SPFBO 2024 Surprise: South Breaks is a Semi-Finalist

Above is the badge that a book may wear if its nominated as a semi-finalist by any of the review blogs participating in SPFBO.

But let’s back up a little.

What is SPFBO?

The acronym stands for “Self Published Fantasy Blog Off”, which is a contest created by Mark Lawrence. This year it has been going on for ten years, which is an amazing feat.

In Mark’s words, the SPFBO is meant to

shine a light on self-published fantasy. It exists to find excellent books that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. It exists to help readers select, from the enormous range of options, books that have a better chance of entertaining them than a random choice, thereby increasing reader faith in finding a quality self-published read.

You can find the blog post where he explains every here: The Official Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off homepage

Why is SPFBO so important?

As far as I know, SPFBO is the only online contest for fantasy books that does not rely on votes by readers. Instead, it teams up with ten review blogs – and the bloggers that cooperate with them – in order to rate the 300 books that can enter every year.

In other words, it’s not a popularity contest. The winner does not get decided by how many votes an author can mobilize. To me, that’s always been inherently unfair because when all is said and done, the number of readers an author can entice to vote for their book says nothing at all about its quality.

It bears repeating: SPFBO is not a popularity contest.

Yes, your book can end up with a reviewer who doesn’t like it for some reason (someone who hates dragons had to review Dragon Prey two years ago, and it didn’t go that well, even though they tried to be fair). Even so, it will be your book that decides the contest, not the size of your email list.

So what about South Breaks and the SPFBO?

I managed to get South Breaks into this year’s round of SPFBO. That wasn’t guaranteed. They have so many interested authors and slots filled up so quickly last year that they changed to a new system this year: Authors can enter books over a period of 24h, and then a random system will select 300 of them to be distributed to the participating review blogs.

I got lucky and South Breaks was among those chosen. (To be very fair, a book can be entered again and again until it has participated once. Mark really is a good guy here.)

What is a Semi-Finalist?

Each participating review blog pick up to five Semi-Finalists from their batch of 30 books. Once that is done, the team gets together and picks their Finalist. That means, out of 300 books, 10 make it to the final round, and from those ten a final winner is chosen.

Even being a semi-finalist is a good thing for a book. It means that more reviewers are going to read and review it, and that gives a book more online reach – and hopefully, more readers. More readers can mean even more reviews and ratings, and well… with a bit of luck, it can become an uplifting spiral.

It’s really what I am hoping for with South Breaks and my series.

Where can I find all the books in SPFBO?

Mark has quite the blog page for all the entries, as well as some statistics.

Entries are broken down according to the blogs that review them. Once you scroll past the stats and the updates, you’ll reach the list of books. South Breaks is pretty far down, it ended up with Philipp Chase who mostly reviews on YouTube. He will read South Breaks because he picks the finalist for his blog. And he’ll review it there, I believe. (Which… ugh. I’m scared.)

How far can South Breaks get?

To be honest, I’m surprised South Breaks made it this far. Not because I think it’s a bad book (it’s not), but because it’s the first in the series and I was still figuring out the world while writing it. It’s also more spicy than the rest of them. In addition, it certainly doesn’t fit your standard expectations for epic fantasy.

However, the reviewer – Vaughn Roycroft – found a lot to praise in my story and gave it 8 out of 10 stars, the best of the six books he reviewed. His review was an additional surprise, really. You know, I just write this stuff. I don’t always think about the deep implications and meanings, and I certainly don’t do it for praise. But read for yourself:

SPFBOX #3 Review—SOUTH BREAKS, by Hannah Steenbock

My score: 8—I would definitely recommend this book to adult readers, particularly those who enjoy spicy fantasy, and/or those interested in ancient Mesoamerican culture.

Where can I read South Breaks?

Well, South Breaks is available as free ebook in all stores (yes, even Apple, Kobo, Google Play Store etc). Amazon doesn’t do that very well, however, you should have no problems in the US and the UK stores. If it charges you, grab the book from my store and sideload it to your Kindle (hang on, links are incoming). I even made a print edition, which you can get through Amazon only.

All the store links: Books2Read
My own online store: South Breaks

Now, if you enjoyed South Breaks, I’d really love to hear from you, either in a comment or – gasp! – through another review, wherever you like to put reviews.

For the next few weeks, I will wait with bated breath to see which book will become the Philipp Chase finalist and which will become the ultimate SPFBO winner this year.

The Newsletter Pop-up

If you have been following my blog, you know that I loathe pop-ups. But sadly, they work. So I’m doing the next best thing right here: Offering you my newsletter.

It’s a low-intensity one because my energy goes to my books, mostly. It goes out once a month, on the 13th, and it has a writing update, some book deals, new releases, recommendations and (yes, yes, Ember, give me a moment!) a sweet little tale from my dragon familiar, Ember. You cannot get that anywhere else.

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And that’s all, folks. See you soon!