#SPFBO: The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off 2016!

A little more than a year ago, author Mark Lawrence had a discussion on the matter of writers and self-promotion, later musing that:

“…as a new author, particularly a self-published one, it is desperately hard to be heard. It’s a signal-to-noise problem. Who knows how many Name of the Winds or [fill in your favourite] are lost to us because they just couldn’t be seen? None? A hundred?”

And thus, the great Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off was born. In a competition where more than 250 self-published authors submitted their book, reviewers at ten blogs acted as judges to choose their favorites and then ultimately picked one final winner. By all accounts it was a great success, so now the event is coming back for Round 2!

As you might have heard, the BiblioSanctum is one of the ten blogs taking part this year’s SPFBO2, and we are thrilled! This is a great opportunity for self-published authors and bloggers, and we can’t be more happy and excited to be involved.

This year, the competition is even tighter, with 300 entries submitted split evenly between the ten blogs. The BiblioSanctum will be doing our part in choosing one finalist from our pool of 30 books to put forth into the next phase. Our process for this will be very similar to some of the bloggers’ strategies from last year: in short, the three of us will put on our pseudo-literary agent hats, read partials of each manuscript (first five chapters, first 100 pages, etc.) while taking notes, then come together afterwards to discuss among ourselves which manuscripts we’ll be reading in full. We hope to end up with about three to five books (or more depending on time constraints) that we’ll be reading from cover to cover, and from this group we’ll be picking our eventual winner. At this time we’re still ironing out the nitty-gritty details, but we’ll be providing more updates soon.

We would like to thank all the authors who have sent in their work. Writing a novel is no small thing. It takes a lot of courage and dedication to tell a story and then send it off into the great wide world, and every single author here has accomplished something amazing that many dream of but few achieve. We would also like to thank Mark Lawrence for putting together this second iteration of the blog-off, and it’s an honor to be one of the ten blogs picked to take part in this incredible event. We’re in some fantastic company for sure! To everyone involved in this year’s SPFBO, we wish you all the best of luck in the coming months!

BiblioSanctum SPFBO 2016 Titles

Here is the list of our 30 books and their authors for SPFBO2 with links to their Amazon pages (or Goodreads/author pages, when no Amazon link is available) if you want to check out the book descriptions, followed by a gallery of covers:

Dragon’s Luck by Richard Hardeman
Gauntlet of Time by Trip Ellington
Shawndirea by Leonard D. Hilley II
Hell is Coming N.P. Martin
Cursed by J.A. Cipriano
Crimson Blade by Corey Soreff
Journey to Kokoroe by Laura L. Comfort
The Alignment by Kay Camden
Rise of the Reaper by Lorna Reid
Transition by O. Rising
Prison of Power by Chris Northern
Leilaka by H. Gibson
Elven Jewel by Kasper Beaumont
The Tenants of 7C by Alice Degan
Endgame by Susan Kelly
Rise of the Storm by Christina Ochs
Liath Luachra: The Grey One by Brian O’Sullivan
An Heir to Throns and Steel by M.C.A Hogarth
Descended from Dragons by Tricia Owens
The Siren’s Mask by Edward Hendrik
Seven Stones by David Higgins
Missy the Werecat by P.G. Allison
Malediction by Hans Cummings
Assassin’s Charge by Claire Frank
The Reborn King by Michael R. Miller
Beyond the Starline by Austin Hackney
Frontier World by Jedediah Kurth
The Warlock and the Wolf by Delfy Hall
A Symphony of Blood by Matthew Swiontek
Jeffrey Cook & Katherine Perkins – Foul is Fair