On your marks: 12 Days of Christmas book game and giveaway starts tomorrow #12days

Tomorrow is Dec 1st and the official start of the 12 Days of Christmas game and giveaway that I announced earlier this month.

To play you need to come up with book titles that match the subject of that day in the cycle song The Twelve Days of Christmas – the one that starts with

On the First day of Christmas my true love sent to me
a Partridge in a Pear Tree.

On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me

Two Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.

There’s an incentive to play along with this which is a giveaway of a book up to the value of $20 USD from the Book Depository

How to Play:

Starting tomorrow and for each of the next 12 days I will publish a post which asks you to come up with a list of books that matches that day in the song. So on Dec 1 (day 1) you’ll be asked to name books (ideally 3) which feature a partridge or a pear tree either in the title, or the cover image or even as  a character. On Day 7 you need to find book titles, cover images etc featuring swans. Be creative – if you can’t think of book titles including the word swan then how  about authors called Swan (and variations of that) or books which feature swimming…

Put your titles into the comments field of that day’s post. Don’t just give me the name since you could easily get that from a Google search – tell us something about the book itself.

Feel free to blog about this on your own site or via Twitter using the #12days hashtag

Here’s the list so you can get thinking….entries in advance of the day’s posting will not be counted.

I will put my list of books in the day’s post.

Day by Day Prompts

Day 1:   Partridge in a Pear Tree
Day 2:   Turtle Doves
Day 3:    French Hens
Day 4:   Calling Birds
Day 5:    Gold Rings
Day 6:   Geese a-Laying
Day 7:   Swans a-Swimming
Day 8:   Maids a-Milking
Day 9:   Ladies Dancing
Day 10:  Lords a-Leaping
Day 11:   Pipers Piping
Day 12:   Drummers Drumming

Rules of the Game

1.Each day a post will go live on booker talk.com matched to the task for that day. All you to do is post a comment with your list of books on the page

2. Each day try to come up with 3 titles. No need to think of 11 books featuring pipers or eight with maids in them. This is meant to be fun not mission impossible…..

3. Participants are encouraged to be creative with the names of titles matching each day. But the books do need to be in existence – no scope here for making up your own titles.

4. The number of contributions per person will be totalled and the one with the highest number will win the prize. So if you post three titles for day 6 and 5 on day 11, that gives a total of 8 points.

5. Contributions should be entered on the page within the time limit stated each day – typically I will give 48 hours between the time I post the day’s challenge and when comments will be closed.

6. You don’t need to play every day in order to be entered for the prize. Some days will be easier than others – and anyway you have all that shopping and packing still to do

7. There is only one prize – available internationally. The Prize winner will be announced on the blog around about the 15th of December.

6. The prize is that you get to choose a book up to the value of $20 USD from the Book Depository that I will arrange to ship to you. This will probably not arrive until next year given the last postage dates for international mail.