We’ve been busy over the past few months, discussing how best to carry the AWW challenge into our sixth year. One of the problems we’ve identified is how diffuse our reading and reviewing community is. We have lots of participants who review books in a number of genres, but often it’s difficult have a sense of cohesion.

Enter Facebook.

After much debate, we’ve decided to create a group for AWW challenge participants. Please consider joining. It’ll be a great way to meet other readers reviewing for the challenge and to share news about great books by Australian women. (You can join it here.)

At first it was going to be a closed group, just for people who have signed up for the challenge, but we’ve decided to open it to the public allowing anyone to join and see what books are being discussed. Please spread the word to your reader friends! Maybe some will be inspired to join the challenge. The group will be moderated, but for now we’re keeping it simple: if you’re posting reviews, we want you to share only the books you liked and can recommend to others. (And please remember our review guidelines.)

For authors, we’ve created a second group. There we’re inviting authors and publicists to post links to new releases, festival attendances, prize listings, book cover reveals, availability for interview and other news. You can join here. If it works, the group should help us to promote AWWs in our new newsletter or here on the blog. (Our end-of-year newsletter is here – please sign up to receive it, if you haven’t already.) I’m particularly keen to support small presses – especially after University of Western Australia Press recently decided to pull out of submitting books for awards, as reported by Susan Wyndham in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday.

Finally, thanks to all those participants who have posted completion posts for this year’s challenge. So far we have:

Note: The Goodreads links might be difficult to navigate, if you’re not familiar with the site – but clearly the AWW group there is well organised.

If you’ve finished the challenge for the year, please remember to enter your details here. Then please sign up for the 2017 challenge. It promises to be a great AWW year!

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