Will I get a cut of the profits, you think?

From Rocky Mountain News: "The Web site Reality TV Magazine, among others, recently reported that the writer's equivalent of American Idol will begin airing on British TV in July. According to the site, writers will pitch their book ideas to a panel of judges; the winner will land a publishing contract."

From my post, "Why have any editors choosing books at all?"

"My new reality TV-book pitch? Hide a literary agent with a lucrative publishing contract on a jungle island. Crash land a group of troubled-but-of-course- Hollywood-attractive, would-be writers there (with a camera crew) and release some unspecified monster that starts killing them gruesomely one by one. Copy editors or book critics might volunteer for this role.

The trick? Each author has been given part of a coded map that can lead them to the agent. And only the agent knows how to kill the monster -- as well as get the author a movie option. All this will require teamwork, obviously, because the longer it takes the writers to find the agent, the more time the agent will have to spend the advance and screw up the movie rights.

But only one writer will get published. So the writers need to work together, and they need to feed each other to the monster. Kind of like literary life in New York.

At any rate, the really important thing, as the Quill Awards like to point out, is that all this idiocy will somehow encourage people to read."