Imagine a web contest for authors based on the American Idol process. Authors publish the first chapter of a book and compete to continue to the next chapters. After three elimination rounds, the winner of a $5,000 book contract is picked by "representatives from Simon & Schuster, Borders bookstores and Gather.com".
That is what the "First Chapters" contest is doing for members of gather.com who want to strut their written stuff in front of the judges. It's certainly a new approach to finding good books from the slush pile of writing submissions.
It's not so obvious from the gather.com front page where to find info, but after some digging I was able to find the rules
here and more information from the First Chapters administrator can be found from some
other posts. So if you are interested, you have until March 15th to make your submission and satisfy the entry requirements.
From
ZDNet.