So here’s a good one: earlier this year, in an effort to discover new talent, Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, teamed up with the social networking site Gather.com to launch a competition entitled “First Chapters”. Taking its cues from American Idol and its ilk, the website offered a forum for any writer to post a first chapter to be judged and voted on by the general populous. When all was said and done, more than 2,600 writers responded, and those entries were pared down to five finalists, who were in turn judged by a team of industry professionals and pared down to two. The grand prize winner, Terry Shaw, submitted his novel, The Way Life Should Be, entirely on a last-minute whim; runner-up Geoffery Edwards had sent his Civil War epic Fire Bell in the Night to more than three hundred publishers before being discovered. Now, come Sept. 18, both will be enjoying prominent positions in Borders Stores across the country. Hot damn.

The contest was so successful that Gather.com has started another — this one for romance writers — and plans to hold more general fiction competitions in the near future.

Read the original NPR article here.