Authonomy and Secret Skin

Last week I heard a news story about a Birmingham writer who sold her novel to Harper Collins after previewing it on their Authonomy site. This obviously piqued my interest, so I decided to go have a look and find out if it might be helpful to me and my novel.
Basically you build a profile similar to the other networking sites, then upload at least ten thousand words of your book for other people to read, discuss and rate. Authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.
Once a month Collins pull out the top five books from the Editor’s Desk Chart, and passes them on to their Editorial Board. HC editors will read from the first 10,000 words of each manuscript, feed back their comments to the appropriate authors and, if the book's good enough push it up the ladder with a view to publishing.

After a bit of hesitancy (mainly due to a reluctance to having a chunk of my book available for anyone to read) I decided to bite the bullet and join up. It doesn't hinder your chances to submit the work to other publishers or agents, so it seems like a win-win situation.
So tonight I uploaded a photo, a profile, a pitch, a working cover for the book (cribbed from one of my Paris photo stash) and then the first eight chapters of my book, Secret Skin.
Here's my profile page and here's the page for the novel.
If anyone wants to join up, you can and should! You don't have to have a book to join; you can just sign up as a reader. That way you can back my book and push it up the charts.