What to expect from The Reader’s Room in 2016

It’s official. It has been one year since we started this blog! We want to give a sincere thank all of you for following us and participating in our challenges. We’ve loved hearing your thoughts on books and discovering all of your creative choices for our challenges. We hope you stay with us through the second year of the blog and we look forward to welcoming new readers!

For our one-year anniversary, we’ve been thinking about ways to improve and expand on the blog. We want to share some of our plans for 2016 and we’d love to get your feedback on the things you like most and least about your experiences here. Without further ado, here are some of our plans:

1. Reader-book match (we’ll rename this once we can figure out a better name for it). This will become a recurring feature that will require your help. Our plan is to solicit readers who want to be matched with a book (it could be you). We will send them a brief survey. We will post the results of that survey and will attempt to create a personalized book list for that reader along with your help.

2. Book-Beer pairings: We’ve done a few book-wine pairings and we will continue with this feature but will also add book-beer pairings thanks to the fabulous Nicole D who will join us this year as contributor. We will have a fabulous contributor for this recurring post.

3. Contributors. In the upcoming months, be sure to check out our “about” page. We’ll be adding some regular contributors (see one such example in point #2) to fill in gaps that we don’t cover that frequently on the blog. Those contributors may be writing things like a non-fiction feature, travel-book pairings, travels through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, & author events (if we can convince one person to join us. You know who you are – send us your personal blurb and join us officially!).

In addition to those new features, we plan to continue with our regular posts: Love it or Hate it, Read around the World, Featured Author, Terrible Reviews of Great Books, and a range of book reviews.

Finally, we are both working on creating some fun new reading challenges for each season. Those of you who are interested can join our winter scavenger hunt, which is in progress and will run through the end of March for a first round of prizes and through the end of 2016 for a few additional prizes.

We want to hear from you. What are your favorite features on the blog? Least favorites? Is there anything we aren’t doing that you’d like us to add? What do you think about some of our new ideas for the blog? Would you be willing to participate in the reader-book match (as either the reader or to provide recommendations)?