Posts Categorized: SPFBO

The #SPFBO competition hasn’t officially started yet, but there’s already quite a buzz about it, and a number of bloggers are getting into the spirit by looking at the entrants for themselves and trying to guess what might make the final cut of 10 books from the starting grid of 300.

Blogger M D presley is one who’s been trying to pick likely winners, and he’s started a ‘brackets’ contest to run alongside the main competition. The idea is to come up with your own selection of three books from each blogger’s batch of 30. The winner is, presumably, the one whose choices are closest to the actual picks.

Now obviously there’s no way of predicting how the individual bloggers will react, so the game becomes an exercise in how to approach the problem Just how do you pick? By covers? Blurbs? First chapters? Throw darts at a list? You can see M D Presley’s thought processes and choices on his blog here (and yes, he did include The Dragon’s Egg in his list!).

For the third year running, Mark Lawrence (author of the Broken Empire series) is organising a contest for self-published authors. He’s rounded up 10 bloggers who read and review fantasy books, usually traditionally published, and 300 books submitted by self-published authors, and thrown the two groups together. Each blogger gets a ‘slush pile’ of 30 books to whittle down over six months to just one to go forward into the final. Then the ten bloggers read all ten finalists and score them, to come up with an overall winner.

And for the third year running, I’ve submitted one of my books. The first year, Bookworm Blues blogger Sarah Chorn looked at The Plains of Kallanash (she gave it 3/5 stars). The second year, Sarah looked at The Mages of Bennamore (she gave it 3/5 stars – I think we can see a pattern here!). This year, I’ve submitted The Dragon’s Egg, and it’s landed at The Quillery. This is a joint operation, so the books will be looked at by four different bloggers, which seems to me like a good system. Frankly, thirty books is just too much of a workload for an individual blogger to be expected to tackle.

There are some great books on the list this year (translation: the competition is very, very stiff). There’s a cover competition, too, and naturally I’m hoping my shiny new Deranged Doctor cover will rate a mention. As for the book, I’ve never expected to win, or even get to the final ten (did I mention, the competition’s very stiff?). My objective is purely to have the book read objectively by someone who normally reads only traditionally published books, who will measure my work by that standard. Nothing more or less than that. The Quillery have said they will read the first fifty pages or so of every book in their group, and decide what interests them enough to read the rest of from that, so of course I’d love to be one of those selected. But if they decide The Dragon’s Egg doesn’t interest them, so be it.

Whatever happens, it’s a great idea, and I’m thrilled to be part of SPFBO once again. If you want to follow along, you can see what’s happening on Mark Lawrence’s blog or on the site of one of the bloggers taking part, Booknest.eu.