[HN Gopher] NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month
___________________________________________________________________
NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month
Author : rfreytag
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-11-13 18:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nanowrimo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (nanowrimo.org)
| rfreytag wrote:
| The podcast 'Writing Excuses' is also doing a series to help
| people complete a novel in a month: https://writingexcuses.com/
|
| See the Oct 29, Nov 5, and Nov 12th episodes so far.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Nanowrimo was started in _1999_! It 's a great project and
| there's no better time than now to start your book.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| My wife participates in it every year (for many years); in
| october she gets the outline done, then in november she writes
| the book, in december she has editors go over it and she
| publishes during the next year. The productivity of just saying
| 'this month is fully for writing' and sticking to a minimum word
| count really has been a very productive mechanism.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| That is a good story, good for your wife.
|
| I belong to a local self-published authors group in my small
| town. We are going to cover NaNoWriMo this weekend.
| asicsp wrote:
| Haven't written a novel before. I had an idea a few months back
| and had been taking notes here and there (fantasy genre). I
| decided to participate, setting myself a 500 words/day goal. Just
| crossed 12k words and now I'm hoping to end up around 30k at the
| end of November. If that pans out, I'll push to finish the first
| draft in December.
|
| My main goal is to have fun and I did feel great a few times,
| especially when I thought of something clever or spotted a
| mistake that'd not work with what I had written a few chapters
| back.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| I've _finally_ managed to complete it in 2021 and 2022. This year
| is much harder because writing prose causes a lot of hard topics
| to get brought up from my subconscious into my everyday, but I 'm
| still aiming for 50k this year and not giving up.
| Jemaclus wrote:
| I believe in you!
| aoanla wrote:
| I'm glad that NaNoWriMo continues to work for people, but I think
| it's important to note that it doesn't work for everyone - and
| it's ok if it doesn't work for you.
|
| I attempted it twice in consecutive years about a decade and a
| half ago, and not only failed to complete anything, but was also
| driven into a worse depression because of it. I had to avoid
| people talking about it in November for years afterwards or I'd
| start to relapse, too.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Writing this much seems to take significant mental energy, so
| if you are already prone to depression you need to be extremely
| prepared. It's also true depending on your intentions for all
| creative things, particularly if you have low self confidence.
| For example you might feel bad about yourself because you don't
| do enough art so you enter some kind of art competition, but
| then you immediately feel shitty about yourself and so you
| can't bring yourself to do it, leading to even worse self
| confidence about it.
|
| My therapist told me that in Germany there is an idiom that in
| English translates to "if you want to prove that you will fail
| you will always succeed". If I did NaNoWriMo, I would have the
| full expectation that I will fail, even if I try to tell myself
| that I have hope it would go well, and so I will just naturally
| make myself fail.
| em-bee wrote:
| not sure if this fits here, but just today the thought
| occurred to me that depression may be related to expectations
| i have of myself but also what others expect of me. by
| avoiding pressure from others and not expecting to much
| myself but without considering that a failure, or by not
| blaming myself if things don't work out, in other words,
| avoiding things that would lower my self confidence, may be a
| way to avoid depression.
|
| i have never tried NaNoWriMo, but if i did, i'd look at my
| situation and realize that i would not get much done, but for
| me that would not be a failure, because i wouldn't even go in
| with the expectation that i should be able to change that. on
| other words, i would not even have the hope that it would go
| well. instead it would be the realization that without
| participating i'd write nothing. by participating i'd write
| something, and so i may consider that a (small) success.
| swagempire wrote:
| While I empathize with your situation-- be careful not to
| discourage others. The only two fully completed novellas were
| because of this month and I'm very proud of them.
|
| I'm much more annoyed I haven't been able to replicate this
| outside of the contest.
|
| Hope you feel better now.
| aoanla wrote:
| I want to be clear, I am not trying to discourage others -
| however, I did try NaNoWriMo because of an aura of "everyone
| should do this, it's great" from people around me, so I am
| more just making the gentle point that people shouldn't feel
| that they "have" to do NaNo, or that there's anything wrong
| with them if they try and fail.
|
| If it does work for you, that is, of course, great.
|
| Indeed, NaNoWriMo does - by the very nature of its focus on
| "pushing yourself to succeed" and positivity in challenge -
| make it hard to talk about _not_ succeeding. (And I am pretty
| sure that attitude didn 't help my own interactions with it.)
| crdrost wrote:
| It's also, you have to make an artistic sacrifice when
| you're doing it. You're writing a first draft of a novel,
| but it's not meant to be a good first draft, it can have
| plotholes and characters who learn nothing and
| unintentional red herrings and all sorts of other stuff
| that drives readers up the wall.
|
| My book, I got to the word count but the characters hadn't
| done a quarter of what they were supposed to over the plot,
| it was a book with an extended beginning, a little bit of
| middle, no resolution or ending. So I learned a lot about
| myself! But if I was trying to actually make a worthwhile
| narrative, well, I need to consider how much reasonably
| fits in 50,000 words and how many books do I need to tell
| the bigger story.
| starkparker wrote:
| It being November is especially hard on US people with any kids
| or large active families, dealing with big Thanksgiving plans.
|
| No matter how well you plan, you really only get two meaningful
| weeks before the wall hits you. "Just set a reasonable word
| count to hit every day!" Then each day you miss days because
| your side dish plans went sideways or your flights get
| rescheduled, making the goal steeper every other day.
|
| "Use your travel time to write more!" Almost impossible with
| young kids without sticking a spouse or relative with watching
| them, and the resentment of even asking if you can ignore kids
| to write lasts a hell of a lot longer than November.
|
| "You can catch up after Thanksgiving!" Not after anti-vax Aunt
| J gives your family the gift of some great new viral disease
| that hits in the last week.
|
| There are writing sprints in other months that never seem to
| have the community of NaNo, and all your single or childless
| writer friends burn it all out during NaNo. The community is a
| big part of what makes it fun, otherwise it's just an arbitrary
| chore goal.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| December is not any better. There's nothing like hating your
| family and their dumb "let's be together and make happy,
| everlasting memories" ideas when all you want is to debug
| your A* algorithm for the Advent of Code.
| edent wrote:
| I've just completed my first #NaNoWriMo.
|
| I decided to do it as a series of short sci-fi stories. You can
| read them at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/TalesOfTheAlgorithm
|
| It was fascinating to me how much like programming it was. So
| much planning, lots of time trying to figure out what isn't
| working, and a bunch of spelling bugs!
|
| Well worth attempting this if you have the time to exercise your
| creative muscles.
|
| Anyway, if you have any feedback on my weird stories, I'd love to
| hear it.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Did anyone read then? My experience in writing things online is
| that barely anyone reads them and even fewer comment on them.
|
| I might just suck at it, but if didn't someone would probably
| pay me to do it.
| edent wrote:
| I've had a bunch of my blog's readers and Mastodon friends
| leave comments on them.
|
| The stories aren't as popular as my normal blogging - but I
| was expecting that.
|
| Looking at my logs, I've had a few hundred people read them,
| which is lovely.
|
| And, frankly, it doesn't matter if I suck or you suck. The
| joy of creation is its own payment.
| vidarh wrote:
| The average _published novel_ hardly sells (couple of hundred
| copies on average), so if you write for the sake of a big
| audience, novels are not the thing to write - in that case
| aim for articles in a well read paper or magazine.
|
| Selling even reasonably well takes a mix of persistency
| (building an audience over multiple works), talent, hard work
| promoting it yourself, and luck.
| boznz wrote:
| So true. I'm still learning the hard part about writing is
| not the writing, it is getting someone to read it. I
| documented it here => https://rodyne.com/?page_id=1252
| ActionHank wrote:
| Do they have a policy on AI, I feel like they are not prepared
| for the coming flood.
| glanzwulf wrote:
| From what I remember when I last tried it, NaNoWriMo worked
| with the honor system. If you wanted you could paste a
| wikipedia article in the editor and it would count the words
| and tell you good job, but you'd only be lying to yourself in
| the end.
| FourHand451 wrote:
| Is there a reason you feel they are less prepared than any
| other organization?
| jyunwai wrote:
| Back when I did this, you could already technically "win" the
| pat on the back just by copying and pasting 50,000 words of
| gibberish to meet their word count. But then you would be
| cheating yourself: the point isn't truly to get the award at
| the end, but rather to challenge yourself to write 50,000 words
| in a month, to make novel writing seem less like an impossible
| task.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Why would they need to be prepared? NaNo is on you, you don't
| get anything for winning other than satisfaction and online
| badges and stuff from sponsors, such as some promo codes for
| writing software and getting your initial draft printed.
|
| A text that reads "Rabbit." written 50,000 times is enough to
| win NaNo.
| dave1010uk wrote:
| https://gist.github.com/dave1010/a7e7207edef422cf972968b029b.
| ..
|
| Feel free to fork.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Congratulations! You just won NaNoWriMo.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| It's a personal incentivising thing. If you do that you can pay
| yourself on the back for, well, nothing.
| instagraham wrote:
| As others have mentioned, since it's self-driven, this would
| not be a problem. Rather than viewing it as a problem, in fact,
| one could use AI to "ensure" they produced finished or clean
| pieces of writing.
|
| I'm less in the frame of thought of using AI to "write a 800
| word story on leprechauns" and more in the situation of "edit
| my lead paragraph in the same style as my concluding paragraph"
| or "here is an outline of my story, critique it and give me a
| structure to follow for a second draft".
|
| As a self-driven exercise then, AI becomes just another tool
| for a writer to get better. Sometimes it's a training wheel,
| sometimes it's a rocket strapped to your butt.
| octokatt wrote:
| They do: https://nanowrimo.zendesk.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/191758964889...
|
| I remember there being a group out there that had the same
| competition but trying to tweak a good LLM to write a novel in
| a month, but I couldn't find it again and it was before the
| ChatGPT heyday.
| semanticist wrote:
| You might be thinking of NaNoGenMo:
| https://nanogenmo.github.io
|
| Which I think largely pre-dates the availability of LLMs and
| is/was more aimed at traditional procedural generation
| techniques, although I imagine LLMs get used a lot these
| days.
| staticman2 wrote:
| You can just copy and paste "All work and no play makes jack a
| dull boy" 50,000 times and "win" there's no need for AI.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There is it its own "month" game for that:
| https://nanogenmo.github.io/
|
| The only "win" is personal and if you want to define your win
| in terms of ML/AI, that's for you to decide and mostly just
| between you and your keyboard. But there's a lot of neat
| resources and a different sense of
| accomplishment/competition/cooperation if you choose to focus
| on it as a NaNoGenMo project instead of a NaNoWriMo project.
| cfr2023 wrote:
| NaNoWriMo, though a net positive force in the world, strikes me
| as a creative exercise for non-creatives. Truly not a bad thing,
| no offense intended. Trying to create regularly will help you
| become more creative.
|
| However, if you're already someone that is able to maintain a
| writing schedule and hit daily targets of hundreds of words, and
| can see your dream works emerge through the simple act of
| scheduling... I'm gently skeptical of where your motivation to
| create comes from. Bear with me.
|
| Before we get bogged down in it: Misery and disorder are not
| requisites for creativity and I'm certainly not advocating that,
| either.
|
| The issue is that trying to hit some sort of material target by
| artificially imposing a daily grind on it forces your work into a
| box created by the work-a-day-world. An undeniably effective one,
| but for everything?
|
| The global marketplace is what sets deadlines like "by the end of
| the day!" and "by the end of the month!" where as works of art
| and creators can both bloom like flowers and get seasoned over
| large segments of time like waves washing over a rock face.
|
| Your arc as an artist or creator, starting from the discovery of
| that impulse inside yourself, may be one that spans decades or
| your entire life. If that's the case, success or failure in
| NanoWriMo may be a bad indicator for you:
|
| "Oh shit, I missed my 7pm writing alarm and forgot to write ~1700
| words, now I'll never be the next Charles Dickens!"
|
| could come from the same writer as:
|
| "After a slow walk through my city on a crisp fall morning, I can
| sit down and write 5000 words without so much as stopping to
| stretch my wrist."
|
| and:
|
| "I don't practice art regularly, but sometimes when I get the
| urge, I will be in the throes for 3 days trying to work out the
| specifics of an image that has flashed into my mind."
|
| These and many other creative modes are valid and exist
| independently of schedules, clocks, word counts, time limits and
| other cops we might invite to sit by our writing desks, easels
| and computer terminals.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The problem is that most people just fundamentally don't want
| to make art. NaNoWriMo is in many ways just an excuse to force
| themselves to do so "because they know they should".
| crdrost wrote:
| People do though.
|
| Making art for most people is like exercise. It's good for
| them and once they get into it they like it, but there is an
| initial cost and your initial attempts aren't going to be
| very fulfilling and all that.
|
| Almost everybody feels that surge of excitement in front of
| the potter's wheel. But, pots collapse, finding a teacher to
| mentor you is expensive, the people who want to start it have
| to start by researching clay and how you work it and can I
| use my oven as a kiln or do I need to buy a dedicated one and
| do I need glazing materials...
|
| And then the same thing that killed exercise has killed the
| "artism" that we feel. People stopped going on daily
| constitutionals because of the TV, we made the TV more
| addictive and put it in your pocket and called it TikTok
| cfr2023 wrote:
| I've seen people that normally wouldn't align with any sort
| of creative identity suddenly light up when placed in the
| role. Even more when their contributions are meaningfully
| acknowledged and dignified as valid creations.
|
| Reminds me of the difference between learning piano from
| someone that's scolding you and smacking your hands, and
| someone that is encouraging you, starting from where you
| are, leveraging your innate interests, opening your eyes to
| patterns... when the gates are down, it's much easier to
| get in.
| cfr2023 wrote:
| It could be that type of target. It can also be a low
| commitment way for people who are on the fence to scratch a
| particular itch they are feeling. For some, the only "output"
| it produces may be, "I do not enjoy this."
|
| That happens to be valuable info in its own way.
| edent wrote:
| For me, it was not because I "should" but because I wanted to
| see if I _could_.
|
| Was it actually possible for me to write ~1,600 words every
| day and have them form a coherent story?
|
| I wasn't aiming for _great_ art. I was following the start-up
| credo of "If you're not embarrassed by the first version,
| you've launched too late."
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > most people just fundamentally don't want to make art
|
| And they're right, because 99.9% of them would be bad at it.
| Probably it would not even have any therapeutical value for
| them, and the 0.1% of new artists discovered might not be a
| significant upside.
|
| The name is terrible too, sounds like Orwell's Minitruth and
| similar 1940s abbreviations - "Hey, comrades, there is a dire
| shortage of blather, and the Great National Novel is nowhere
| in sight. Therefore our enlightened leadership has
| established a program with the catchy name NaNoWriMo, and all
| youth is enrolled."
| acheong08 wrote:
| I remember doing this back when I was 11 or 12. Very nostalgic. I
| wish I could find the short novel I wrote back then but it seems
| like I purged all my files.
| drakonka wrote:
| I am not participating in it exactly, but I'm finishing up my
| next novel draft right now and it is still really satisfying to
| work alongside all the NaNo-ers. Coincidentally this can also be
| a nice time to get that writing or editing software you might be
| interested in, since many of them run sales around NaNoWriMo.
| mkerrigan wrote:
| It's interesting to read the criticisms of NaNoWriMo because they
| don't really change. I have completed it for 15 years in a row,
| then on year 16 I sort of hit a wall and this year I am
| deliberately not doing it. But my friend and I have been doing it
| since high school. The point is usually not about doing it to
| become published but rather to have fun. I'm not sure if I would
| have been able to do it without going to some of the in-person
| write-ins. I even know someone who met their husband at a in-
| person write-in.
| harperlee wrote:
| I guess that NaNoGenMo, the variant where you use algorithms to
| create a novel, is really going to change this year...
| tunesmith wrote:
| I'm in a small writing club and all four of us are trying it. I
| successfully finished it two years ago with a series of ten
| interlocking short stories that (surprise!) tell a complete story
| as a novel by the end.
|
| One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to
| just get words out, regardless of quality. They talk about vomit-
| drafts, and/or just sitting down to write to see where it takes
| them, to see what the characters will do. I don't think that
| mindset is very compatible with story forms that requires mystery
| or twists or foreshadowing. My story this month has that so it's
| been difficult. I'm at 11,000 words now and we're late enough in
| the month that it's telling me I have to write more than 2,000
| words/day to finish. Soon I'll be past the point of no return,
| where it will be practically impossible to catch up; I think the
| most I've ever written in a day is 5,000 words.
|
| Ah well, it was still good motivation, and I'm signed on enough
| to my concept that I'll probably finish it even if I'm not done
| on 11/30.
| Jemaclus wrote:
| Well, the explicit goal of NaNoWriMo is word count, not
| quality. You aren't wrong in your analysis, but NaNoWriMo is
| not the event through which you write complex stories and spend
| a ton of time thinking about each scene. It's pretty explicitly
| for plowing through as many words as possible in 30 days.
|
| An analogy I would make is that a marathon is measured as 26.2
| miles. It's not measured in minutes or hours -- it's not the
| 2:30 run, for example. The standard of success is measured in
| miles, not minutes. Similarly, NaNoWriMo is measured in words,
| not quality or twists or ready-to-be-published state.
|
| You are right, though. It's good motivation. I've finished
| every year for 10 years, but I've never gotten anything to a
| state I would consider to be even remotely publishable. :)
| criley2 wrote:
| For the record, the point of NaNoWriMo is pure word count, and
| folks consider December to be "National Novel Editing Month"
| where you refine the word vomit.
|
| Obviously this is not the only approach to writing, and some
| folks are incompatible with the concept of "just write with
| abandon" and "sort it all out and refine it in edit".
|
| If you want to write and edit at the same time, consider
| halving your total word count (since they take two months to do
| that), or double your time (and continue through December).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Related to the "word vomit" aspect of it, I've found a
| general rule of "wait at least 6 months" for the first edit
| pass to be helpful to me (rather than December my "National
| Novel Editing Month" is closer to June). From my experience I
| often am too critical trying to revise it immediately and
| having distance and forgetfulness helps a lot to better spot
| the jewels in project and polish them rather than dwell as
| much on the dreck and "word vomit" which you can simply
| rewrite or even delete. I was surprised when I mentioned it
| last night at a write-in how many hadn't considered forcing
| some distance between (very) rough draft and trying to make a
| proper first draft out of it.
| 5555624 wrote:
| >One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project
| to just get words out, regardless of quality.
|
| That's the point or at least it was in the early days.
| NaNoWriMo came out of Chris Baty's book, "No Plot? No Problem!"
| and the point was to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days. The
| point was to sit down and write. As I recall, the book mentions
| "One Day Novelists' as in "One day I'm going to write a
| novel...." It's just a kick in the pants to get you to sit down
| and write. Don't edit, don't re-write, just write.
|
| I've done (and completed) NaNoWriMo a dozen times (2004-2013,
| 2015, 2020) and I've never had an outline and only a basic idea
| of a plot when I started,, mainly because I didn't want to
| start writing before 1 November. One way to handle twists and
| foreshadowing is not to write it in order (I used to bike to
| and from work and those 40 minutes each day was when I'd work
| to what happened next or what happened to get to where I was in
| the story.)
|
| The first year, I took the "scientific approach" and started
| out just writing 1,667 words a day. While that was always my
| daily goal, I did abandon it. The most words I wrote in a
| single day was 10,596 (20-Nov-2007).
| boznz wrote:
| Congratulate yourself it is a great internal achievement to
| finish writing something. I just published my first book this
| month, I'm not sure how the mojo came, it certainly wasn't a
| special month though I did manage 10K words during last
| NaNoWriMo.
|
| The floodgates opening for me was being stuck in a hotel room
| during a cyclone for 3 days without power and an old Chromebook
| which I nursed to fourteen hours of battery by turning the
| brightness all the way down and closing the lid to put it in
| sleep mode during the times I was thinking. That got me the re-
| start I needed.
| eludwig wrote:
| Writing (and illustrating) an amateur novel is the most creative
| fun I've ever had. Highly recommended if you have a mind to try.
| (trained artist, but software developer by day)
|
| I wrote one[1] about 5 years ago. It's amateur and too long, but
| it's my great American novel, for better or worse! It actually
| took 4 years, but so much fun! The most annoying part was getting
| it into a viable ePub. I ended up using Sigil, as it was the
| easiest to use at the time.
|
| [1] https://darladarling.com (free ePub)
| jdriselvato wrote:
| I love NaNoWriMo and have written and won every year since 2019.
| My only issue is once the month is complete, no one cares about
| your novel or that you finished it.
|
| So when I got laid off earlier in the year I started working on
| an alternative to NaNo.
|
| https://penpinery.com
|
| At the moment it's in MVP but it current has:
|
| - Author profiles w/ blogging - Publication cataloging + reader
| reviews - WIP cataloging with word count tracking - A community
| feed similar to Goodreads + WIP word count updates
|
| The idea is I think NaNo could be more social post-November. With
| Pen Pinery's current MVP I think Authors can build a readership
| fanbase much easier than anything NaNo could do.
|
| In the future I want to also have goal tracking based on pages
| instead of word count and for editing as well. I also think
| there's a lot of potential for building out an ARC sign up
| system.
|
| Pretty much I've self-published 15+ books and I'm putting
| everything that worked for me into a social author/reading
| platform.
|
| Authors who use NaNo or are completely against it, I'd love to
| get some feedback on the concept from a description standpoint.
| Any thoughts or tips?
|
| ---
|
| Since this is YC, the tech stack is Django 4, Postgres and
| Bootstrap 5; Hosted on DigitalOcean.
| boznz wrote:
| Nice concept, for me and millions of others at the mercy of the
| Amazon algorithm to what we read next I may try a few books
| here.
|
| You are right nobody cares about your novel but the rush from
| finishing and publishing something even if nobody reads it is
| pretty satisfying.
| jdriselvato wrote:
| Right now I'm in the middle of the chicken and the egg
| problem where we don't have enough authors cataloging their
| publications and b/c of that obviously readers are not
| interested in using the site.
|
| I've gone back and forth with taking Open Libray's [0]
| catalog as that would at least flesh out our collection of
| books but then I'd have to deal with verifying authors to
| accounts so they can access their books. Which sounds like a
| major headache and also just defeats the concept of building
| a community.
|
| Since this is really a weekend project, I'm just going to
| keep building the tools out to perfection and hope people
| will trickle in over time.
|
| Luckily for me I just want to write, so the tools I'm
| building are exactly what works for my writing goals and I
| think overtime others will find the same value.
|
| [0] https://openlibrary.org
| boznz wrote:
| Thanks for both links, anything to get away from the
| algorithm that keeps recommending the same military Sci-Fi
| to me just because I liked Old Man's War and Enders Game!
| The big sites should all have a big reset algorithm button
| IMHO.
|
| As another author I am happy to create an account and pop
| my "masterpiece" on and re-link it for the 100 or so bots
| that visit my website every year.
|
| Holiday coming up in a few week's time, so I have
| downloaded your first book for a read so at least you got
| something good from your post :-)
| meristohm wrote:
| Why are you at the mercy of Amazon's algorithm?
|
| Have you tried asking for recommendations from your
| librarian(s)? On my public library's website there's a form
| for this, and if I'm ever at a loss for what to read next (I
| usually go with recommendations from friends, family, and HN
| threads) I'd either ask this way or in person.
|
| There's also the NPR Book Concierge, BookPage (paid for here
| by Friends of the Library), and the Libby app, with lists put
| together by librarians and a option to see similar books
| (based on keywords? Sometimes the list items don't make much
| sense, but I have found some good ones this way).
| notatoad wrote:
| So as a reader the only way to see any content is to purchase a
| book?
|
| i love self-published books and back a few authors on patreon
| that i've found on royalroad, but there's not a chance i'd be
| buying books from unkown self-published authors without even a
| few sample chapters. especially not when the pitch is that it's
| something an author has created by churning out as much
| wordcount as possible during a writing challenge.
| jdriselvato wrote:
| Good question.
|
| We're not a marketplace just like NaNoWriMo isn't a
| marketplace. As an author you build an author profile (like
| any other social media) and link directly to where people buy
| books (Except we have catered icons for Ao3, Amazon, wattpad,
| quotev, etc that show up on the profile).
|
| So the cataloging of publications on the profile is just like
| Amazon's author profile, GoodReads' author profile, a person
| website, etc it's another place for people to find ones work.
|
| The plus side of an author profile is if you share your
| publications they can rank on the community feed where new
| readers can organically find your novel. Then go to Amazon,
| B&N, etc and purchase it.
|
| The reader can also follow the author so if the author adds
| blog posts they'll see it show up on the feed. Which I think
| will be a great way for Authors to talk about book tours, new
| novel releases or WIP they're starting.
|
| It isn't so much about wordcount is the focus but building an
| author brand on the platform where ones publications, WIP and
| posts are all talking to the same algo on the community feed.
| Here people can easily find new authors and what they are
| working on in an author/reader relationship I haven't found
| else where.
| drusepth wrote:
| Very cool idea; I always wished the NaNoWriMo energy would
| persist past November. That's actually why I added forums to my
| own writing site and have had _decent_ luck keeping the
| momentum going year-round (at least, some years).
|
| If you end up adding an API or looking for other sites to
| partner with, feel free to reach out sometime (email on
| profile). Not sure what your needs are but I might be able to
| help from Notebook.ai. :)
| jdriselvato wrote:
| I love the concept of Notebook.ai, thanks for sharing that.
|
| When I was writing my first fantasy novel I was messing
| around with Notion templates (almost a local wiki in a sense)
| just to organize weapons, factions/governments, religions,
| etc. It didn't work as well as I expected and I had been
| wishing something like your service existed the whole time.
| Well done!
|
| For time being, I'll put together a little blog post about
| Notebook.ai to let the community know about it. I know
| there's writers out there that are looking for this exact
| product. I appreciate the comment!
| schaefer wrote:
| you say you're in MVP, so it may be a bit early for this but,
| it's really surprising to me that the landing page is not
| geared towards readers trying to discover new authors.
| jdriselvato wrote:
| At the moment we're trying to get authors on the platform to
| build up the "marketplace" (although we're not a traditional
| marketplace of selling books).
|
| The great thing about authors is they should be reading just
| as much as they write. So in a sense, we're able to build
| both sides of the coin by marketing to a single user from the
| start.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| The problem on my end is finding readers. My stuff is at
| https://emlia.org/
| blakewatson wrote:
| I'm I love this little challenge. I've participated almost every
| year since 2010. At the peak of my involvement l was a local
| organizer (Municipal Liaison). I met a lot of cool people and had
| a great time at write-ins and such.
|
| It was a good social outlet for me because I have a pretty severe
| mobility impairment and, long story short, small groups and laid
| back activities are easier for me to participate in than other
| things.
|
| I haven't really gotten back into in-person stuff post-COVID, but
| I still enjoy making November a time to write and hanging out in
| the local NaNo Discord server. I enjoy perusing the NaNo forums,
| particularly the Adoption Society, where people offer up plots,
| characters, running gags, opening lines, chapter-naming schemes,
| and more for anyone to use.
|
| There's also a bit of fun lore that has developed. For example,
| if you're stuck, kill a character with the traveling shovel of
| death ("traveling" because us Wrimos are passing it around). Or
| find a way to include Mr. Ian Woon (anagram of NaNoWriMo).
|
| NaNoWriMo is different things to different people and I love that
| about it.
|
| This year and last, I lowered my goal to writing a 20k-word
| novella. I have difficulty typing and a lower word count makes it
| a bit easier for me (that makes me a "NaNo rebel" lol I love all
| the little jokes and stuff).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| On this topic, where do people go for short stories online?
|
| I find myself with 20 mins here, 40 mins there, and half the time
| gets spent trying to find a decent short story.
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