April 2020 Readathon Wrap-Up

Friends, I’m so happy-sad to write this post. This Readathon, the last for Heather and I as co-organizers, is bittersweet for sure. It’s been one of the greatest joys of my life to help run this thing for the last seven and a half years. It’s been an honor to pay tribute to Dewey, to read with you, to see you all come together, and it’s even more amazing because I’ve gotten to work with my best friend. Thank you, friends, for the time you’ve spent volunteering, cheering, posting, hashtagging, and definitely reading.

We love you a lot, and while we’re sad to step away, we are happy to remain Dewey’s Readathon readers.

It’s also a great, great pleasure to hand Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon to two people who love this event just as much as we do.

Thank you so much, Andi and Heather, for all that you have done for us over the years! We cannot wait to see what you will spend your Readathon time reading 🙂

When Andi first made her announcement that she and Heather would be stepping back as organizers, I immediately contacted Andi and volunteered to takeover. Read-a-Thon has always been such a big part of my life and I knew I couldn’t let it disappear. When Andi agreed to hand the reigns over to me, I knew I needed my Goodreads Partner in Crime to be my partner over here as well.

From Kate: “Hello! My name is Kate. These days, I am primarily an audiobook consumer, and 1.75 times speed is my jam 🙂 My favorite genres are Psychological Thrillers, Fantasy, and Historical Fiction. Brandon Sanderson is my all-time favorite author and if I had it my way, The Stormlight Archives would be mandatory reading 🙂 I got married just less than a year ago and we have since adopted two Maltipoo puppies that are the best part of my day (Gracie and Georgie). I love a good cup of tea and there is nothing better than a cold and rainy day spent cuddled up with a nice cup of tea and a good book! I used to book blog but I find it is hard to review audiobooks because I don’t have the actual book to flip through while writing reviews. I do, however, have a cross stitch related youtube channel if that kind of thing interests you… I am so excited for this next chapter of the readathon and the opportunity to bring some new features to an already amazing event!”

I already have so many exciting ideas for the upcoming readathon and we hope that you will come back to join us in the fall. Below we have two Google Forms that we ask you take a moment to fill out. The first is in regards to what you would like to see in upcoming Readathons. The second is for if you would like to volunteer to help out in some way with the readathon. Without volunteers, we are limited in what we can make happen.

Thank you all for your continued support. We hope you had a wonderful April Readathon! Keep your eye on this space for the announcement of the next Readathon. We will also Tweet out the date.

Wrap Up, Save the Date, and call for Volunteers

Wrap Up

Number of Readers (officially signed up): 1,089

Number of Books (so far): 772 (don’t forget to submit your books read here!)

Pages (so far, that were submitted): 153,083

Most Read Book (so far): Through the Woods by Emily Carroll and Escaping from Houdini Kerri Maniscalco, both with 4

Want to help next April? We would appreciate the help! Sign up below and we’ll be in touch.

April 2017 Wrap-Up and Volunteer for October 2017!

Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us for the April 2017 Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon! Let’s look at the Readathon by the numbers:

• Over 1,700 readers
• Approximately 30 behind-the-scenes volunteers
• 24 mini challenges
• Over 2,000 #IGReadathon posts
• Gazillions of tweets! (ok, maybe not, but a lot)

We thank you so much for being with us, and we hope you’ll be back in October for our TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY! There are schemes happening as we speak.

If you’re interested in volunteering to help in October, fill out the handy dandy form down below, and we’ll contact you!

HAPPY READING!

That’s a Wrap on the April 2016 #Readathon!

Thank you THANK YOU for joining us for the April 2016 Readathon! We ended the event with

• 1,950 readers
• 774 Facebook group members
• 2,237 Goodreads members
• And an epic ton of photos, Tweets, BookTube videos, and any other kind of social media love you can imagine!

We’ll be back with our next event on October 22, 2016 and we hope to see you there.

In the meantime, if you’re moved to volunteer we would love to have you be a part of the Dewey’s family. It takes over 100 individuals to make this machine work, and we could use more hands! You can express your interest in the form down below, and we’ll reach out to you as the next event draws close.

We’ll see you in October!

Read-a-thon Highlights

Another Dewey’s Readathon has come and gone, and we could not be more thankful for the thousands of you who joined us to read, cheer, host mini-challenges, co-host.

Heather and I are whizzes with spreadsheets and we have a pretty good organizational plan to keep things going, but without all of you taking time out of your lives to volunteer and read, this event wouldn’t happen. It’s so important to us that we honor Dewey’s legacy, so thank you so much for enthusiastically doing that time and again.

Quick Facts:

• 2,008 readers
• 132 cheerleaders
• 28 mini-challenges
• 1,102 entries in the Books Read Database (so far)
• 8 hourly co-hosts
• 1,495 Goodreads group members
• 120+ prizes awarded

If you’re interested in volunteering for the next readathon on April 23, 2016, fill out the form down below.

But now…Amanda from Fig and Thistle has used Storify to capture some moments from the readathon that we hope you’ll enjoy.

Read on, readers!!!!

[View the story “Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon” on Storify]

See you next time!

That’s a Wrap on October 2014!

Another Readathon has come and gone, and this girl is just getting over the reading hangover!

We’re so glad you could all join us, and we hope you’ll be here for the next exciting  installment on April 25, 2015!

For now, let’s take a look back with some stats! Can you believe these numbers???

993 readers
959 books in the database
142 prizes
70 cheerleaders
24 hours trending on Twitter
532 new Goodreads group members
10 cohosts

 

From the bottom of our readerly hearts, we appreciate all you do to make he Readathon happen and to honor Dewey by growing this community with every single event. As usual, we’ll have some tucks and tweaks for the April 2015 event, but for now, we’re going to pull up a chair and read a little more. We hope you’re doing the same.

If you’re interested in getting involved in the April 2015 event, please fill out the form below and we’ll contact you when the time comes!

April 2014 Readathon Wrap Up!

The next readathon will be October 18, 2014! 

WOW! What a Readathon that was! It was so memorable in so many ways, from the records we set to the special guests who read along with us, to ALL OF YOU who participated and helped organize!

To celebrate, we’ve crafted a fun little infographic that highlights some of our Read-a-Thon stats! A few of them have changed just slightly since we collected them, but we’re pretty close!

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And a few things we forgot to mention up top:

• We’re up to 863 titles in the Books Read Database!
• Hundreds of Instagram photos were uploaded!
• We TRENDED on Twitter for all 24 hours!
• We had over 200 prizes donated!
• We had one very special celebrity author read! Thanks, Marissa Meyer!
• We had LOTS of people jump in to read for charity!

Isn’t that amazing!!! We’re blown away every time we look at it!

If you’re interested in joining us for the October 2014 Read-a-Thon and you think you might like to volunteer in some capacity, please fill out the interest form below. You are not committed! But we’ll contact you when we get things rolling ’round about September.

That’s a Wrap on October 2013!

 

Read-a-Thon hangover? Why, yes! I believe I still have one! But it is SOOOO worth it!

• We had 484 people sign-up to participate this October.
• 229 of those participated in the Introduction Meme.
• 127 participated in the Mid-Event Survey.
• 132 of those participated in the End of Event Meme (so far!).
• 504 books were entered into the Books Read Database (there’s still time to add yours)
• We had 38 cheerleaders sign-up.
• We had 21 Mini-Challenge hosts.
• We had readers participate via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, their blogs, and everywhere else imaginable!
• Hundreds of Instagram photos were uploaded!
• We TRENDED on Twitter for all 24 hours!
• We had over 200 prizes donated!
• We had 5 generous individuals who helped us “warm up” with guest posts!
• We had 4 cohosts (Courtney, Deb, Dana, Kate) in addition to our hosts/organizers (Heather and Andi).

Isn’t that amazing!!! We’re blown away every time we look at it! We’ve also been doing a bit of assessing as we’ve worked through this Read-a-Thon, and there are some things we think we’re doing pretty well, and there are a couple of areas we want to work on, and we want to share them with you!

Happy With…

Hourly mini-challenges and co-hosts! We feel like these have been smooth sailing for the last few Read-a-Thons, so while we might be tweaking, there won’t be any major overhauls in this area.

Working On…

Cheerleading! We had an AMAZING group of Cheerleaders and I don’t FOR A MINUTE, want to take away from their accomplishments! We’ve gotten lots of direct comments,  and we’ve seen in the closing surveys that many of you felt like the cheerleaders ROCKED! The only problem? There are 38 of them for 484 blogs/channels. OMG, right??? I don’t even know how they make a dent! We’re considering some options to make blog/channel comments more plentiful in April, but this really comes down to the cheerleading manpower we have. If you’ve ever thought of volunteering to cheer, we really need you!

Prizes! I’ve seen the question pop up: “Why do you guys have so many prizes but you give so few away?” Quite simply, the bulk of our donations come from US publishers who do not ship internationally. We hate to limit the pool from which our international participants choose, so that means those of us behind the scenes have to cover the cost of international shipping. Roughly half of our winners are international and only SEVEN individuals have offered to help us cover international shipping costs. OUCH! Right now we could be spending as much as $210+ shipping prizes, so that’s why we have limited the number we give away. Going forward we hope to…

1. Attract more “angels” to help ship international prizes — US residents who will receive a prize and forward it to the international recipient (email deweyreadathon@gmail.com to volunteer to help with October 2013 shipping!)

2. Attract a larger pool of international publishers who can donate and ship their own books (this is the ideal!)

We take your feedback seriously, and that’s why we’re asking you to fill out this quick survey (6 questions, totally anonymous) to help us prioritize and make some decisions about these areas!

Lastly, we really want to thank EVERYONE involved!  This was an especially spirited Read-a-Thon full of genuine excitement and community warmth.  Even if you only got to read for a few hours… or a few minutes, you were still a part of something AMAZING!

Without further ado, go ahead and put it on your calendar. The Spring 2014 Read-a-Thon will take place on April 26th! Be there or be square! Put in for your days off and book that babysitter. It’s ON!

We’d also love it if you could indicate your volunteer interests for April in the form below. We’ll be in touch!!!

April 2013 Read-a-Thon Wrap-Up and EXCITING Announcements!

Whew!  Do you still have a Read-a-Thon hangover? We might!

To wrap things up, I just want to fill you in on a few stinkin’ awesome stats:

• We had 494 people sign-up to participate this April.
• 242 of those participated in the Introduction Meme.
• 122 of those participated in the End of Event Meme.
• 588 books were entered into the Books Read Database (there’s still time to add yours)
• We had 31 cheerleaders sign-up.
• We had 21 Mini-Challenge hosts.
• We had readers participate via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, their blogs, and everywhere else imaginable!
• Over 1,100 Instagram photos were uploaded and tagged!
• We TRENDED on Twitter on and off for all 24 hours!
• We had at least 186 prizes donated to us… more if you count those wonderful Mini-Challenge hosts. Thanks to Vasilly for helping with this!
• We had 4 cohosts (Sheila, Deb, Courtney, Kate) in addition to our hosts/organizers (Heather and Andi, waving).

Publishers, authors, bloggers, and bookstore who donated prizes this time, thank you from the bottom of our hearts! I am sad to say that A Real Bookstore, such a generous donor to this Read-a-Thon, closed their doors for good on Thursday, April 25th. It’s such a sad thing for those of us in the Dallas area to lose such a wonderful part of the community.

Lastly, we really want to thank all 494 of you who signed-up to participate!  This was an especially spirited Read-a-Thon full of genuine excitement and community warmth.  Even if you only got to read for a few hours… or a few minutes, you were still a part of something AMAZING!

We’ll do it all over again in October, and we have a major goal in mind…

We want at least 500 readers! 

I think we can do it…don’t you?

Without further ado, go ahead and put it on your calendar. The Fall 2013 Read-a-Thon will take place on October 12th! Be there or be square! Put in for your days off and book that babysitter. It’s ON!

We’d also love it if you could indicate your volunteer interests for October in the form below. We’ll be in touch!!!

 

Wrapping up the Read-a-thon and Planning for Next Year

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I needed a few days to recover from the read-a-thon!

Thank yous

Thanks to Hannah, Eva, and Nymeth for helping make this read-a-thon fantastic! 😀

Also thanks to our volunteers, Beth Fish, Trish, Jodie, and Darren. You all were invaluable!

Wieners!

One of our drawings in Hour 5 was a random drawing of two cheerleaders. One of the cheerleaders that we drew wasn’t able to end up cheering, so we’ve redrawn a new winner! Lynn from Chronicles of an Infant Bibliophile wins a book of her choice from the Prizes page and one of the following (given out on a first come, first served basis):

• Laura’s bookmark set
• 2 sets from Katrina (winner gets one of these, but we have 2 to give away)
• Kim’s bookmark
• a set of literary stamps
• Read-a-thon mug

Here’s some winners from mini-challenges we didn’t have a challenge to announce during the actual read-a-thon:

The winner of Dana at Scraptherapy’s mini-challenge Four That Never Bore was Mervi

The winner of Trisha at The Book Case’s mini-challenge Re-Reading the Classics was Tami & Dave.

Now for winners who we had to draw after the read-a-thon was over:

• Most time spent reading: Liyana Liyana Land with 24.5 hours! Liyana, you’re our hero.You’ve won a $15 Amazon gift card!
• Most pages read: Deborah from Books, Movies, and Chinese Food with 6,882. LOL. I think we all wish we could read this fast. 😉 You’ve also won a $15 Amazon gift card!
• Most enthusiastic cheerleader was Jill from Fizzy Thoughts. Everyone loved your cheers, Jill! 🙂 You get a $25 Amazon gift card
• The other most enthusiastic cheerleader was Eva from A Striped Armchair. Congratulations! You’ve won a $20 Amazon gift card!

Winners of the end-of-event meme:

• Fiona from Book Journeys won 5 books of her choice from the Prizes page
• Melissa from One Librarian’s Book Reviews one of the Hachette bundles from the Prizes page

Winners, please email deweyreadathon at gmail to claim your prize.

Money for Charity!

As far as we can tell, $956 was raised for charity! You guys are awesome! (Probably more money was raised but it’s hard to keep track of everyone!)

Other cool stuff

We have a French version! They had their first read-a-thon in June and had 10 people participate. They’re already planning another read-a-thon for 2010!

Begging and Pleading

Unfortunately for me, Eva and Nymeth have decided to not to co-host in the future. So we’re now in need of at least two more co-hosts for April. I can’t say exactly what you would do as far as co-hosting before the read-a-thon, because we split up the duties so one person isn’t saddled with everything, but things that we do pre-read-a-thon and that you may or may not end up doing include: soliciting prizes, getting mini-challenge hosts, organizing the cheerleaders, answering questions, divvying up the prizes for the various hours, etc. Duties during the read-a-thon  are more universal and include: posting during each hour of your shift (shifts are 6 hours), being the back-up for someone else who is posting for their shift, monitoring Twitter, going around to participants as needed, following up with mini-challenge hosts, etc. If you’re interested in co-hosting or volunteering in some other way, please send an email to deweyreadathon at gmail.

The next read-a-thon…

The date for the next read-a-thon is April 10, 2010. Mark your calendars!

(Originally I’d set this date for April 3, 2010, but April 4th is Easter, so I switched it.)