October 1, 2010 #FridayReads Giveaways from @NovelBooks

A little over a year ago I began asking all of my Twitter followers (at that time I had a few hundred) what they were reading on Friday. With great originality, I called this Twitter meme “#fridayreads.” (For those of you who haven’t experienced the joys of Twitter, anything with a hashmark is known as a “hashtag;” the hashtag “#fridayreads” signifies that you can put the phrase into Search on Twitter and find all of the other tweets so tagged.)

There was a tiny bit of method to my madness (or perhaps it’s the other way around?): I wanted to emphasize reading rather than books, because we’re currently in the midst of a great upheaval in the book world. Notice I said “upheaval,” and not “transition:” I for one firmly believe that paper books and electronic books will continue to coexist for many decades, if not centuries. However, I didn’t want my meme to wind up as a way for people to continue debating bound books versus e-readers. I wanted it to be a place where people could simply share books, stories, poems, magazine articles, ANYTHING they were reading.

It’s taken a while for #FridayReads to take off. There are many reasons for this, and I won’t digress much further in a post which has as its ultimate purpose the announcement of giveaway winners. However, it is my enormous pleasure to be able to share with everyone that this week for the first time, #FridayReads topped 2,000 participants! In fact, we made it to 2,113.

We’ve been making such strides (and I do mean “we;” I could not do this without the support of each and every person on Twitter who participates) with #FridayReads that people in the publishing world are taking notice. This week, Patrick Darby of Novel Places Books in Clarksburg, Maryland put up $250 worth of free, new books in support of #FridayReads reaching 2K for the first time. What a great carrot, Patrick! THANK YOU. 

Here’s how it works, and here are the winners:

– 500-participant mark, $25 worth of free books: @book_nut

– 1,000-participant mark, $50 worth of free books: @ReidIsRead

– 1,500-participant mark, $75 worth of free books: @Hudsonette

– 2,000-participant mark, $100 worth of free books: @Perednia

To claim your prizes, please contact @NovelBooks! I cannot thank Patrick enough for this amazing giveaway, and you all deserve kudos for getting #FridayReads to this point. 

If you have any questions or would like to sponsor or donate to #FridayReads, you can reach me at thebookmaven at gmail dot com.