What is the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO)?
Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO): Founded in 2015 by author Mark Lawrence, SPFBO is an annual reader-run contest evaluating 300 self-published fantasy novels.
Judging Process: Ten prominent fantasy blogs each receive 30 books, select one finalist, and collectively review all 10 finalists to crown a winner.
No Gatekeepers: The contest operates entirely without agents, editors, or publisher marketing budgets.
Industry Impact: Finalists and standout entries (such as Josiah Bancroft's Senlin Ascends) frequently earn traditional publishing deals after gaining public acclaim through the contest.
How the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) Works
Three hundred self-published fantasy novels went into this year's Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. Ten remain. The contest, run since 2015 by author Mark Lawrence, works without an acquisitions editor, an agent, or a publisher anywhere in the process. Lawrence distributes the full slate of entries across ten fantasy blogs. Each blog reads its batch and selects one finalist. Every finalist is then reviewed by all ten blogs, and the book with the highest average score wins.
Reversing Gatekeeping: Why Reader-First Discovery Succeeds
That order matters. Most discovery in fantasy publishing runs through a gatekeeper who decides what a reader gets to see before the reader ever sees it: an agent choosing what to submit, an editor choosing what to buy, a marketing budget choosing what gets displayed. SPFBO reverses it. Readers score the books in public first, and the traditional side of the industry has, more than once, paid attention after the fact.
From Self-Published to Traditional Deals: The Senlin Ascends Effect
Josiah Bancroft's Senlin Ascends is the clearest example. Self-published in 2013, it sold an estimated 250 copies in its first three years. It did not win its year of SPFBO, but the attention it earned during the contest, combined with praise from Mark Lawrence himself and a widely read review from a popular Goodreads critic, was enough to pull it out of obscurity. Orbit signed Bancroft to a four-book deal in 2017 and released "Senlin Ascends" under its own imprint in January 2018. Jonathan French, the contest's 2016 winner, found a traditional deal the same way. Neither book needed a query letter to prove it worked. Both needed readers willing to say so, on the record, before anyone with a marketing budget was paying attention.
This year's ten finalists are now working through that same public review process, with a champion expected before the year is out. For a reader who has ever wondered whether the best epic fantasy is actually the fantasy that gets the marketing spend, SPFBO is worth watching for exactly that reason: it is one of the few places in the genre built to separate those two questions on purpose.
Map's Edge Media watches contests like this one for the same reason its readers do. Some of the best epic fantasy being written this year will never see a marketing budget, and this is one of the few places built to find it anyway.