Looking for a New Publishing Paradigm

I’m imagining a room -- probably a big one -- at Amazon Books HQ occupied by people whose desks have disappeared under envelopes stuffed with hopes and dreams and manuscripts. Motoko Rich of The New York Times explains what’s got me thinking this way:

From today through Nov. 5, contestants from 20 countries can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, which will assign a small group of its top-rated online reviewers to evaluate 5,000-word excerpts and narrow the field to 1,000.

So stop here for a minute and imagine the possible numbers that might be involved here. Thousands. Nay possibly hundreds of thousands. If the volume is anywhere near what I’m imagining, the whole thing might be worth it for the publicity alone. So, OK, again, with the field narrowed down to a manageable thousand:

The full manuscripts of those semi-finalists will be submitted to Publishers Weekly, which will assign reviewers to each. Amazon will post the reviews, along with excerpts, online, where customers can make comments. Using those comments and the magazine’s reviews, Penguin will winnow the field to 100 finalists who will get two readings by Penguin editors. When a final 10 manuscripts are selected, a panel including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the current nonfiction paperback best seller “Eat, Pray, Love,” and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, will read and post comments on the novels at Amazon. Readers can then vote on the winner, who will receive a publishing contract and a $25,000 advance from Penguin.

On paper, it all looks pretty good. If you take into account that most publishers seem capable of doing anything to get an inside track on the bestseller list, the potential circus getting ready to erupt here begins to make even more sense. The business of publishing books may be many things, but it’s seldom democratic. If this scheme is successful, that might begin to change. And the apple cart won't just be upset, it will be totally pissed.

With the apple carts neatly stacked to the side, Borders isn’t sitting around letting their arch rivals have all the fun. They’ve put together their own publishing party, though the advance is smaller and there’s a sexy, spacy cyber component via Gather:

Separately, Borders Group, the bookstore chain, is teaming with Gather.com, the social networking site, and Court TV to solicit unpublished manuscripts from mystery or crime writers. A panel of judges that includes the writers Harlan Coben and Sandra Brown will crown the winner from a pool of finalists selected by voters on Gather.com. The winner will receive a $5,000 advance and will be published by Borders itself.

The future of publishing looks democratic. We won’t know for a while if that’s a good thing or not.

The full piece is here.