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The time has finally come for us to make a decision. Firstly though, I thought I’d mention how we decided what to pick:

1) We selected the two novels that we felt best represented the spirit of the contest.
2) Each member of the EBR Team read both books, then told the others which one they had picked and why.
3) The book with the most votes became our finalist.

Seems simple, right? It wasn’t. See, this task wasn’t just about grabbing two books off a bookshelf and saying which was better. The largest reason for this was that neither of these books have had professional edits, and so we ended up having to tackle the problem by saying, “Well, if it HAD been given those edits, the novel would probably have turned out like THIS.”

We talked about writing ability, originality, pacing, foreshadowing, characters… it was all very long-winded (totally my fault), but I think we covered all of the good stuff. Anywho, we’ll have a post later on that gets into the nuts and bolts of our opinions on self-pubbed stuff now that this section of the contest is over.Read the rest of this post »

All right. People have been wondering where we are in the process so far. While we haven’t picked our Finalist yet, we are very close. This will be a quick summary of who we have eliminated so far. We aren’t going to get into specifics on each book, because it seems bad form to to lay it out publicly why we didn’t care for your book. I think we’ve been pretty clear about the main issues we’ve had in our posts on PoV, Beginnings, Internet Presence, and First Impressions.
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If you saw Steve’s awesome review for THE BORDER and you still aren’t convinced, check out a free audio clip HERE.
You’re welcome.

So. Mark Lawrence. You know the name. He’s a great author, and an even better person. We’re rather fond of him. Mark did a thing. Maybe you noticed it. A couple of weeks ago, over on his blog, Mark said the following:

“I realise that [self-promotion] is a lot easier once you’re ‘off the ground’ and that as a new author, particularly a self-published one, it is desperately hard to be heard. It’s a signal-to-noise problem. Who knows how many Name of the Winds or [fill in your favourite] are lost to us because they just couldn’t be seen? None? A hundred?”

This hit home to us at EBR. You can read the whole post, and the follow-ups, over at Marks blog (here’s your link). Here’s the short of of it:

Between 260 and 270 self-pubbed authors submitted their work to Mark, and he then passed those books evenly (and randomly) out to ten (10) review sites. We go through them and pick the best of the 27-ish sent to us while the other blogs do the same with their allotment. Then we all read the final 10 stories and say which is the best.

That’s a lot of books. A lot of self-pubbed books. Yeah.
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Heya everyone! Welcome to the new Elitist Book Reviews. Please pardon the sawdust, we are still getting everything cleaned up. Turns out all of those tags vanished in the import. Awesome right!? We’ll get them all straightened out.
But yeah! Welcome to our new digs! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, just shoot us an email.
Thank you all for your continued support. We appreciate it tremendously. Enjoy the reviews. Tell your friends and family.
Most importantly, read. Read everything you can.

So. The Hugo Awards. Maybe you’ve heard of them. They come in a mixed bag of good and bad, full of second guessing and “should-haves”. Here at Elitist Book Reviews, we were nominated for the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine. It was a big deal. I didn’t expect us to win, so it came as no surprise when SF Signal was awarded the Hugo.
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This is it everyone. If you can vote for the Hugo Awards, you have have until July 31st to do so. Honestly, vote for who you feel is best and most deserving, but most of all, JUST VOTE!

So who are we voting for? Well, that’s a bit complicated in some aspects. It’s a very odd field this time around, especially in short fiction. I know we usually review the short fiction, but there doesn’t seem to be any point to it. We just end up saying, “Hey we really liked this one. But we can’t discuss it without major spoilers because of how short the pieces of fiction are.
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Well holy crap! If you pay attention to the Hugo Awards, you know that the nominees for the 2013 Hugo Awards were announced today. So who has ten thumbs and is nominated for a Hugo? THESE GUYS here at Elitist Book Reviews!!!!

… you get it right? There are five reviewers here at EBR… ten thumbs… never mind.
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Well, this Sunday (the 31st of July) is the deadline for Hugo voting. We cast our individual ballots (well, those of us eligible anyway), but we figured we should let you all know what we picked, why we picked them, and where there were differences of opinion if there were any. If you don’t see a category on here, it’s because we didn’t vote in that category.

Here we go!
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CONduit 2011 Report

CONduit, for me, was an interesting experience. For the longest time I have attended conventions solely as an attendee. I would sit in the panels and listen to the various professionals as they spoke about different topics, and mostly keep my mouth shut. I’ve learned a lot from conventions. This year, however, I went to CONduit in a completely different capacity. This time I was one of those guys on the panels sharing my wisdom (lol!) with the masses. I even was a moderator on two panels. I know, the program directors must have had a serious sense of humor.

So, I figured I would share my experiences on the panels. My impressions. What I learned. Nuggets of brilliance (usually not my own). You get the picture. The easy way to share my thoughts is to just go in order of panels I was on. Here we go:
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