Join our March Madness Reading Challenge

Our books have been ranked and our book brackets are ready. On Sunday night when the basketball team rankings will be released it will be time to fill out your bracket and play along. Want to join the challenge? Here’s what you have to do…

The point of our reading challenge is to use your skills and/or luck to try and predict which book/basketball teams will win each game and then read books to boost your points. All books will be partnered to basketball teams in the order of the bracket above. Points will be determined by how well you make predictions and which books you end up reading. Here are the basic steps:

Step 1: Join the CBS pool for our group. Here is the link. You will need to set up an account and get ready for when they release the brackets. Sign up asap so we know you’ll be joining us.

Step 2: Fill out your bracket. On March 12th the NCAA will post their bracket. You then need to log back in to CBS pool and fill out your bracket by picking the teams that you think will advance each round. Since all books are partnered with a basketball team, the teams you pick to advance will be the books you will be able to read. For example say that Kansas is the #1 pick in the top left division then Kansas would get paired with Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. If you pick Kansas to lose in the first game, then you can’t read Born a Crime for extra points. In contrast, if you pick Kansas to win the whole thing, you will then be able to read Born a Crime and will be allotted the maximum extra points.  I will post the exact team/book pairings in this excel sheet. Sheet one has the bracket, sheet two has the team/book pairings. You can check it out now but it only includes the books currently.

Step 3: Submit your bracket before the start of games on March 16 or you will get shut out.

Step 4: Read and watch how your teams/books perform. Scores will be determined by how well basketball teams do AND which books you end up reading. Your total score will be the CBS score on your bracket + points for books you read. The further a book/team goes in the tournament, the more points you will get if you read it. Exact instructions on how to score will be posted on the blog challenge page.

Step 5: Keep score and post reviews when you are completed. Please post a short, 1-4 sentence review on the challenge page when you have completed your book so we can verify your final score at the end of the game and award the prize correctly. If you have a goodreads account or a blog, you can simply link to your review on those sites in the comments section of the challenge page. If you are a Litsy participant, you can post a review on Litsy but make sure to tag me so I see it and count it (JenP).

Confused on how to fill out a bracket? I’ll be posting a link to detailed instructions on March 12 but here are a few tips:

Print out a copy of the book bracket. When team pairings are posted, write in the names of the basketball teams into your bracket to make it easy to fill out the CBS bracket and to keep track of which books you’ll need to read.

You can choose to fill out your bracket in different ways:
1. Pick based on your basketball knowledge or based exclusively on which basketball teams you want to root for. Pros: This will make filling out your bracket easy b/c all you will need to do is look at the basketball teams to fill out your bracket on CBS site. Cons: You get points for reading books and if you don’t look at which books are paired with teams, you could end up having to read books you don’t like in order to get those additional points.
2. Pick based exclusively on the book bracket and ignore basketball teams. Pros: You get to read only books that you want to read and you can fill out your bracket today. Cons: 1) You will need to convert your bracket to basketball teams in order to fill out the CBS bracket; 2)If a book you love is ranked low and matched to a weak team AND you pick it to win the tournament because you love the book, then you probably won’t do well in terms of final score.
3. Pick based on a combination of basketball teams and books. Pros: You can pick a mix of books with enough books you love to read for points while still thinking statistically about probability of teams winning. For example, if everyone says Kansas is a favorite but you don’t want to read the book, you can still pick them to win but then fill the rest of your bracket with books you do want to read. That way you get the points for Kansas winning but you rack up reading points by reading other books on your bracket.  Cons: Tricky to go back and forth between books and teams and more time consuming.

Ask you questions since setup is tricky but once the tournament starts you should be able to sit back, watch, and read.