The 7th Annual Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off – Call for Submissions

[EDIT: Submissions for SPFBO #7 (2021) are now closed! Check back next year if you’d like to enter.]

Hello everyone and welcome to 2021’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO)! If you’ve been following our site for awhile you probably know about this awesome contest started by author Mark Lawrence. But for those who don’t, let me give you some background.

What Is The SPFBO?

Mark created the SPFBO to highlight self-published fantasy novels, which tend to go less noticed than those published by traditional means. This starts with open submissions. Submissions close when 300 books have been entered (last year this took less than twenty-four hours!).

Next is Phase One. In it ten book review blogs split the 300 books, each taking thirty. Every blog handles this a little differently, but the idea is to read through the thirty-book slush pile and pick one lucky winner to move on to Phase Two. On Fantasy-Faction, our judging team let’s five books go at a time, doing mini reviews for each entry. Then we do full reviews of our favorites and announce our finalist for Phase One at the end.

Phase Two starts when all the blogs have picked their favorite. These ten books will be read by each blog. Again, each blog handles it differently, but here we do full reviews of each title, announcing our pick for overall winner last. When all the scores are tallied the winner is announced and wins the contest!

What Do I Win?

Good question! I’ll let Mark explain this part:

The winner will receive the prestigious Selfie Stick Award but the true prize is the publicity of being the winner, plus the bonus of being reviewed on the blogs of ten highly respected fantasy bloggers.

Frankly you can’t buy better publicity than that. The winning book will have been selected as the best from a field of 250+ self-published works.

My blog pages associated with last year’s SPFBO got 70,000 views during the contest and well over a hundred reviews were posted on the ten blogs!

We have an SPFBO (Spifbo) group on Facebook. And on Twitter the #SPFBO hashtag is a good way to keep updated.

For those interested in following the contest, you need do no more than watch this space and follow the group on Facebook and hashtags on Twitter. For those who would like to enter, here is some more information.

How Do I Enter?

Any self-published fantasy novel published before June 1, 2021 is eligible to enter. It doesn’t matter how long ago the book was published. We’ve read entries that were years old and those that came out only months before the contest started. And don’t worry. If your book is due out after June 1st you can always enter next year. Here are the official rules from Mark’s website:

1. No book entered in a previous SPFBO can be reentered.
2. The book must be first in a series or a stand-alone.
3. The book must actually be self-published by the start date (June 1, 2021), not something you’re considering self-publishing in future.
4. It must be a fantasy book. (If you say it’s fantasy, then it is. But if it isn’t really, it won’t get far.) [Note from Jennie: There have been excellent science fiction books that scored poorly due to judges not agreeing they were fantasy.]
5. One book per author.
6. No anthologies.
7. No short stories. Books must be 40,000 words or longer. [Note from Jennie: Books have had issues in this category as well. Check your word counts!]
8. Your manuscript must be uploaded via the online form when you apply to enter the contest. You will not be allowed to update or change it.
9. Don’t contact the blog to which you’ve been assigned. You can contact me [Mark Lawrence] about important issues.

If your book qualifies, here’s how you enter:

• Submissions are Closed.

Make sure you include the following with your entry:

• Your name (the one on the book if you use a pseudonym)
• The title of the book
• The book itself (must be in MOBI format)
• The book cover separately (JPEG preferred)

You can also include the following to help out the judges:

• The book itself in EPUB format
• The book’s Goodreads page
• The book’s Amazon page

Summary

We’ve been a part of the SPFBO since year one and we love finding new authors and hidden gems during this contest. I’ll be posting near when Phase One begins, to introduce you to our group of books and our judges for this year. You can see a list of past winners and finalists as well as much more in-depth information about the SPFBO in general and this year’s contest in particular on Mark Lawrence’s website.

Good luck to all who are submitting we can’t wait to read your stuff!

I would like to thank Mihir Wanchoo from Fantasy Book Critic’s judging team for his informational post in the SPFBO Facebook group, which I used as a reference for this article. You can find him on Facebook and as a reviewer on the Fantasy Book Critic website as well as The Fantasy Hive website.

Title image background by Martin Hetto.

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