Publishers and literary agents are scouring sites like Wattpad, which offers free fiction by amateur writers, to find authors with big and enthusiastic followings. On Kickstarter, writers last year collectively raised $22 million in funding for some 6,000 works in progress, which ranged from teenage novels and comics to nonfiction books. Several new companies dedicated to enlisting crowds in funding literature have opened in recent years, including Unbound, which allows readers to give direct financial support to authors in exchange for a copy of a finished book.

Even some established best-selling authors are dabbling in crowdsourcing. For his coming book “The Innovators,” Walter Isaacson posted a chapter on the website Medium to get readers’ feedback and ideas about his central argument, which posits that technological breakthroughs often come from collaboration rather than lone geniuses.

Some question whether fans will have greater success finding undiscovered gems than the publishing industry’s traditional gatekeepers. Two years ago, Avon Romance, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, created a site for aspiring romance writers to share their novels and get feedback, in the hope that great new novels would surface. A handful of editors comb through the site every week to evaluate the manuscripts that are getting the most “loves” — the equivalent of Facebook “likes.” So far, 500 works have been posted, but none have been acquired for publication.

Erika Tsang, the editorial director of Avon, said she was a bit skeptical of the rating system. “Honestly, a lot of the time it’s the writers’ relatives who are ‘loving,’ ” she said.

It is also unclear whether involving fans in the editorial evaluation process is any more efficient than sorting through unsolicited manuscripts or relying on submissions from agents. In Britain, HarperCollins created a website where writers can upload their manuscripts and evaluate one another’s work. The site, Authonomy, now has about 100,000 registered users and more than 15,000 manuscripts. Every month, a team of HarperCollins editors reads the five highest-rated manuscripts, but so far just 15 of the novels posted on Authonomy have been published.

“We know there are some best sellers in there,” said Rachel Faulkner, a HarperCollins editor. “We just need to stir the pot a bit and get the best ones to rise to the top.”