Five other writers will be selected as runners-up; they will also be published on the website and collect $100 each.

Only previously unpublished writers are eligible to enter. Each written piece must contain 1,500-5,000 words. Those who enter will have to pay a $10 entry fee. A deadline has been set for 11:59 p.m. EST on July 1, 2013. Follow this link to read all the rules and learn all the details about this contest.

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HarperCollins’ William Morrow imprint has unveiled  a “digital-original mystery, suspense and thriller line” called Witness Impulse. The imprint will release its first digital titles in October, already stocked with 100 books acquired by editors.

William Morrow executive editor Dan Mallory will lead the new line. The launch will include classic Agatha Christie short stories, releasing digital singles of the Hercule Poirot stories and an omnibus edition. Here’s more about the imprint:

Witness will feature the same royalty structure as William Morrow/Avon’s other digital-first imprints: authors receive a 50% royalty once their book sells 10,000 copies (initial royalties start at 25%). They will not receive an advance … Even though these books are digital-first, the HarperCollins sales group is always seeking out opportunities in print, working with key retail accounts to execute tailored promotions in physical stores. To date, more than 60 percent of Impulse titles have a print format, with thousands of printed copies sold for each of those books.

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What’s your favorite kind of book? We’ve created a giant flowchart to help you browse the top 50 free eBooks at Project Gutenberg.

Click the image above to see a larger version of the book map. Your choices range from Charles Dickens to Jane Austen, from Sherlock Holmes to needlework. Below, we’ve linked to all 50 free eBooks so you can start downloading right now. The books are available in all major eBook formats.

Follow this link to see an online version of the flowchart, complete with links to the the individual books.

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Over at Time magazine, Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn shared her four favorite books with literary twists. We’ve linked to free samples of her picks below–some great summer reading for the beach…

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (pictured, via)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

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Here’s more about the case: “On March 12, the teacher was placed on administrative leave while police and school officials investigated whether he breached school policy or the law when he read from three books, among them Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, which became the focus of the probe when a 14-year-old student’s mother complained about the subject matter of the book.”

Despite the end to the criminal investigation, the Aiken County School District’s internal investigation is still ongoing. If you want to share your opinion about the controversy, here is contact information for the office of the school district’s superintendent.

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Players journey through New Orleans, Memphis, and Charleston Harbor searching for a magical tonic that allows vampires to endure open sunlight. Dahlia gathers clues, solves puzzles, and meets interesting characters along the way.

The press release offers this quote from Harris: “As an author, I have spent my life focusing on the power of words. I can honestly say that this collaboration with I-play has been eye-opening, showing the unique way stories can be told and characters brought to life in games.”

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The classic science fiction author Jules Verne received his own Google Doodle today–U.S. readers will see an image of the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea submarine’s portholes as they search with Google.

Verne was born on this date in 1828. According to UNESCO’s Index Translationum database, Verne is the third most translated author in the world–only topped by Walt Disney and Agatha Christie.

Other Google Doodles have honored Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, and Ahmad Shawqi. (Via Publishers Weekly)

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The Google Doodle team honored two writers in select countries last Friday. Oscar Wilde received a mysterious Dorian Gray-style doodle in honor of his 156th birthday. The Google team incorporated Arabic script into the logo to honor the birthday of poet Ahmad Shawqi (both embedded above, via).

Wilde’s most notable works include The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray. To this day, he is widely considered to be iconic in the gay community. He passed away at age 40 in 1900 from cerebral meningitis.

Shawqi was known primarily as a poet. He was particularly known in the Arabic literature community for being the first to write poetic plays. The play which gave him the most fame and recognition was the tragedy, The Death of Cleopatra.

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The authors are Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, James Whitcomb Riley, Edmond Rostand, Benjamin Franklin, and Agatha Christie.

Hemingway’s cousin, Edward actually opened Britain’s oldest nudist colony during the 1930s and called it Metherell Towers. So far, there are no accountings of Ernest having visited the colony. Most of the authors don’t give an explanation for the unclothed state, but French novelist Hugo had a legitimate methodical purpose behind his nudeness.

Neatorama reports: “When Victor Hugo, the famous author of great tomes such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, ran into a writer’s block, he concocted a unique scheme to force himself to write: he had his servant take all of his clothes away for the day and leave his own nude self with only pen and paper, so he’d have nothing to do but sit down and write.”

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To access the collection, readers need to sign up for the Audiofile newsletter between Dec. 16 and 29. In months past, the multimedia series has also included listeners’ guides to Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett. The free stories will be read by award winning producer David Timson, including the stories “Silver Blaze,” “The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk,” and “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plan.”

AudioFile publisher Robin Whitten explained: “With the 150th anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle‘s birth this year and the release of the Sherlock Holmes film starring Robert Downey, Jr., it’s an appropriate time to encourage a new generation of fans to discover the voices of Sherlock Holmes … the atmospheric settings, intellectual puzzles and intriguing characters of Arthur Conan Doyle make perfect audio listening.”

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According to Bookseller, the books were uncovered by John Curran, a Christie fan granted rare access to the late mystery writer’s 73 writing notebooks. The stories will be published in the forthcoming volume, “Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making.” The book is a £20 hardcover with a UK print-run of 20,000 and HarperCollins holds the world rights.

Here’s more from the report: “Secret Notebooks will include short story ‘The Mystery of the Dog’s Ball,’ which was eventually reworked into the novel ‘Dumb Witness,’ but unlike other Christie short stories-turned-­novels it remained unpublished. The other story ‘The Capture of Cerberus,’ was written to complete The Labours of Hercules, a collection which followed the 12 cases Poirot chose to end his career.” (Image via.)

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“We have absolute control over what’s made,” says Mathew Prichard, ACL chairman and Christie’s grandson, of various television series starring venerated Christie characters. “The most important thing about television is that it keeps the books alive. We definitely see a rise in sales across her whole list when the series are screened.” Another layer of protection is by trademarking: For dead authors who are still in copyright, trademarking may help estates keep control after the term ends, says intellectual property lawyer Laurence Kaye. “If you intend to republish a book that has gone out of copyright, you would have to do it in a way that did not infringe any trademarks.”

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Ridout said that HC planned to “substantially grow” its children’s business over the next few years. Santos said: “I am delighted to be joining the talented team at HarperCollins at such an exciting time for children’s publishing, and I look forward to working with them to develop and grow the business in the short and long term.”

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But that flurry will eventually slow as time passes. “We’ll probably see fewer titles. The energy that comes from a release of a new book in the series will be over,” says Roger Scholl, the editorial director of Bertelsmann AG’s Currency/Doubleday business imprint, who edited Tom Morris‘s IF HARRY POTTER RAN GENERAL ELECTRIC. Still, some caution against underestimating the passion of Harry Potter readers. John Granger, an English teacher at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pa., says academics will attempt to fix Rowling’s place in the cultural firmament, much as they continue to do so for such writers as Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie. “I’m fairly certain Potter-mania will not go the way of disco and the hula-hoop,” says Granger, who is currently working on HARRY MEETS HAMLET AND SCROOGE that will explore Harry’s literary antecedents.

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The publisher, Minuit, now wants to get it on supermarket and airport bookshelves. “I think the success shows that it has touched on a sensitive point,” Professor Bayard said, adding that his aim was to help people to avoid feeling guilty about their failure to read. He says, for instance, that he wants to free French intellectuals from the taboo that prevents them from confessing that they have only leafed through the works of Marcel Proust – “although that is the case for most of them”. He says that a valid literary opinion can be formed by dipping into a work, hearing others talk about it or skimming through a review of it.

And indeed, plenty of critics in the UK world are jumping off Bayard’s thesis. John Sutherland invokes David Lodge, Jacques Lacan and Stephen Pile in finding others who write about books and bullshitters; and Ros Taylor has some fun commenting on Bayard’s book even though she, of course, has not read it. Something tells me that if there are no plans for an English translation, there soon will be…

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