score up to 225! I do think that there is a real danger of people marking down other writing in order to give their own piece a boost...the problem with this is that is everyone marks each other poorly, no one (not even the deserving writers) will ever make it to 225. Which might well have been part of the moderators' plan!

Of the pieces I was assigned to read, two were pleasantly entertaining "light reads" that I'm sure could make it to a supermarket shelf. One I recognized from Write Words, and fortunately it was excellent - no moral dilemma there about supporting someone from this site! The other was downright rejectable, with a synopsis that made no sense (and went on...and on...and on...)

Would definitely stick with WW instead.

I wrote to The Front List with the points made on here (re quality of reviews and threshold) and received this reply.

Hi Mischa,

Many thanks for taking the time to provide us with feedback.

You make two good points.

We think that enforcing a word limit may not deal appropriately with
the problem. A poorly written review of 5 words is unlikely to be
received any more happily than a poorly reviewed work of 20 words.
Instead we are thinking about how we might provide a system to allow
writers more of a say on the critiques - but as you say we still have
a system to appeal critiques, which we believe to be fair.

We're also on the brink of adding code to allow 'professional'
reviewers to come in and take a look at any pieces of work and provide
a review - something that Scott Pack is keen to do - so we hope that
this will also give writers an opportunity to get their work exposed.

Regarding the threshold. You may be right - we may reduce this a
little further over time - but in reality the project must ensure that
only exceptional pieces are passed on to A.M Heath or The Friday
Project, else The Frontlist is not being fair to writers or
agents/publishers. This is something that we feel will become much
clearer over time.

This is a new concept - we think it's clear what we're trying to
achieve - inevitably there will be niggles, but we've had some great
feedback and believe that the project is getting closer to becoming a
recognised alternative to the slushpile.

Interesting response, Mischa. I've found the moderator to be fair and open to suggestions, whenever I've dealt with him. TFL and schemes like it do have the potential to create a more sane and rational approach to dealing with unsolicited submissions. Once the reviewing criteria and processes are sorted out, an agent could skim, say, the top ten percent of submissions to see if there is something which piques their interest. The idea of involving professional reviewers is also interesting; it would get around the 'reviewing the competition' mindset that some TFL reviewers seem to suffer from.

It's worth feeping an eye on TFL to see how it develops.

Tony


<Added>

'feeping'?

Did anyone take a look at the YouWriteOn website which Naomi referred to earlier in this thread? It's on sort of the same principle as the Front List one but it's backed by the Arts Council. The submitted pieces are reviewed and rated by members as on the Front List and the top 5 (I think ) are given a crit by professional reviewers and then passed on to agents. The best at the end of the year gets published. One of the differences with the Front list is that there is no threshold to cross, it's just the top five that go through. It's also free.

I joined and as far as I can make out this is how it works. For every crit you do of a members piece you get a reading credit which you can assign to your own uploaded piece and then it will be allocated randomly to a member who requests a reading assignment.

There are 3 phases to a crit. Firstly you give a score between 1 and 5 for 8 different categories eg characters, setting etc. Then you write a review of the piece with a minimum of 100 words. Finally you have to complete a reading test which is a multiple choice test of 5 questions to make sure that you have read the piece. If you fail this test you don't get the credit. You can't see what anyone else said about the piece until after you have submitted your own crit.

You can do as many or as few reading assignements as you like but obviously that influences the number of reviews you get back. You can also pass on a reading assignment if the genre doesn't suit you for example but you can only do that once per day.

I've only just uploaded my own piece so I didn't get any feedback yet but I think the concept seems good. Anyone got any experience of it?

A.

Hi, Ashlinn. It sounds as if the Arts Council have put more effort into the review process for their site. I'll be very interested to hear how you fare. Good luck.
Tony

It does sound like a better way of doing it, to cream off the top scorers rather than setting a high bar for everyone to reach.

I did register with YWO after reading Ashlinn's post and started my first review, although I couldn't continue after the first few sentences of bad grammar and spelling mistakes. I suppose this is price you pay.

M

Hi Tony and Mischa,

I'll let you know how I get on.
As far as I can work out you need a minimum of 5 reviews to qualify for the Top Ten list. The rules are quite complex so I'm not certain I've worked it out fully.
Mischa, I've done four reviews and read another one which I've yet to write the review for. I know what you mean about grammar and sentence structure. It something that really gets to me. One of the pieces in particular was quite bad on that score but to be honest three of them were surprisingly good, even if one was in a genre I don't read.

A.