This is all by accident! You’ll find that funny once I tell you what’s
going on.
So I’m getting published, well
actually it’s self-published, but finally! a novel of mine will be on the
shelves or at least available online. So
here’s what happened. Have you ever
heard of NaNoWriMo? Yeah, well unless
you’re a serious writer it’s probably something you haven’t, actually, I can’t
even say that. I didn’t hear about
NaNoWriMo until about two years after I started writing, making it one year
after I had gotten serious about making it my career.
So here’s the deal with NaNo;
it’s created by authors who realize the first step in getting published is
actually finishing the book! I know
right!? Shocker! So the creators of this site—who I have no
idea who they are because I’m still new to them and I can’t really find out the
history of how NaNo truly started—began a quest in 2001, as far as I can tell,
that would help authors, young and old, finish a book and take their first step
out on a journey that would hopefully be fulfilling. It started off small but has grown to
millions of participants every year and continues to grow exponentially and has
sparked a camp and a month dedicated to Scripts. Alright, I’m all over the place, I know, so
let me tell you exactly what it is.
NaNoWriMo is “literary abandon”
as they say. It started off by having a
contest every single November which is the National Novel Writing Month. The contest comes down during the 1st
of November until the 30th at Midnight. Contestants are to write an entire novel,
50,000 words or more. That’s a lot
right? Well here’s how they make it
simple. You can write it, you can type
it, you can do both, however you decide to do it you can do it as long as it is
50,000 words. They have a site in which
you create a completely free profile, because they earn their money
through donations, and keep track of the words.
So basically, in my opinion, typing would be easier because then it
would be easier to keep track of how many words you’ve typed. NaNo is very lax on their rules. They feel that the true reward of the contest
is actually completing the novel itself and so if you screw around and post 50,000
words of crap, or copy it from somewhere else, you can still win the
contest. Trust me; nothing is better
than feeling the success of actually writing and finishing that novel, if
you’re a true writer. Or, and that’s the
other thing, you don’t actually have to finish the novel. The moment you reach 50,000 is the moment you
win that contest. This number is
apparently the standard novel count.
Standard doesn’t mean there aren’t smaller novels out there. But it’s to help you sit down and write that
novel you’ve been planning to write, have started to write, or have already
written maybe down on paper but you’ve been procrastinating on typing or
whatever. It’s to help get those
creative ideas flowing and get that novel started.
Since 2001 the numbers have
climbed and now NaNo has been able to do different things such as NaNoWriMo
Camp—“Based on November’s National Novel
Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Camp NaNoWriMo provides the online support, tracking
tools, and hard deadline to help you write the rough draft of your novel in a
month… other than November!”—and Script Frenzy which is in April and has
rules set up for writing a script by the ending of April. There are many other things that NaNo does
including fundraising, a store, a fundraising/writing night; it’s all dedicated
to writing and getting that first draft down.
When I first heard about
NaNoWriMo they had a janky website.
There site wasn’t yet equipped to handle the thousands to possibly
millions of writers that were competing for the ability to say, “Yeah, I wrote
that.” And so when I first tried to get
on my computer’s browser kept crashing.
Well I was able to do one thing, which was sign up and so a couple of
years later they sent me an email about how their site was new and
improved. So I checked it out, and by
this time it was the last week of October last year. It was a lot better and I learned a lot more
about what NaNoWriMo was. I found out
that winning the contest was actually noticed by a few publishers because it’s
a contest of commitment. At this
point I had and have a literary agent through the Pikkante Media Network and he
wanted me to make sure I focused on getting my name out there by doing as many
contest as I possibly could. So I
entered NaNoWriMo. I used one of my
novels that I had already written out but hadn’t typed. It was the last one I’ve finished in a while
and I felt it was my best writing. I
didn’t want to just use the novel I’m trying to get published on so I went
ahead and typed up this latest story.
Well I won the contest, but only
because at the time I had a sample of a story that I hadn’t finished and I
originally planned on connecting the two together so putting in the first few
chapters of that as an excerpt helped me make the count and I won. I was surprised to find out one of the prizes
this year was the ability to get five free copies of you book in actual
published form for me to do whatever I pleased through a website known as
Createspace.com. I thought that was cool
but I wanted to edit the story so I went ahead and started working on that and
I eventually took out the excerpt because when I started Book 2 of my novel I
couldn’t make that excerpt fit without making the story completely ridiculous. So the book is now 5,000 words short give or
take a few hundred words. Not bad, and
like I said, there are shorter novels.
Anyway once I start going
through the process on Createspace.com, I realize once they start telling me to
set a price and my distribution channels that I actually will be making this available
for sale. At that point it just blew my
mind, a self-publishing website that was free basically, and one of the
available channels is Amazon.com…this could actually be how I could get my
start. So now I’m going through and
trying to fine tune this book as best as I possibly can so I can get this out
there. I just wanted to let you all know
a little of what’s happening, as I get closer to setting it all up you will
know more. I’m excited and you should be
too and I’m hoping to get this book mainstream as soon as possible. Also if I can get enough money from my sales
I can transfer it into a Kindle E-book as well so those of you with fancy
devices can read as well. Anyway, that’s
all I wanted to say, but until next time According to Michael III, sometimes
accidents can work out in your favor. If
you want to check out NaNoWriMo then here is the link to their website, http://www.nanowrimo.org/.
—Michael III
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