The wait is over. Presenting the finalists for the “Sweet by Design” cover contest.

What a week for yours truly…But like the man said, the show must go on! The “novel slash social media experiment,” Sweet by Design is finally over. It took a bit longer than I’d anticipated; reformatting the novel for WordPress was time-consuming. And since I was adding links and photography along with text the task grew even harder. But it was worth it.

In terms of the cover contest, it appears the added time allowed for some pretty terrific 11th hour creations, several ‘sweet’ designs submitted in the last 24 hours. Frankly, most of the covers were damn good -arguably better than my silly book! All 70 of them can be viewed on the blog and will remain there indefinitely. Thank you, each and every entrant, reader and observer for making my So-Me experiment a success. More people read at least part of SBD than the combined total readers for my previous two novels combined.

I’d also like to thank my co-judge, best-selling author and digital publishing pioneer, M.J. Rose. Her input was a key factor in helping me choose the winning entries.

This is how the judging worked. The panel was divided into three voting parts. M.J. had a third of the vote, me another third, and your voting comments represented the final third. Pretty simple. Through this process, we came up with eight finalists, one of which will be chosen for the cover of my novel, Sweet by Design as well as win the author’s unused iPad. The second place vote getter gets an iPod Shuffle. Those two winners will be announced next week. I promise!

Please visit Sweet by Design for designer credits, book chapters and other tidbits. Enough blather… Without further ado, here are the finalists:

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