2023 Spring Pre-Readathon

April 29th is our first readathon for 2023. If you have done this before, you pretty much know the drill. Pick your TBR, gather your snacks and beverages, work out how your family will keep themselves busy during the readathon, make sure you have the day off, and get your reading area tidied up and ready for the big day. Then we grab our first book, as 8am Eastern Time rolls around on the 29th, and we read. Easy, right? This readathon we are simplifying things just slightly. Our admin team is a bit smaller this time, and we added Discord to our list of social media sites we manage during our readathon seasons, so while we don’t want to cut out any of our other sites, we need to pare things back a little on the back end of things. So, for this readathon we won’t be doing the sign-up form on our wordpress site, nor will we do the form here for completed books (which apparently less than a third of our readers have been using anyway over the past few events). If you are on Facebook, we have an ‘event’ created for the readathon, and you are highly encouraged to mark yourself as ‘going’ if you plan to participate. We may bring back the sign-up form, and even the completed books log, as we build up the next iteration of our readathon admin team, if we don’t work out something more satisfying that works better within our growing collection of social media.

By the way, if you think you might wish to join our admin team, this upcoming readathon is a great event for you to participate in more actively. Pick up a few hours as a co-mod on our facebook or goodreads, post actively on Facebook, Goodreads, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and/or Discord. Volunteer to write an hourly guest post for our wordpress site (this site). Share quality information about our readathon within the online bookish communities you are involved with, and help new readathon participants find their bearings so they can have a great first readathon. Even if you really don’t want to be an admin (it is a lot of work during readathon months, and completely unpaid) we welcome all of the above, and we love when more experienced readathoners help us build the Deweys 24hr Readathons into something far cooler than our small admin team could create just on our own.

So, you have the Spring readathon penciled into your calendar, right? And you are gathering your snacks and books? Excellent. To get you into the mood, we are starting the month with what we have been calling a Reading Long Lap (like a reading sprint, but lasting a whole week or longer). From April 1-7 we are trying to read a bit more than usual, flexing our reading muscles and accomplishing some reading goals along the way. I am trying to finish a few more of the prompts from the 2023 Spring Reading Challenge on our Goodreads group. We will have Bingo boards, an experimental reading/TBR building challenge on Goodreads, and photo challenges on Tumblr and Instagram. And as we get closer to The Day we’ll be doing impromptu reading sprints on various media sites to really get warmed up. By April 29th, reading for 24 hours may not seem so impossible a challenge. 🙂

Enjoy your week of reading and readathon preparations and stay tuned for more as we build up our Dewey’s Spring 2023 24hr Readathon.

• Jamie Barringer