The fifth Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off officially kicked off yesterday! As one of the ten blogs involved in judging the contest, the Hive team and I are more than a little excited to dig into our batch of entries. (Check out my post from yesterday in which I introduced the contest, the entrants, and of course, our judges.)

The annual cover contest is one of the most fun traditions of SPFBO. It showcases the best of the best in terms of production value and surface quality, and highlights the importance of first impressions in a market where hidden talent often flounders amongst the currents of mediocrity.

How does it work? Each of the ten blogs must select three covers to put forward. Once all thirty have been chosen, there’ll be a public vote as well as a blogger vote; surprisingly, each typically yield contrasting results, which makes things even more interesting!

Here at the Hive, we’ve been quite impressed with our batch of covers this year. Feast your eyes on them all:

Click to view full-size image (opens in new tab)

Tough choice, right? After a great deal of thought, we narrowed our options down to the following six covers:

• Women of Wasps and War by Madeleine D’Este (Cover by Deranged Doctor Design)
• Brightshade by Miriam R. Dumitra (Cover by Amalia Chitulescu Digital Art)
• The Map Maker of Morgenfeld by Sean Monaghan (Cover by Grandfailure / Dreamstime)
• Forlorn Dimension by M.T. Satterlee (Cover by Dan Von Oss @ covermint.design)
• Eyrie by K. Vale Nagle (Cover by Jeff Brown)
• The Wretched by Brad Carsten (Cover design by Brad Carsten)

(The above info is taken directly from the copyright page of each book.)

As you can see, there are a variety of styles, which reflects our judges’ diverse individual tastes as well as our consideration of numerous different elements, including how distinctive each cover looked in thumbnail form. After a further round of voting (and some pretty fierce discussion!) in which each of us ranked all six covers in order of preference, we finally had our winners.

So, without further ado, the Fantasy Hive’s three nominations for the SPFBO 5 cover contest are Brightshade, The Wretched, and Forlorn Dimension!

Congratulations to the authors and designers, and good luck to everyone in the cover contest!

Which covers have caught your fancy? Follow the contest here, join the discussion on Facebook here, and weigh in on Twitter using the hashtag #SPFBO!

Stay tuned over the following five months as we review and eliminate 29 of the 30 books in our batch, and check out our introduction to round 1!