Aspiring authors get help online

In the old days of publishing, getting your manuscript into the hands of an editor often meant mailing the unsolicited finished product to the offices of literary agents or editors, where it would receive a cursory look from an editorial assistant — or none at all. A modern version of the slush pile is the online “writing community,” a website where aspiring novelists can post their ideas, writing samples or manuscripts and open them to comments and reviews from strangers.

On Tuesday Penguin Group USA, the publisher of Tom Clancy, Kathryn Stockett and Nora Roberts, unveiled its own venture, Book Country, a website for writers of genre fiction.

In its initial phase, Book Country will allow writers to post their own work — whether it’s an opening chapter or a full manuscript — and receive critiques from other users, who can comment on points like character development, pacing and dialogue.

Later, the site will generate revenue by allowing users to self-publish their books for a fee by ordering printed copies. (The books will bear the stamp of Book Country, not Penguin, and the site is considered a separate operation from Penguin.)

The site will also explain the business of finding an agent, marketing and promoting a book, using social media and handling digital and subsidiary rights. Penguin hopes the site will attract agents, editors and publishers scouting for new talent, and allow writers to produce work with more polish and direction than they could otherwise.

Helping writers -- The project has been spearheaded by Molly Barton, the director of business development for Penguin and the president of Book Country.

“One of the things I remember really clearly from my early editorial experiences was this feeling of guilt,” Ms. Barton said in an interview. “I would read submissions and not be able to help the writer because we couldn’t find a place for them on the list that I was acquiring for. And I kept feeling that there was something we could do on the Internet to really help writers help each other.”

Book Country users are invited to submit work in certain genres: romance, fantasy, science fiction, thriller and mystery. Those categories are broken down into subgenres like military science fiction, steampunk, space opera and alternate history. To discourage plagiarism, administrators have disabled the copy-and-paste and print mechanisms on the site.

Barton said she had been influenced by web sites like Ravelry, a popular site for knitters and crocheters. It has more than 1.3 million registered users.

Countless writers’ websites have popped up in recent years, including Writers Cafe, Protagonize and Mibba, but executives at Penguin said other sites did not provide so comprehensive an experience as the site they wanted to create.