Late last week, Touchstone Books announced the finalists in its "Project Publish" competition, a contest run in collaboration with "prediction market" specialists Predict Media. After watching the votes accumulate for various book proposals on the Media Predict website, senior editors culled five authors from the top scorers; voting on the finalists, based on the excerpts published online, will continue until October 9, when the most popular proposal will receive a book contract, "so long as the completed manuscript satisfies Touchstone's publishing criteria." (Technically, I think I'm not supposed to call this voting, because it's all about predicting which book has the best shot at being commercially successful, but "voting" takes less time to type.) Among the offerings: a lad lit novel, a guide to email management, and a time-travel fantasy about the crucifixion of Jesus.

Meanwhile, the two winners from Touchstone's previous "so you want to be a published writer?" contest, a partnership with Gather.com, showed up in my mailbox recently, so I figured, as long as they called it the "First Chapters writing competition," based on the model where voters indicated which entries they'd like to read more of, why not have a look at those first chapters? I have to confess that the winning book, a murder mystery called The Way Life Should Be by a newspaperman named Terry Shaw, didn't really do anything for me—the characters weren't interesting enough to me to care much about the standard issue "amateur sleuth gets angry at police's indifferent reaction to a friend's death" plot—but Sarah was always the mystery expert here. The runner-up, on the other hand, Geoffrey S. Edwards's Fire Bell in the Night, was much more effective. I actually read a few chapters in, mostly because it takes nearly forty pages to introduce the protagonist identified on the back cover copy, but the tensions leading up to a slave rebellion on a South Carolina plantation are drawn out well...and even though this looks to be much the same type of story as Shaw's novel—journalist keeps poking at people's secrets until they spill out like crazy—it did a better job of holding my attention. (Given the respective rankings of the two novels, of course, your mileage may well vary.)