At Storyshares, we envision a world where everyone has the chance to fall in love with a story – and grow into a life-long reader. We are dreaming up a new library to engage the students who have fallen behind – filled with real choices for readers of all ages, identities, backgrounds, and reading levels.
As we gear up for our 7th annual writing contest at Storyshares, it is amazing to reflect on where it all began: a single writing contest – an experiment to test the waters. The very first Storyshares contest launched in 2013. It was, and still is, a project designed to address the lack of engaging and culturally relevant texts for adolescents and young adults whose reading levels lagged behind their ages and interests. We sought to answer a key question: could we inspire a community of authors to develop a new kind of book designed specifically to support and empower older, striving readers?
At the time, we were clear on the problem we were trying to address: millions upon millions of readers lack literacy skills beyond elementary school. To improve their skills, they must receive targeted instruction, and they must spend time practicing reading. But very little content and support exists for students who are learning to read after the third grade. Literacy is one of the few areas that is focused almost exclusively on young students. But learning to decode shouldn’t only be a juvenile experience, centered around content like Sesame Street or Hop on Pop. Older learners across the globe need equitable and inclusive access to relevant and representative content – authentic and intriguing books – to inspire them to engage deeply in reading and to enable their literacy skill growth.
Without engaging content, students are less likely to improve, and the consequences are very, very real: if students can’t read proficiently after third grade, their life outcomes look different. hey are four times less likely to graduate high school and six times more likely to end up in prisonor on welfare.
So how could we support and empower the millions of readers worldwide, who have moved past third grade without yet being able to read?
With our very first writing contest, we wanted to see if we could build the first shelf in the library for those millions of students who were being overlooked.
While the problem was clear back in 2013, this solution, and its viability, still remained unknown. Could we source this new kind of book from global authors? Was it possible to develop easy-to-read books that would engage a 12-year-old, or 17-year-old?
We spent months and months planning our first contest: building an awareness campaign, developing a digital publishing platform, crafting guidelines for authors, and amassing a group of partners who shared the same goals.
I will never forget the day that the first contest launched, back in October 2013. We had marketed the upcoming contest far and wide, in hopes of getting writers excited to share their own stories once the contest opened. And our efforts had been successful: as visitors began pouring into the contest website, it crashed. I entered full-on panic mode, feeling certain that it was all over, right then and there. We were doomed; we would never receive a single story submission.
Of course, as I’ve learned many times over since, undertakings like these rarely go off without a hitch. And their success is never determined by a single day, or a single error, no matter how consequential those may seem at the time.
So we fixed the website, and we went on to receive hundreds of amazing story submissions from writers and educators with all kinds of backgrounds. What did they have in common? A desire to share their own stories, publish their own works, and serve this significant and unmet market for striving readers at any age.
Our first contest became a proof point, and it started a movement – evolving into a brand new publishing model.
Through our contests since, we have engaged over 4,000 authors from 180 countries. We dive into the thousands of submissions we receive each year, refining, designing, and publishing the best ones to our collection: with over 600 titles to date, and hundreds more pouring in each year.
We cultivate strong, long standing relationships with our authors. They continually contribute stories to our niche collection, and we provide them the opportunity to become published, to share their voices towards a more authentic and inclusive global library.
What we learned from that first experiment is this: there already exists a willing community of suppliers (authors) and an eager community of consumers (struggling readers). They are simply unaware of each other, and they require facilitation to communicate effectively. Storyshares brings these readers and writers together for ongoing content creation and consumption. Thanks to our contest, our books are now published and distributed to over a million readers around the world.
Each year, we craft our contest award categories to incentivize the creation of specific content, which fill the gaps we hear about through our work with educators and students in the classroom. As a result, we are able to generate bookshelves that meet any number of criteria for topic, genre, reading level, target audience, and purpose. This year’s contest will include the first ever decodables category, based on our recent success publishing decodable chapter book series for students in grades 3-12. We are excited to see how our community rises to the challenge, to develop more amazing titles for students at truly any reading level.
Learn more about the 2024 Story of the Year Contest here.