The Del Rey Digital Writing Workshop is a free online mentoring service for science-fiction and fantasy writers. Participants critique each others' work and must review as many stories as they post up themselves. Del Rey Books, a Random House imprint, offers e-book publication contracts to four books a year after a competition in which authors post up three chapters nad a synopsis. The publisher's editors will announce their first two choices for e-publication in September 2001. This is a forum for writers, editors, agents and publishers.
Participants exchange ideas about the writing life and the business of writing.
Every month a new writing advice question is answered. Visitors sign up for a free monthly newsletter, which includes the new advice topic for the month, author interviews, writing competitions and guest columns from published authors. There is a new set of e-publishers who do not have an established track record. Some are genuine publishers operating in the new environment and some come perilously close to vanity publishers eager to make money out of the unwary. Some offer useful services to self-publishers.