American Idol, but For Books!

Sure it’s innovative, fun, and John Freeman is involved, but I just can’t get on-board with the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award sponsored by Penguin, Amazon, and Hewlett Packard.

From today through Nov. 5, contestants from 20 countries can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, which will assign a small group of its top-rated online reviewers to evaluate 5,000-word excerpts and narrow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

It’s a complicated process, and the winning book should be rather popular, but there’s still something about this carnival-like approach to publishing that bugs me. I think it’s because of my snobbish notions.