I’m bad at tooting my own horn and celebrating my successes, but it’s a habit that I’m trying hard to break and this news has provided me with a good opportunity to do so. My gritty fantasy book, The Sins of Steel and Shadow, is a semi-finalist in this year’s SPFBO competition (SPFBO 11).
What is SPFBO?
SPFBO stands for Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off – it’s an open competition run by author Mark Lawrence, designed to celebrate indie books within the fantasy genre. Now in its eleventh iteration, I decided to enter TSOSAS in a bid to get the book (the first in a planned series) in front of more prospective readers.
SPFBO is split into several phases:
- Phase 1 – A random lottery draw of all submissions to the competition. Only 300 are chosen so there are often lots of books that miss out. (I myself missed out in the 2024 competition).
- This draw is then finalised once the 300 randomly selected books have been checked to ensure they meet the competition’s full criteria
- Phase 2 – The 300 books are split into ten groups of 30, with each group assigned to a judging team. These teams are the book-loving blogs from the Blog-Off part of the competition’s name. The objective for each team is to whittle down their 30 to just one selected finalist.
- Phase 3 – At the end of this process, there will be ten finalists. Each blog will then review and score the other nine finalists until…
- Phase 4 – A winner of SPFBO is crowned!
SPFBO 11
In SPFBO 11, TSOSAS was assigned to the blog Fantasy Book Critic. This year their judging team is comprised of five reviewers.
Other blogging teams vary their processes (the competition allows for them to judge the 30 books in their pot at their own discretion) but Fantasy Book Critic opted to split out their books into five groups of six titles. Each reviewer within their team was assigned six books, and then the individual reviewer has free reign to judge their cohort as they see fit. This will produce five semi-finalists, which the team will then deliberate in order to select their nominated finalist for the last phase of the competition!
The group containing The Sins of Steel and Shadow was reviewed (see the full post here) with TSOSAS being selected as the semi-finalist!
To say I am chuffed is an understatement! There are some incredibly strong-looking books in this year’s competition, and in the five that TSOSAS was pitted against in this early stage (I will be adding The Dragon of the Dread Deep to my own TBR immediately). But what I love most about this competition is how kind and thoughtful everyone is with their time (no one is paid for any of this!) and how carefully the reviewers choose their words when gathering their thoughts. Mihir Wanchoo—who reviewed the cohort containing TSOSAS—sums it up rather beautifully with this opening line of the post I linked in the paragraph above:
My thanks to all six authors for their submission and being brave to submit their babies for being reviewed by unknown people. It takes a special kind of mental fortitude to toil away in creating these stories and then setting them free into the world for being read and judged. I applaud you all.
Writing—and then publishing—can make you feel incredibly vulnerable. Just like any art form, you know that there will be people out there who will enjoy your work. But you also know that there will be detractors, too. There is no right or wrong, just subjective opinion. So I also salute anyone who entered their book into this competition, and will be vociferously supporting a favourite (if/when TSOSAS is knocked out, of course). I will also be steadily growing my TBR list—as should you, dear Reader—as I dig through the brave 300 of this year’s contest!
And, in the meantime, to quote FBC once again:
For readers who enjoy character-driven stories, mixed in moral ambiguity, socio-political intrigue, and low fantasy settings, this book (The Sins of Steel and Shadow) will be for you.
📚✌🏻SP
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Book One of the TURNED
The Sins of Steel and Shadow
Hated and reviled by humans and vampyrs alike, every day for a Turned is a deadly struggle. But when Bail is offered the chance of a lifetime, there’s much more at stake than just his survival.
The Turned series is a fast-paced, character-led, gritty fantasy saga for fans of Joe Abercrombie or Scott Lynch.
Steve Pannett is an author and designer based in Yorkshire, UK.
He writes primarily in the fantasy genre, combining character-led storytelling with epic, gritty world-building to create dark tales with plenty of action and lots of twists along the way.
He has self-published multiple books and is active online.
