#SPFBO : Finalist announcement
28 October 2020
Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: Finalist Announcement, SPFBO, Threadlight #1, Voice of War, Zack Argyle
300 books 10 Judges 1 winner
The 1st of June marked the start of the sixth Self Published Fantasy Blog Off (details here.) My Introductory post is here.
You can find my updates for batch 1, batch 2, batch 3, Batch 4 and Batch 5 by clicking on the links.
So, today I will announce my finalist. To be honest, this has been a very difficult choice to make. I had four semi-finalists chosen and all are very good reads that I highly recommend. I can say that in my deliberations each of these books has been my finalist at some point and I think they would all be worthy of moving forward to Stage 2. That being said, I had to make a choice and so without further ado my finalist this year is:
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Voice of War (Threadlight #1) by Zack Argyle (check out the new cover)
My three semi finalists are:
My congratulations to Zack Argyle, commiserations to all the other authors who took part. I had a fantastic batch of books and the decisions this year have been ridiculously difficult due to the excellent. I highly recommend the three SFs and in fact I still have a couple of other books to complete and review that I will post at a later stage.
Good luck to all the finalists moving forward.
My reviews for all four books are below:
#SPFBO Semi Finalists and Finalist Announcement
Today sees, for me, the completion of Stage 1 of the SPFBO competition. I’ve really enjoyed the first stage and I have to say I had some incredible books in my batch.
Firstly, the following books are the ones I’ve completed fully and reviewed (I’ve provided mini reviews for my other books as I went along.
Cry Havoc by Jack Frey
Healer’s Ruin by Chris O’Mara
The Lore of Prometheus by Graham Austin-King
From the Shadows of the Owl Queen’s Court(Yarnsworld #4) by Benedict Patrick
Never Die by Rob J Hayes
Sir Thomas the Hesitant and the Table of Less Valued Knights by Liam Perrin
Vortex Visions by Elise Kova
The Blade Within by Jackson Lear
River of Thieves by Clayton Snyder
From the above I have chosen five Semi Finalists, to be fair to the authors I would stress that all of these books were very good and I definitely recommend them all. And in fact I am hoping to be able to go back and read fully some of the other books from my batch – time allowing.
My five semi finalists:
And this is where the really tough decision kicked in and kicked me to the floor (not at all dramatic)!
I’m not going to deny that it’s been very difficult to choose a finalist. The nine books above were all very good and I recommend them – narrowing that list down to semi finalists was tough enough – going further and choosing just one – well, it was stressful and if it made me feel like that then I can’t even begin to imagine how all the authors feel.
Basically I narrowed my choice down to three. I made a list of all sorts of pros and cons and was then left with two choices – which I really couldn’t choose between.
I don’t always score my books but I rated different aspects of both books in this case to try and find a score for each and see if that would help. Even with that in mind it’s been difficult to stick to one decision and there has been lots of to ing and fro ing and a tiny bit of dithering. In the end I’ve chosen my finalist but I would stress that this was a really difficult decision.
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My finalist:
My congratulations to the author 😀
I would also like to put forward under the ‘Senlin Safety Net’:
My apologies to the other authors from my batch. I’ve had a fantastic time reading all these books and I wish that I could choose more than one but that’s the nature of the competition. Thank you so much to all the authors for taking the time to enter and for taking the risk to put forward your work. You definitely get my round of applause.
