Month: December 2017

January 2018 24in48 Readathon Sign-ups are Open!

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and happy end of 2017! I don’t know about you guys, but this year was kind of a dumpster fire, both personally and in the world at large. I’m ready to start fresh in 2018 and what better way to do that than blocking off a whole weekend to read?

Setting reading goals for the new year? Taking on a new reading challenge? The 24in48 is here to help. Last summer 1400 readers joined in on the festivities and I’m so excited to jump start the year with all of you again. I’ll personally be using the weekend to kickstart two challenges for the year, Read Harder (as always), and the new Reading Women challenge.

The next #24in48 will be taking place on Jan. 27-28, 2018! And I hope you can join us for a weekend full of warm blankets, snuggly pets, stacks of books, and blessed alone time.

If you’re new to 24in48, this is the basic gist: beginning at 12:01am on Saturday morning and running through 11:59pm on Sunday night, participants read for 24 hours out of that 48-hour period. You can split that up however you’d like: 20 hours on Saturday, four hours on Sunday; 12 hours each day; six four-hour sessions with four hour breaks in between, whatever you’d like.

And that’s it. The format never changes but it’s always an adventure.

Have more questions? There’s an FAQ page for that. Also, we’re still accepting donations to help us send more prizes out to international winners through the PayPal donate button on the sidebar.

Ready to join? Fill out the form below and feel free to list any and all of the places you’ll be hanging out online during the ‘thon. Check out who else is participating. If your entry doesn’t immediately pop in to the spreadsheet, give it a few minutes to populate.

And you can follow the readathon in all the normal places. We’re on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Litsy (@24in48) and you can use the official hashtag #24in48 everywhere to keep up with your fellow readathon-ers.

 

Taking Your Feedback, Making It Better

We are just about 46 days from our next readathon and your team is hard at work preparing for another fantastic event. This past July, we had a record turnout for #24in48. Close to 1,400 of you signed up and read for a full weekend. You came from all over the world—from Australia to Japan, Finland to Brazil, the UK and the US—and when all was said and done, we shared a lot of great experiences and received a lot of feedback on ways to make this little readathon better.

July’s event was the first time I had any help managing the workflow (why I waited so long, I’ll never know) and the first time we were able to offer such an abundance of prizes thanks to increased publisher support. Many of you won drawings but were unable to select books from our prize list because they were specific to US-based contributors. We’re actively reaching out to international publishers and their sales teams to solicit more prizes for our growing participant base. I’m hopeful that these efforts will expand the number of international prizes offered for the readathon. (If you have contact information for or are employed by an international publisher and you’d like to help, send an email to 24in48readathonofficial@gmail.com.)

One way we’ve been able to add more prizes for non-US readers is by funding Book Depository and Amazon gift cards, either ourselves or through the generous (though rare) contributions of readathon participants. We’ve been brainstorming ways to expand the inclusivity of the event on an international level. Now that the need (and expense) is greater, we need some help.

To this end, a PayPal “Donate” button has been added at the bottom of this update and on the site’s sidebar to accept monetary donations.100% of the funds donated (minus PayPal’s standard fees) will go to creating and purchasing international prizes. Together, we can create a readathon that embodies the increasingly global community we have all worked to grow over the last five years.

Additionally, if you’re interested in donating actual prizes—be it bookmarks from your Etsy store or new books to be sent to a winner in your own country—please send us an email.

I’m so proud to be a part of this fantastic community, and I know each of you are too. Thanks in advance for your support.