Well, I know I said last time that I’d have my own personal picks up for the SPFBO prediction brackets hosted over at the Sigil site in a week or so. If you haven’t noticed, I took quite a bit longer. And, as with my writing, it was only the looming deadline of having my picks before August when the first round of reviews/ cuts/ semifinalists are picked that got my ass in gear. Well, here we go. I may have stated that my first picks were all the books with the highest reviews, which is sort of a baseline in that I want to see if the books with the highest scores are in fact better or if the contest is really finding those hidden gems that are overlooked in all the self-publishing white noise

If you haven’t noticed, I put together another SPFBO brackets for the 2018 year up at the Sigil site. And I thought about putting my predictions up over at Sigil as well, but figured that would appear as an official endorsement from all the guild members and opted to put them here (despite my supposed hiatus). All this got me to thinking about my last year’s predictions, where my criteria were only books with 10+ ratings on Goodreads and a 4+ average. Which, incidentally, precluded my own book, which did go on to get semifinalist status, so I’m unsure how good a strategy it actually was. I will note that I did pick out 13 semifinalists through this system (of my 30 picks), which is nearly 50