From 250 to 13.

Not that long ago I posted about Mark Lawrence's Great Self-published Fantasy Blog-off. A humorously titled take on the Great British Bake-off, presumably.

Well after making sure my cream had set correctly and my oven was at the right temperature and my sponge was correctly moistened with confiture, I went through all 250 entries that the 'short' list comprised of.

As previously noted, there were a lot of familiar faces, and in my own personal whittling down process I excluded works that I had read before and authors who were already in the Recommended Reading section.

After this, I cut out those authors whose covers didn't appeal to my artist's aesthetic sensibilities and those whose books clearly weren't aimed at me in the first place. This narrowed it down further, but the pile was still large.

Finally, I downloaded a sample of each work onto my kindle and read the opening chapters of every work that was left. The samples I was able to complete were bought outright and will be getting a review at some point in the next year.

As the title of this entry suggested, we went from 250 to 13. Here are those 13:

Pauline M Ross – The Plains of Kallanash
G. R. Matthews – The Stone Road
Melisa McPhail – Cephrael’s Hand
Michael Watson – Valkwitch
Michael McClung – The thief who pulled on trouble’s braids
Christian Freed – Hammers in the Wind
Jacob Cooper – Circle of Reign
James Islington – The shadow of what was lost
Davis Ashura – A Warrior's Path
Greg James – Under a colder sun
Christopher Ruz – Century of Sand
T.O Munro – Lady of the Helm
Barbara Webb – City of Burning Shadows

Note that this is a personal list, and there's a lot of very good fiction that has been omitted in order to compile it. I strongly suggest you check out the authors I mentioned in one of my previous entries about the contest.

You can find Watson, Ashura and Freed's short fiction in our latest anthology, and it was most gratifying to see that they had made the cut.

The others are more of an unknown quantity, but I've heard good things about a number of them.

I shall also be reading and reviewing the final 10 choices the bloggers make in the contest proper, and look forward to adding any additional titles I may have missed in my scouring.