My 2015 Reading Challenges

I’ve never done a reading challenge before outside of the Goodreads reading challenge, which I mostly do for myself to see how many books I’m reading each year. Since I started my blog in like March I missed the usual beginning of the year excitement over new reading challenges to have for the next twelve months and I’m glad, another things added into the challenge of starting a blog might have been too much.

As it is my first year I am trying to be sensible, I will only do a couple of reading challenges and I will be realistic. I could say I’ll ready hundreds of books, but as I am not a planner when it comes to reading I don’t want to put the number too high and find myself having to dash through books to keep up with a challenge. I’ll keep the numbers realistic, no more than a book a month for any challenge and wherever possible I will try and find books that can work in crossover, I’ll explain that in a minute, though.

I plan to do the Fairytale retelling challenge, the fantasy challenge (you see what I mean about crossover books now?) and participate in the Blog Organisation Challenge, because God knows I need something to help guide in my organisation.

The Fairytale Retelling Challenge (Hosted by Mel @ The Daily Prophecy)

How the challenge works:

• The challenge runs from January 1st – December 31st 2015.
• The goal is to read fairytale retellings, but if you want you can also pick other retellings. The books can be from whenever, not just new 2015 releases and rereads count!
• There are 6 different levels you can aim for:
  -Prince Charming: 1 – 4 books.
  -Magic mirror: 5 - 9 books.
  -Big bad wolf: 10 – 15 books.
  -The wise princess: 16 – 20 books.
  -Wicked fairy Godmother: 21 – 25 books.
  -Bluebeard: you are killing it! 26+ books.

I am aiming to read 12 books, so I want to be the Big Bad Wolf. I will count any books that I read in this challenge which are fantasy books as part of the Fantasy challenge below.

Flights of Fantasy (hosted by Alexa Loves Books and Hello, Chelly)

How the challenge Works:

• The challenge runs from January 1st – December 31st 2015.
• All you have to do is challenge yourself to read a certain number of fantasy books.

I, again, plan to read 12, I don’t know if crossovers from other challenges are allowed or not, but I’m doing it anyway. I will of course be trying to read books I already own in this challenge as well, because my TBR shelf is crazy. I know 12 is quite a low number because I know I often go one fantasy reading binges, but I’m being realistic and then if I read more I’ll feel proud.

Book Blogger Organisation Challenge (hosted by Brittany @ The Book Addict’s Guide)

How it works:

• The Blog Organization Challenge will run from January 1st to June 30th.
• The idea is to help you stay organised on your blog and (hopefully) help you stay on top og things with themes for each month to help you.

That's it really, this one is not a reading challenge, just a normal challenge that is going to help guide me. I am terribly disorganised and love nothing more than organising myself (sounds a bit contradictory, I know) but I am so bad at knowing where to start. My attempts at organising myself often begin with me creating more chaos before attempting to tidy it all back up again, so I’m hoping the monthly themes will help me sort my blog out. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I’m definitely not on top of things.

The themes for this organisation are as below. Each month I’ll create a round up post for myself about what I’ve been doing to contribute to my blog organisation.

• JANUARY: Reading challenges & resolutions
  • Picking challenges, making resolutions, scheduling, forming plans, picking reading/blogging buddies,
• FEBRUARY: Blog maintenance
  • Updating old reviews, pages, layouts, features/memes, contact info
  • Clean up images, broken links
  • SEOs
• MARCH: Social Media + Review Outlets
  • Update social media accounts: bios, who you follow, delete old accounts you won’t use, resolve to use some accounts more
  • Organize Goodreads shelves: duplicate copies, version of books, creating shelves, removing shelves
  • Cross-posting
• APRIL: Graphics, HTML, CSS, Plug-ins
  • Update graphics for posts/memes/events, update button, update header
  • Learn Photoshop/Gimp/PicMonkey
  • Brush up or try to learn simple HTML and CSS (for layouts, fonts, etc). Take this month to delve into the scary world of coding! (Or at least teach yourself one new thing!)
• MAY: Book clean-up + spring cleaning!
  • Culling shelves, giveaways, donations, giving back borrowed books
  • Reading books you were given as gifts, ARC catch up
  • Rearranging shelves, updating Goodreads again, giving back borrowed books
  • More cross-posting & cleaning up GR shelves
• JUNE: Freebie
  • Recapping what you’ve organized, focus on biggest area of need, review TBR list

Those are my challenge plans for this year. Here’s hoping it goes well.