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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/BicycleConsortium on 2024-09-30 11:51:48+00:00.

The Rise and Fall of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO)

Today we take a deep dive into the world of self-published fantasy books, the book blogger/reviewer community, and unpack all the drama that comes with starting your own awards for clout. This is the non-chronological history of SPFBO's slow descent into irrelevance as told through its biggest controversies.

What the Heck's a SPFBO?

The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off or SPFBO (yes, it's blog off and not book off. No, you're not crazy for wondering. My proofreaders were surprised that wasn't just one of my many typos) is a yearly competition to highlight the work of self-published fantasy writers. Here's the mission statement:

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.

The contest first began in 2015 (then called The Great Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off) when author Mark Lawrence announced his intent to try to find the best self-published fantasy books. Here's how it works:

• Every year, 300 self-pub authors enter their books for the competition
• 10 blogs are tapped to be competition judges
• Books are divided among these blogs until each one has 30 books to review
• Each blog selects one book from their assigned reading to move on to the finalist stage
• Once all 10 finalist slots are filled, all teams give final ratings on all of the books
• The book with the highest average score at the end of this round wins the cleverly-named award: the Selfie Stick

At nearly ten years old, SPFBO has gone on to have a number of controversies over the years. I'm here to catalogue its slow descent into irrelevance after its explosive debut by talking about many of its ongoing issues through the lens of its biggest controversies.

Mark Lawrence

Let's start by talking about the SPFBO host, Mark Lawrence. Lawrence is an accomplished and popular fantasy author. If you're into fantasy books, you may know that his Broken Empire trilogy was a smash success when it came out in 2011. He's also a reliable and quick writer, currently projected to publish his 18th book in a span of 14 years when his most recent trilogy completes in 2025. The guy has had plenty of critical and commercial success as a traditionally published author including a few badass award wins. This raises the question: why would he want to start a contest to highlight self-published authors? He's objectively done about as well as anyone could hope in traditional publishing and, to the best of my research, has only ever self-published a couple books on Wattpad but the first of those projects, Gunlaw, began months after SPFBO was first announced. What's he got to do with self-pub?

The common understanding is that he's helping out self-published authors out of the goodness of his heart because they don't get enough respect. I am skeptical that's the full reason. A few things to know about how Lawrence runs SPFBO:

• Lawrence does very little actual work - all reading and judging is done by blog teams with Lawrence posting announcements and updates once a quarter or so
• Lawrence famously rarely reads any entries. In the nearly ten years this contest has run, I could only find evidence of him having read a handful of participants. It wasn't until this YouTube video in August 2022 that there was solid proof of him having actually read all of the winning SPFBO books. This is widely known too and being read by Lawrence is considered a big badge of distinction in the SPFBO community
• the competition is centered entirely around Lawerence's blog and he has responded negatively to suggestions of creating an official website or oversight committee for the awards

When you take these factors together, the situation starts to look a bit fishy. Sure you can argue that it's in the spirit of self-publishing to have the competition be run through some guy's blog but Lawrence doesn't seem like a guy who is sincerely interested in self-published fantasy. Rather, he seems like an opportunist leeching off the actual work of bloggers and self-pub authors to drive traffic to himself. The evidence is certainly all circumstantial but I'm struggling to think of any other award where it's an open question whether the guy giving you the award will read your award-winning book.

A relevant consideration here is that Mark Lawrence has a history of obnoxious self-promo. He has been banned by r/fantasywriters for flouting their rules (comment link and backup screenshot because Lawrence likes to delete his comments once he realizes they reflect poorly on him). He seems to be in a constant battle with the mods of r/Fantasy over his promo violations (comment link and backup screenshot) as seen in the frequent potshots he takes at their self-promo rules (comment link and backup screenshot) including this instance where he appears to have directly DMed a random user to ask them to post promo on his behalf (comment link and backup screenshot) because he knew it would get removed as promotional if he posted it. I mean, what else could "Posted with permission since self-promotion is not allowed" mean? So when I say "it seems like Lawrence's motives for running SPFBO don't seem altruistic," that's not coming from nowhere. There is a record of him knowingly engaging in underhanded self-promo. And look, I get that publishers don't support their authors enough and that Lawrence's tenacity in promoting himself and hanging in there as an author is on some level very impressive. It's just also very annoying to watch this man act like it's his god-given right to talk himself up at every opportunity.

But you know what? Even if all the worst things I've guessed about him were irrefutably true with a mile-long evidence trail, that would be forgivable if he was any good at running the contest.

But he's not.

Lawrence is great at soaking up all the praise and attention from "running SPFBO" but it's very hard to find proof of him doing any actual work for the contest. Keep in mind that all blog teams are asked to have read nearly 40 books by the end of the SPFBO year. I'm a big reader, I usually average around 80 books a year and I can't imagine devoting half my hobby time to this endeavor but there are brave souls out there who do every year. Meanwhile, the second any part of the contest takes more than the barest hint of effort on his part, Lawrence abandons it or pawns it off. This can best be seen in one of SPFBO's biggest controversies: the AI cover fiasco. For years, SPFBO ran a best cover contest where a selection of good looking covers were uploaded for users and critics to vote on. In 2023 though, one of the winning covers was revealed to be AI generated which was explicitly against the rules of the contest and violated the self-report form authors had to fill out in order to enter the contest.

People were upset and there were ideas for how to revamp the contest so that such an issue would not repeat but Lawrence simply ended the cover contest completely. The cover contest was an immensely popular part of SPFBO and served to highlight that not all self-pub books have bad cover art but the moment it became more work than posting pictures for other people to vote on, he dropped it faster than Kendrick Lamar drops Drake diss tracks. There's no explanation as to why either. Lawrence didn't provide a reason in his announcement, he did not respond to requests for comments from the news orgs that reported the story, and our only hint as to why is a tweet hinti...

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