It’s our honour to be participating in Mark Lawrence’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off (the SPFBO) in its eleventh year!
What is SPFBO?
For those new to the contest, SPFBO is a competition for independently published fantasy novels. Each year 300 authors enter their published books to be assessed by 10 judging teams. Each team is assigned an initial 30 books, to be assessed according to that team’s criteria and unique judging approach. After a first round, teams select a finalist from their batch of 30 that will then compete against the other finalists for the title of SPFBO champion!
Below, you’ll find a breakdown of Before We Go Blog’s judging approaches, our team members, and our 30 assigned books!
As Mark Lawrence describes on his website, “The SPFBO exists 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.”
If you’d like to follow along with the contest, you can check for updates on Mark Lawrence’s blog, the Read Indie Fantasy’s SPFBO page, or Zack Argyle’s visual guide. Whether you’re an entrant or a spectator, you may also wish to join the SPFBO Facebook page or become a member of the SPFBO entrants’ Discord to see what’s going on in the wider SPFBO community!
Our Contest Timeline and Approach
Hello, everyone! For anyone who doesn’t know me, I’m Steve Hugh Westenra, a SFINCS judge, academic, book reviewer, and SFFH author. I’ve recently stepped into the role of team leader for Before We Go Blog. As a previous entrant, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to give back to the SPFBO community through participation as a judge.
Since I’m coming in late, I haven’t assigned a specific set of judging criteria to my team mates. Instead, each judge will apply their own preferred method when it comes to assessing their books. Some judges may read most of their books to completion, while others will review the first 10-25% of each entrant before deciding which books to read in full. Some judges have been randomly assigned their books, while others have already sampled all 30 of our initial batch. While I can’t guarantee you’ll receive reviews from multiple team members, the majority of books will be looked at by at least two judges.
Although there’s no formal semi-finalist round in SPFBO, like most of the judging teams, Before We Go Blog will select around 6 books as semi-finalists. Once we’ve chosen our semi-finalists, as many team members as possible will read those selected to communally decide on a finalist!
Going forward, it’s our goal to post one “cuts” post every Monday until we’ve run out of books. These posts will highlight books that will not be progressing to Phase 2 of the competition. Each book will get at least a short write-up. In terms of the order in which a book is cut, being eliminated early or being eliminated late is no reflection of relative quality. It simply may be that out of a number of cuts, our judges had already written up a review for a work by the time Monday rolled around. I encourage readers to check out the cut books for something they may enjoy. Hopefully our write-ups will help put the right books in front of the right readers!
Along with our “cuts” posts, every Friday we’ll announce a different semi-finalist. Finally, likely in June, we’ll put forward our finalist!
In an ideal world, we’d have time to give every book its own lengthy spotlight, but alas, the passage of time does roll on and on top of judging, our team members also have day jobs and additional responsibilities.
A note on judging criteria:
Most important to me as team leader is that each of our allotted books gets a fair shake, regardless of author identity, genre, age category, length, or the personal taste of reviewers. While any judgement or review is always subjective, as someone who has applied to judge in a formal contest setting, and who has been entrusted with your work, my goal is that every work be assessed according to its own merits and within its own context to our best ability.
Before We Go Blog is honoured to have been entrusted with your words and we’re excited to help share our love of indie voices. Regardless of whether you progress to the semis, the finals, win the whole thing, or are eliminated in Phase 1, there’s much the contest has to offer and we hope you take the opportunity to socialize with your fellow entrants and the broader SPFBO community!
Above all, be kind to one another and patient with the organizers, judges, readers, and your fellow authors.
The real SPFBO was the friends we made along the way!
Meet the Team
Angela Boord
Angela Boord is the author of the award-winning Eterean Empire series, including SPFBO5 Finalist Fortune’s Fool. She’s also a hopeless romantic, a nerdy introvert, and can usually be found with her nose in a book when she’s not writing dark fantasy epics of hope and redemption. Angela and her husband live in northern Mississippi in a house full of children, books, and innumerable quantities of Legos.
My approach to judging:
I read and love all kinds of fantasy, from romantasy to grimdark, but I have a special place in my heart for narratives that bend/blend genres. Mostly what hooks me, no matter genre, are the characters! I don’t have hard and fast rules about what I do and don’t like to see in books, because a talented author with the right story can make me like things I think I dislike. So I try to go into every story with an open mind, and my goal is to read at least 25% of every book I’m assigned before making a cut.
Fave Books: Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier; Tales of Isyr series by CM Debell; the Tarot Sequence series by KD Edwards
Find Angela Boord Online: Website / Goodreads / Instagram / Facebook / Bluesky
Noel Cober
I’m a writer and reader of all types of fantasy, especially the comedic and increasingly the horrific. I’m also an English teacher and academic who studies disabled people in historical literature, and was a judge for SFINCS3this year.
As a judge, I love to see great pacing, fun characters, and stories that understand what they’re really about. I’m willing to give any book written by a human a fair shot and even if something isn’t my personal cup of tea (nothing is–I hate tea) I’m still going to read it fairly and honestly.
Find Noel Cober Online: Bluesky / Goodreads
Sarah Chorn
Sarah has been a compulsive reader her whole life. At a young age, she found her reading niche in the fantastic genre of Speculative Fiction. She blames her active imagination for the hobbies that threaten to consume herlife. She is a published author and editor, a semi-pro nature photographer, world traveler, three-time cancer survivor, and mom to two kids. In her ideal world, she’d do nothing but drink lots of tea and read from a never-ending pile of books.
Sarah has been a respected book critic since 2010 (Bookworm Blues). This has served to give her an intimate knowledge of story, and has kept her thumb on the pulse of the genre. She has been a developmental editor since 2017, with numerous award-winning titles under her belt (SPFBO finalists). Now, she is also the staff editor of Grimdark Magazine. Sarah has put her love of words to good use and is the author of Seraphina’s Lament and Of Honey and Wildfires, and numerous other published books.
For a list of books I’ve edited, please click here for my Goodreads shelf. Please note, not every book I’ve edited has been published yet.
I am always on the lookout for a story that engages me emotionally. I love a book that makes me feel. While I believe there is something to celebrate about every book, the ones that I love most are carefully crafted, with a clear focus and attention on prose, character voice, and each detail considered.
Find Sarah Chorn Online: Website / Bluesky
Beth Tabler
She enjoys whiskey and sticking up for the marginalized with deadly precision. She is on her eleventh SPFBO, and can’t wait for more. You will find her with a coffee in one hand and her iPad in the other.
Find Beth Tabler Online: Website / Bluesky / Goodreads
@lookma.i.read
Always reading 3 books at once. My kindle is my security blanket and food is my love language.
2nd Year Judge on Team Before We Go Blog • Avid Buddy Reader • Storyteller Academy participant
Find @lookma.i.read Online: Instagram / Goodreads / Linktree
St
eve Hugh Westenra
Steve Hugh Westenra (He/Him) is the pen name of an academic expert on monsters and the monstrous. His short fiction has been published in New Edge Sword and Sorcery. He is the author of the The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle (a queer horror comedy about a cryptid-hunting YouTuber), The Wings of Ashtaroth (a sprawling epic fantasy set in a world based on Ancient Carthage), The Barbarian at Dream’s End (forthcoming from New Edge Sword and Sorcery) and Breadcrumbs on a Forest Floor (an upcoming novella about a trans man from rural Newfoundland who was taken by the fairies and returns on the grave of the changeling who replaced him). The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle is a 2026 Indie Ink Award Finalist. Born in England, Steve grew up on the eldritch shores of Newfoundland, Canada, and has since worked in the slightly-less eldritch Montreal. He is a judge in a number of indie writing competitions and reviews books online. He is trans and, like all academics, neurodivergent.
My reading tastes are eclectic, but overall I crave variety, originality, and a well-crafted sentence! I’m most happy reading works that push genre conventions to some degree, but for me it’s all in the execution.
As a judge, I aim to read my assigned books the whole way through, unless there are clarity or major craft issues.
Find Steve Hugh Westenra Online: Website / Bluesky / Itchio / Linktree
Our Phase One Books!
Great intro post! A concerned contestant on discord pointed out you only have 23 of the 30 books listed. Is there any strategy/reasoning for that, or is it a website hiccup perhaps?
Thanks for serving as judges. We really appreciate it!
Oh no! So sorry about that–I think it must be a website malfunction (it was hard getting the graphics to look right and it’s possible I may have accidentally deleted some, or they’re simply “dropping off”). Please let everyone know we do have a full roster of 30 books. I’ll see about fixing it tomorrow morning. (:
Edit to say I put them back in–they’d definitely disappeared for some reason. I’ll try fixing the visuals up again tomorrow, but for now I’ll leave it just so I don’t mess it up and worry anyone else, haha
Thanks so much, I’ll pass it along!
What a team full of talents!!
Thank you so much!! That’s incredibly kind.
Thanks so much for posting this. I was beginning to get a little nervous. Lovely to finally find out who is involved and to have a timeline of cuts (gulp) and semi-finalists, and of course, best of luck to everyone going under the knife!
Of course–you’re very welcome! And thank you for the kind words.
It’s honestly incredibly anxiety-inducing cutting books, as in many cases there’s nothing “wrong” with a book; it’s simply that the contest only allows one to move forward. It’ll be much more fun posting the semi-finalist on Friday! No matter what though, hopefully all of the posts highlight something positive about each of our reads that makes it easy for the right reader to find them.