I think the best thing to do if you're serious is to put your money where your mouth is and put out a CD.

You can do endless floor spots, open mics and folk clubs and whatnot for years and never get any feedback beyond a polite round of applause.

Or you can record your current repertoire as best you can over the course of a month. And then press up 1000 copies of a CD for around £400 (cheapest I can currently find is colour card wallets at: www.wr4multimedia.co.uk/index.php/cd-replication.html)

And then send out your album to every journalist at every magazine you think is relevant. Send out your album to every festival and club organizer to think is relevant. Send out all 1000 of them if you have to.

If you're really serious about a pro career, you might even want to set yourself up as a business and claim a portion of this money as a promotional/marketing expense. But that's a whole other thread.

Don't worry about whether you sound too much like Martin Carthy for now.
Just get out there.