Howdy howdy, squiders! How are you?
The big news of the week is SPFBO (Self Published Fantasy Blog Off), which is a year-long competition. 300 fantasy books go in, 10 finalists are selected, and 1 book wins (and some of those have gone on to receive traditional book deals because of the competition).
I’ve been aware of it for, oh, eight years, I want to say? I think I originally found it about when City of Hope and Ruin came out, because I remember mentioning it to Siri, and we’d missed the deadline for the year. Every so often I remember it exists and check up on it, but because I am flighty and there’s fifty million things that you should, in theory, keep up on as an indie author, I am not normally on the right trajectory to participate.
BUT NOT THIS YEAR.
This year, a few months out, I put a to do on my to do list app (I use Todoist for long-term things and Microsoft To Do for daily lists) to get ready for SPFBO. I read the rules several times. I downloaded an epub of my book off Smashwords, and found a copy of the cover.
Traditionally (this is the tenth year of the contest), the first 300 entries get in, so you have to be primed and ready at the right time. But this year they operated on a lottery system, where you had 24 hours to enter, and then they selected the 300 out of those. Lovely! Less stress, except for the stress of whether or not you’d be selected in the lottery.
(Which, to be fair, was a lot of stress.)
But I made it in! And then promptly fretted for two days about whether I’d messed something up and would be disqualified before the contest even started.
Oh. I entered Hidden Worlds.
The contest rules say that a book can be entered, no matter how old. Hidden Worlds was a launch title for TDP at the end of 2010 (though I had published an earlier version that needed some help, in 2009) and it is my oldest book (that’s not an anthology). But I never truly gave it a book launch, because of imposter syndrome and a bunch of other silly reasons, and so, despite it being my highest rated book, and the one that I’ve gotten the best reviews on (including a 5-star review from Reader’s Favorite), it hasn’t ever really had any reach.
(Mark, who runs the contest, put up a list of the five oldest books. Hidden Worlds is the second oldest.)
From what I understand, SPFBO is great for visibility. My hope is that this fun little book finally gets the love that it deserves. I don’t expect it to be selected as a finalist or anything like that–it’s up against a ton of other great books–but if I could get 100 or even 50 new eyes on it, or a dozen new reviews, the contest will have made it for me.
(Of course, there’s always the possibility that it gets eliminated immediately once the contest officially starts on June 1. The reviewers don’t HAVE to read all their books. But fingers crossed!)
Wish me luck, squiders!
