The four finalists for the LOL Handz Contest are:

RebyJ:

KarenD:

Karen:

Mary:

Voting is below - and I’ll keep this entry open through the weekend for your votin’ plehzur.

When are they going to stop the rebate program? Check the announcement:

The Feds bailed out Wall Street last week to the tune of $700 Billion, and here at Fictionwise we say: why let the fat cat CEO’s have all the fun? So starting now, every single title in our store sports a massive 50% Micropay Rebate when paying by credit or PayPal! But hurry: we will run this insane eBook Bailout Package either through Sunday October 12, or until we give away $700 Billion worth of Rebates, whichever comes first!

I laughed so hard - way to spin horror into humor, Fictionwise. $700 billion worth of rebates? Bring it on!

Thanks to Vera for the link. 

So! A contest is born! Take that fabulous cover and LOL-caption it. Certainly we can do better than “FAIL,” because certainly, while it’s an artistic fail, as a matter of promotional opportunity, for Christina Dodd, it was utterly full of win.

Your quest: take the cover, and LOL Caption it. You have 24 hours, and can post them in the comments or post links to an image hosted elsewhere. If you do post them here, please don’t make the image more than 325 pixels wide, please. Vote for your favorites in the comments, please, and then we’ll have a vote-off for the top 3 over the weekend.

Grand Prize? The book itself, of course! One pristine, fabulous copy of the three-handed woman adorning the cover of Christina Dodd’s Castles in the …

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Citing evidence such as GalleyCat’s side by side comparison of Sue Hepworth’s Zuzu’s Petals, and Bookninja’s contest to recast classic novels to appeal to popular markets like “romance, chick lit, thriller, scifi, fantasy, celebrity kids, etc”, Kellogg’s entry follows a 7 October article in The Independent that questions whether authors are being asked to “dumb down” their work to appeal to a larger readership.

As for me: I already voted. (Yes, huge relief. PHEW.) I don’t as a rule trust the voting machines in any location, particularly since every time I’ve voted there’s been a different machine from a different manufacturer. So I am a permanent absentee in the state of New Jersey (sounds like a paranormal romance plot, doesn’t it? Permanently absent, but still there). My #2 pencil and I voted this weekend. One down, only a few million to go.

Back to your regularly scheduled romance novel banter. 

And what to the corner of my eye should appear but a video directed by...Stephenie Meyer? From a genre I call “whine-rock” comes Jack’s Mannequin, and a host of rather obvious images that are the visual equivalent over overly-sweet candy. Hearts! Lots of them! Oy, says I. People’s article has a quote from the band’s singer-keyboardist stating that the video has a whimsical, other-worldliness to it.” Oy, again, says I.

I don’t have a lot of time at the ‘puter to do the full on Google-Fu, but I’m pretty sure that the floating pale corpse-like person near the end is the actress from Twilight.

Wanna see? Have a look & listen:

Now - the real question: what romance authors ought to be directing music videos? I mean, come on now. Five minutes with the
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“The Jewel of Medina” is a second-rate bodice ripper or, rather, a second-rate bodice ripper-style romance (it doesn’t really have sex scenes). It’s readable enough, but it suffers from large swaths of purple prose. Paragraphs read like ad copy for a Rudolph Valentino movie.

“From my camel’s hump I could feel the leaf-kissed air moving like a cool, moist cloth across my brow as I inhaled the fresh clean scents of petal and blade and springs gilding the morning,” says A’isha. The newly founded Islamic community is fleeing Mecca, and she’s selling air freshener. Also, it’s unfortunate that Jones refers to male genitals as “the scorpion’s tail.” Perhaps this is an Arabic metaphor, like the Petrarchan conceit of lips like cherries, but it doesn’t work.

Thanks to Jessica M. via earlyword.com.

The problem (as we see it) stems from the flagrant mischaracterization of the novel by Islamic studies professor Denise Spellberg, whom Ballantine Books had approached hoping for a blurb, as “soft core pornography” and anti-Muslim propaganda; Spellberg’s zealous efforts to alert Muslims to the book’s impending publication were particularly effective in giving the public a distorted impression of its contents. And we do mean distorted: Now that we’ve read the novel for ourselves, and seen precisely two paragraphs that might be construed as sexually explicit (and that’s being extremely generous to one of them), Jones deserves a public apology from Spellberg for her public misrepresentations.

So far no word from professor Spellberg. But, according to the image posted by Ron, the book is already a bestseller in Serbia after it was re-released.

(Thanks to Rebecca …

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