Today’s post is going to be fairly short and sweet.  SPFBO X is now underway, the books have all been allocated and so I wanted to quickly introduce myself and let authors know a little bit more about my process.

For those who don’t know about SPFBO (the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off) – this is a competition created and run by Mark Lawrence.  The competition is now in its tenth year and you can find more about all the other entrants and judges over on Mark Lawrence’s blog.

So, each judge/team is allocated 30 books.  This year I am again teaming up with the Critiquing Chemist and we have allocated 15 books per blog.

This year I am planning on reading the first 25% (or for those larger books the first 100 pages) of all the books in my allocation.  This way I will quickly gain an idea of the books that I want to continue to read.  If the book doesn’t grab my attention within those pages then it will be cut (although if in doubt I will obviously read some more).  I realise this probably sounds harsh but we can only have one Finalist and so, likable or not, these tough decisions have to be made.

I will review all the books that I read fully.  The books that are cut I will also highlight and provide a quick synopsis of my thoughts up to the point I cut off.

Here are the books in my batch (for more information these can all be found on Goodreads):

Good luck to all the authors.  My only advice, use the competition to make contacts and friends with other self published authors.  This is such a great community and although the ideal is to win – there can be only one.  So, make the best of the competition to find friends.  As with every year, I go into my batch of books with high hopes – let’s see if that winner is among my batch.

If you have any questions leave me a comment.