2025 Reading Challenge

What exactly is the 2025 IHS Reading Challenge?

The short answer is it’s a fun event to get people to read more sapphic books!

The challenge runs from January 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025. You can join at any point during the 365-day span just by picking up a book and starting to read.
To promote the widest variety of women-loving-women stories, the IHS team has selected 50 categories, ranging from age-gap romance to sci-fi, and everything in between.
When you finish reading the book, submit it here to get one entry into the end-of-the-year prize drawings. More on that below.
You can only submit one book per category until you have submitted a book for each of the fifty categories. After that, you may continue to submit books in any categories you wish. There is no limit to the number of books you can enter after reaching the 50-category threshold.
IHS will feature one category each week (50 weeks in total) and will share a list of book suggestions on our website. Some of them will even be on sale! You are in no way obligated to read only the books we showcase. As long as a book fits a category, that works!
You are not required to read a book during the week the category is featured. We do this to showcase the categories, but you can read a category at any time during the year.

You might want to keep track of your reading progress for this challenge. This is not required to participate, but we’ve created two PDF options and a Canva template to help you, if you so desire.

This PDF has all the categories with a slot for you to add the book cover.

Get the book cover PDF option right here. You can do this in any graphic design program such as Canva, Photoshop, etc. Or you can even print the pages and get out your scissors and glue sticks if you like arts and crafts.

Please don’t email IHS asking how to add the book covers to the PDF. We’d love to be everyone’s tech support, but we simply don’t have the time.

If you’re like TB and have absolutely no idea how to add the book covers (even though Miranda keeps trying to teach TB simple programs like Canva and Book Brush), the second PDF option right below is probably the one you need.

This PDF lists all the categories with a space for you to jot down the title.

Get that one here.

This one allows you to either print and handwrite the titles in the available space or if you’re more tech savvy and have more patience than TB, you can type in the title.

Finally, if you use Canva, we have a template that contains both versions of the tracking sheet. This will allow you to fill it out in Canva. Here’s the link.

Please note, you still have to submit a form for each book read to be entered into the end-of-the-year Amazon gift card giveaways.

Keep reading to find out about the prizes

Why should I get involved?

Because reading is fun!

Not a good enough reason? We also have prizes!

One of the big changes from last year’s challenge is there won’t be levels. This means even if you only read one book in 2025, you have a chance of winning one of three $100 Amazon gift cards. That’s right, we’re giving away $300 just for reading books. Please note, you can only win one of the $100 gift cards.

But that’s not all. We have weekly and monthly prizes, too.

Weekly Prizes

eBook Giveaways: Every week, there’s an eBook giveaway for the featured category. The prize is a collection of all the eBooks that have been generously donated by authors and publishers for that category. There is one lucky winner per drawing per week! The most recent giveaway posts can always be found at the top of this page. You can enter every week and can win multiple times during the year.
Facebook contests: Throughout the week, check our Facebook Reader Forum for games and prizes hosted by authors who have books in featured challenge categories.

Monthly $25 Amazon gift Card giveaways:

Each Wednesday, look for our What Are You Reading post on Facebook and Patreon. This year, these are the only two places where we will be posting the check-ins. This means, if you were entering on Instagram, Twitter, or Goodreads in the past you’ll need to join either Facebook or Patreon. You can join our Patreon as a free member.

If you’re not a fast reader, and it takes you more than a week to read a book, that’s fine, too. As long as you reply to the new post the following week (or weeks) to say you are still reading that book, we will count it as a new entry toward the monthly drawing.

If you don’t like Facebook or Patreon, no problem. You’re more than welcome to email us your info. Please send an email to [email protected], put “Monthly IHS Reading Challenge Giveaway” in the subject line, and tell us the name of the book and the category. Just like the Facebook and Patreon peeps, you can enter once per week. All entries for the drawing will need to be received by midnight Eastern Time on the last day of the month to qualify. Entries received after that will roll over to the next month’s drawing.

You cannot enter on Facebook, Patreon, and via email to triple your chances. Let’s keep this fair, peeps! We’ll assign a number to every entry we receive, and then we’ll use a random number selector to choose the winner.

You’re eligible to win multiple months so keep entering every week.

Here’s a page that explains all the prizes and the pertinent details.

Is there a reader group I can join?

If you want to make things more fun, we suggest joining a reader group.

The next best thing to reading is talking about what you’re reading. IHS has a Facebook group where we would love to hear about your reading progress.

Plus, since the next best thing to reading is talking about what you’re reading, you’ll find plenty of other SapphFic book lovers to chat with and get even more book recommendations.

Is there a complete list of rules?

Yes, we do have a rule page, and we suggest you check it out before you begin.

Here is a complete list of the rules, including all the details about entering our giveaways. For added fun, try reading them out loud like you’re doing a voiceover in a pharmaceutical commercial.