On June 1st The Trials of Ashmount released and was simultaneously entered into SPFBO 8! For the uninitiated, SPFBO means Self Published Fantasy Blog Off and it's helmed by Mark Lawrence. Yes, that Mark Lawrence. You can follow SPFBO 8 (and The Trial of Ashmount's progress) here:
Mark Lawrence also runs an SPFBO Facebook group where you can see the reviews as they're posted. Great community.
A quick description of how SPFBO works...
300 self published books are entered into a competition where 10 bloggers/reviewers will each be assigned 30. From the 30 books they eliminate all but one to push forward to a finalist (some blogs/reviewers also nominate semi-finalists). When there are 10 finalists, the 10 blogs/reviewers then read and review each book. Some entrants (even non-finalists) have received traditional publishing deals just for entering their books - exciting times!
And that brings us to an update regarding The Trials of Ashmount (which can be purchased here: https://mybook.to/TheTrialsofAshmount ). In roughly a week and a half, my debut novel has sold 63 copies! And that's WITH an Amazon listing issue which isn't displaying the correct paperback price and causing a lot of headache (along with insane shipping times) for the US customers. Hopefully any day that'll be fixed (the price SHOULD be $17.99 and for anybody who's waiting, sometimes it shows up in the "more options" section... but it comes and goes).
I appreciate the support I've received thus far and thank everyone who's helped me in my various endeavors or purchased a copy. Soon, hopefully, we'll have an update on the sequel...