[2] [3] The event was established in 2011 by Charlotte Frost during her tenure as Provost International Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) and PhD2Published, a website aimed at helping early-career academics learn how to get published.
Creator Charlotte Frost aimed to develop an event that would push her and her colleagues to work on their respective academic writing projects and create a sense of teamship among them and the wider global academic community.
The inaugural event took place November 2011 with over one hundred participants sharing their progress on their blogs and social media accounts.
For 2012, 'Book' was dropped from the event name to include a greater array of academic writers working on shorter manuscripts.
Subsequent years saw the introduction of other tools and activities, including video tutorials and dedicated apps.