Monday, July 27, 2020

Bout of Books 29 - We're shaking things up!

Bout of Books 29 is August 17th through August 23rd

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 Bout of Books 29 is coming!


Ready for the shakeup? During the last Bout of Books, we may have let it slip that changes were coming. And then we had the nerve to tell you we weren’t going to say anything yet.

Well, the wait is over. And here it is...

We will not have any daily challenges.

Okay? Deep breaths. The reading? Still happening. Still the focal point of the readathon! Our Instagram-only photo challenges? Yup. Those are staying. And Twitter chats? You know we can’t get rid of those! But the challenges hosted on this blog? They had to go.

The simple explanation is, we weren’t getting a lot of community-submitted ideas*, and rather than having the two of us continue to fill in the holes, we’re going to try something new.

Reading-in-place times. Or, you know, reading sprints.

Y’all have asked for these before and we said no. But removing daily challenges from our readathon workload means that we can devote that time to other activities. Also note that, similar to our daily challenges, you are never required to participate in the new reading-in-place times if you can’t or don’t want to.

You’ll have to let us know what you think. No, seriously. Love it or hate it or want the more in-depth answer for why we’re getting rid of challenges and starting reading-in-place times, we want to know what you think. Send us an email at boutofbooks[at]gmail[dot]com or if you’d like to remain anonymous, use this Google form to submit your comments.

For the reading-in-place times, we’ll post the schedule one week before the readathon starts. Our Bout of Books experts may host additional reading sprints throughout the readathon.

And one more change, just to see if you’ve read this far:

Sign-up will no longer close two days into the readathon. Join us anytime throughout the readathon. Have your friends join us!

*For the people who routinely and consistently submitted ideas (because a few of you did!), we see you and recognize your contributions. Thank you. Seriously, thank you for jumping in and sharing your ideas with us. We appreciate you.