about me

Hi Authonomites,

I think it is time to throw in the towel. I'll still pop in fairly regularly.
I’ve enjoyed the site and the community enormously. From early on it was clear that as one moved up the rankings the pace would diminish until, eventually single digit moves became the norm. Of course there are and will, from time to time, be double digit jumps and drops. All in all though, the single digit moves understandably mean that you are just as likely to move up the chart one day and down the chart the next.

Over the course of my time on Authonomy I have found myself constantly revising my approach and, by and large, to good effect. Based on the original posting dates of the books at the top end of the chart it was clear that it could easily take a year to get to the top. (I am, of course, referring to the vast majority of authors who embrace Authonomy as it was intended and play by the rules rather than circumvent them through technicalities in order to jump to the front of the line.)

Anyway, that little rant aside, the Authonomy experience has been wonderful. The site is a great idea and I have a feeling that it, or at least variations of it, represents the shape of things to come.

As for why I am bowing out of actively “working” the site… it is not that the site by design is necessarily time consuming as it should be, it is that you inevitably hit a wall where advancing up the rankings the site becomes “all consuming”.

You find yourself competing with folks who almost seem to live on-site. I’ve watched my news feed and I see individuals backing so many books that they must be posting, dumping and replacing them as quickly as they can click the buttons. This apparently has worked wonders for their talent spotter rankings as they are near the top of the list. It became clear that if I had any hope of achieving a good talent spotter ranking, I was going to have to operate in like fashion.

Much the same seems the case with advancing my book up the chart. When my book began to flutter between 220 and 212 there were almost no people/books ranked above me that had not either already backed me or been backed by me. As for books below me, I’ve backed a ton but it has become more difficult to ferret out books that I honestly want to back based upon their merits.

One personal factor, I don't mean this as a complaint and I am probably not alone along these lines, is that I do not have internet access at home. The nearest internet access point is a 30 mile drive, one way. It always takes me a minimum of an hour on Authonomy, to find books, read enough to form an opinion and then back/comment. After that, it is 30 miles back home. This usually ends up taking two to three hours. That is a lot of time to find, read, comment and back five books. Doing this every day becomes both expense and time consuming.

Yet, even if I had internet access at home, and if I made any attempt at honest backings, I have gotten to a point in the rankings where backing five books a day is not paying off. (Granted, backing someone’s book is no guarantee that they will back yours. That is as it should be, but in order to draw people, especially people who are inclined to your genre, it doesn’t hurt if you like their work and back it.)

In fact, at my current ranking, by giving five honest backings a day, I might, on a good day get two return backings. Numerically, this obviously means that I have to reach out to many more than five books/people a day. Being on fewer bookshelves on any given day, also results on fewer backings by people I have not initiated contact with.

Based upon what I see others doing, I would have to contact/back fifteen or twenty books a day. Even if I had home internet, there are not enough hours in the waking day to work this site at that level with any integrity. And I don’t know about everyone else on the site, but those necessary hours spent reading and “writing” comments would be better spent writing my books.

The long and short of it is that I don’t see that I can do both. I wish I could, but as good an idea as I think Authonomy is, I don’t think the mere “possibility” of making the top five with no guarantee of getting published) is worth the necessary time and effort. I've been a on site for about three or four months. Assuming I could eventually get to the top five, if it were to take about a year, that leaves eight months to go and probably three or more hours on site every day. I believe my book and the energy to get it out there will be better served going old school. A potential year is a small eternity, especially when there are still more slush piles out there than you can shake a stick at.

Anyway, it has been a fun ride and I wish my fellow Authonomites all the best. I have sincerely enjoyed much of what I have read on site and I thank everyone who backed “The Wild, Wild Quest”. I don’t foresee pulling my book in the short term; I hold out hope that an agent may catch wind of it.

All the best,
J. A. Johnson

If any agents or publishers cpome across my book and are interested, my e-mail adress is...
42talk2jim@gmail.com

The Wild, Wild Quest is the first in a trilogy. THE BOOK IS COMPLETE. At present I am writing the final few chapters of book two. I won't post the title since it is something of a spoiler for book one, the WWQ.

favourite books

Dracula
the westerns of Louis Lamour
the sci-fi of PKD.
C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series
Kevin J. Anderson's, The Saga of Seven Suns
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Lucasfilm's Alien Chronicles
Lord of the World

my websites