Last May, I decided to try my luck in the SPFBO this year and see how my latest book “Army of the Cursed” will fare in the competition. After five months of fretting about emails and Facebook notifications, I received the great news:

Army of the Cursed is a semi-finalist!

So, what is SPFBO? And how does it work?

Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (aka SPFBO) is an annual literary contest intended to bring greater visibility to self-published English-language fantasy authors. It has been operated since 2015 by the one and only Mark Lawrence himself. Every year he distributes 300 novels submitted by the authors to ten fantasy bloggers to review. You can learn more about the contest from here.

So, what does it mean to be a semi-finalist?

It means that Army of the Cursed is among the top 5 books that has survived the primary cut phase in its group (In this phase, around 80% of the books are axed). From those five, our bloggers/judges are going to choose one finalist to compete against nine finalists from the other bloggers.

And what are our chances to qualify as a finalist?

Honestly, I have no idea, and I don’t want to think about it now. I’m living the current moment and enjoying every bit of it.

So, what are you waiting for? Hit the button below and…