SPFBO X

 

I am happy to say that Sailing to Redoubt made it into the tenth Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off,  known as SPFBO X This is a contest that has been run by fantasy author Mark Lawrence for the last ten years to highlight the quality of self-published fantasy books. There are ten judges, or teams of judges, each of who each read, or at least sample 30 books, for a total of 300 books, selecting 5 or 6 as semi-finalists and then settling on a single finalist for the final judging round of 10 books that all the judges read and rate. The book with the highest score on a 1 to 10 scale wins. A number of winning and finalist books and authors have gone on to fame and fortune. The first contest attracted 276 entries, last year's contest filled its 300 slots in 44 minutes after the entry form went live. As a result of its popularity, this year the entry form was live for 24 hours, with 300 books selected at random from all the entries.

I had  expected that there would be a thousand or more entries, but as it turned out there were only* 595. So the odds were 50-50 and I got lucky.

The asterisk for "only" is to highlight the fact that all of those 595 entries were author/publishers of fantasy novels with novels that had not been entered before. While there may be some better known authors amongst the pack - one entry has 4,700 Goodreads ratings, and five others have more than 1,300, most of them are writers who have yet to find a mass indie market for their work. And when you consider how many authors did not enter for one reason or another, you can see the scale of competition for readers in the author/publisher book space.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't expect to see any sales jump as a result of being in the contest, based on entering books in three other similar contests - two of which were the science fiction knock-off, and last year's SPFBO 9. I do it simply for, the excitement/disappointment, and for the chance to hear or read what a reader has to say, one who did not select one of my books to read because it appealed to them. In other words, an unbiased view of my work. 

This year my book is in the pool of a new judge for the contest Captured in Words, which is a YouTube channel focusing on fantasy books. He has 106K subscribers, making it a pretty big BookTube channel. His videos tend to get 5 to 50 thousand views, so any mention of my book will likely reach more potential readers - for better or worse- than the blogs that judged my previous entries. It will be interesting to see how he handles this task. Judges need only read 10% -20% of the book before deciding pass on it. Still, he has 30 books to sample in the next three months or so. Another BookTuber, Philip Chase, did this last year, and this year decided to add a team of other people to help him. They divide the slush pile and he reads only the books they chose to make his final decision. Despite the potential for a wider audience, the downside with video judges is that unless they really like your book, the book might be little more than a mention, and no book gets written reviews. We'll see how it goes this year, but I'm going in with no expectations. That keeps the bar pretty low.

And in the wider sense, I believe that art awards and contests are meaningless. Art - be it painting, writing, music, dance, etc. is a one-on-one experience. What it means to you is all that counts. Counting votes, tabulating scores don't mean a thing. If you want an objective scale, look at sales figures, if the art is commercial. And anyone entering this contest, or viewing the results, needs to know that the most critical factor in it is luck. It doesn't matter how good your book is if it doesn't find an appreciative reader. Take, for example, the person who judged Beneath the Lanterns last year. She wrote a nice review for my book and gave it 5 stars, but here is her opening line for another book she had to judge in my group:

Sometimes, and it doesn’t happen often, you start reading a book and it just works. Everything is exactly the way you like. The story flows, the writing is smooth, the pacing is perfectly unhealthy for your heart rate but this is what we want! Every word, every bit of dialogue, every scene has captured you and before you know it, the book is finished.

This is what art is all about. The only valid basis she or anyone else can judge art as art on is how it affects them. You can knock points off for grammar, or typos, or what have you, but when something speaks to you, none of that matters. So you have to go into contests knowing that luck needs to be on your side to have any chance at all, and that luck is beyond your control. And that whatever the results are, they represent no more than one or several people's opinion of you work. And that you've given them permission make public their opinions, good or bad, and have to accept the consequences. 

It's a gamble. But as Bobby Dylan sings in Like a Rolling Stone, "If you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose."