Hey, you, reader of books!
Can you believe this is the fourth year of the Challenge? Nope, us neither. The time has simply flown past, despite there being obviously nothing of note going on in the world lately.
*peers around stacks of books towards the fire of ridiculousness engulfing literally everything*
Annnnnnyway...
Once again it feels like exactly the right time of the year to cosy up and get some reading done (which is kind of why we chose October, the best of all the months). Also, publishing has had a pretty good couple of years, and we all know that's due to us needing the escape of buying more books than usual to sit unread on our shelves or go unheard on our devices. Because that's what we do, right?
What is the OcTBR Challenge?
The OcTBR Challenge is all about changing that. At least a little. It's an entire month of celebrating reading (or listening to) the books we have that remain unread, despite our best intentions. And while we're not expecting to get through our entire tower of TBRs, if we can read even one of those beautiful books we'll be happy.
Of course, we could all be doing this anyway, at any time. But life is a lot, so we thought it would be fun to set aside a specific time every year to do it collectively, all readers together, so we're supporting each other.
The OcTBR Challenge Plan
As always, we'll kick off on Oct 1st by encouraging everyone to share photos of their TBR towers on Twitter. They can either be everything you've yet to read or a select few you've chosen to tackle. And what it is doesn't really matter. Physical books. Ebooks. Audiobooks. Open tabs of articles. The backs of cereal packets. We celebrate all reading. Whatever inks your pages.
After this, you simply get reading! Devour those words!
You can do it hazardously or you can be as organised as you like. In fact, you can keep track through the month with our downloadable Challenge Sheets and you can also collect and share our fun badges that celebrate particular reading achievements. All of which can be found on our 'Cool Things' page.
Every Thursday at 8pm in October, we'll hold the OcTBR Chat (follow #OcTBRChat) on Twitter, where you can get involved in conversations on reading. We'll throw out questions and you can answer them and then we'll chat and conversations and life-long friendships will ensue. Hurray!
And then, at the end of the month, we'll give out book prizes! These come courtesy of the amazing literary agent Sara Megibow at KT Literary and will be given out to those readers who we think really got involved with the event and made the most of it. So go forth and enjoy yourself and you might just end up with even more books on those TBR piles! (Sorry, but also not.)
Right. That's it from us. Any questions, check our our FAQs page or just drop us a message on Twitter.
Can't wait to read with you all again!
Love, us.