For nearly 20 years, Franklin Leonard has made it his mission to help undiscovered writers find an audience.

In 2005, he started the Black List — an annual survey of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays. Over the years, the Black List evolved to include a website that has hosted tens of thousands of scripts, TV pilots and plays, and became an indispensable tool for studios and producers. More than 400 screenplays that landed on the Black List’s annual survey have been produced, including acclaimed films like “Spotlight,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The King’s Speech.”

Now, Leonard is tackling another industry in which writers struggle, and mostly fail, to break through: publishing. He's adding novel manuscripts to the Black List, aiming to crack the perennial problem of the slush pile.

Aspiring novelists can now post manuscripts on the Black List, where they can potentially get discovered by the literary agents, editors and publishers who subscribe to the site.

The goal, Leonard said, is to create a new avenue for authors whose work may have gone overlooked because they lack a literary agent or the right industry connections.

This lack of visibility, he said, “has really negative consequences for the writers who are trying to get their work to somebody who can do something with it, but also for the publishing industry itself, because it’s not necessarily finding the best writers and the best books,” Leonard said.