Authonomy - Online Writing Community

The first thing to do is create a profile to showcase your work and to do this you need to visit the registration page, and create a new account.

It's very simple, complete the forum by entering your email address, password etc. Your "Screen Name" is the name that will be publically visible on the site so choose wisely.

Once you have registered your account you are taken to the edit profile page, where you can personalise your page by uploading an avatar, writing a bio for yourself, or listing your favourite books.

Your profile is publically visible on the site and a link to your profile will be posted whenever you comment on another members work, or post in the forums etc. It is therefore important to make your profile page as interesting as possible in order to try and attract people to your work.

Before uploading your writing to authonomy you need to split your book into seperate documents. Each chapter needs to be in a seperate document. authonomy accepts uploads in either rtf or word (doc, docx) format.

In order to make your book public on authonomy you will need to upload at least 10,000 words.

To begin uploading a book, click on the upload link in the main menu. If you are not already logged in, you will need to do so at this point.

You will then be taken through authonomy's 5 step upload process.

Step 1 :
Choose a tile for your book, and choose your author name. This can be different to your normal authonomy screenname.
Your Pitch and Short Pitch are very important. Most community members will not bother to read a book with an uninteresting pictch.
The short pitch can be up to 25 words and is used in various book lists around the site. You need something that will grab your readers attention!

Step 2:
Choose a cover for your book.
Again this is very important. Having an attractive or interesting cover will go a long way to enticing readers to read your book.
If you dont have a cover, you can use one of authonomy's default covers.

Step 3:
Select Genres for your book (you can choose up to 4).
Select a classification for your book. If you select "over 18" then members will be required to log in before they can read your book.
Add tags to your book. Tags are keywords that describe the content of your book.
The more tags you put on your book, the more likely it is that people will find your book in the authonomy tag cloud.

Step 4:
Upload your chapters.
Before you started this process you should already have seperated your manuscript into 1 word or rft document per chapter.
Choose how many chapters you would like to upload, and authonomy will provide you with that number of file inputs to select your documents.
Select your documents, chapter by chapter, add a title for each chapter if you want to, and then when you are finished, click next to proceed to the last step.

Step 5:
Step 5 simply confirms your total word count and if you have uploaded over 10,000 words you can choose to make your book public to the rest of the community.

When you have made your book public on the site, it is automatically listed in the latest books chart and on your profile page.

The best place to start promoting your work is the writers forums
Introduce yourself to the community and maybe post a link in the shameless plugs forum. Your book has a unique url which you can copy and paste from the address bar of your browser when you are on your book's page.

Another way to promote your own work is to read and comment on other people's books. Try to make your comments detailed and insightful.
Don't just critisize or bash other peoples writing for the sake of it.
If you have taken the time to comment on another members writing, maybe ask them if they could possibly read and comment on your work.
You can leave any authonomy member a message by clicking on the message icon underneath their profile picture.

The Editors Desk Chart is the heart of authonomy, and is the motivation behind many of the hopefull writers that join the community.

At the end of every month. HarperCollins select the top 5 books from the editors desk chart for review and consideration.