Yesterday I signed up for NaNoWriMo, the annual “Write-a-novel-in-a-month” write-a-thon that hundreds of thousands of writers participate in every year.  The next step, according to their website, was:

3. Our user dashboard will usher you through the rest of your account set-up stuff. Click on the grayed-out badges to fill out your profile, say hello in our forums, and add writing buddies.

However, right now on their website, the message is:

From	NaNoWriMo
Sent at	October 03, 2014 10:18
Subject	NaNoWriMo 2014 is coming!

I registered for NaNoWriMo today, with the idea of participating in the month-long “Write a Novel in 30 Days” write-a-thon that takes place every November throughout the world and online at http://nanowrimo.org

From their website (along with my status for each step).

How It Works

During NaNoWriMo, you write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. The challenge may be hard, but the logistics are not! Here, let us guide you through ‘em.

1. Sign up for our website with that big, blue “Sign Up!” button on the homepage. You’ll get an email validation link a few minutes later.  DONE

2. As part of the sign-up process, you’ll choose a home region for in-person events near you. This is totally optional, but we think it’s a pretty awesome part of the NaNo experience.  DONE

3. Our user dashboard will usher you through the rest of your account set-up stuff. Click on the grayed-out badges to fill out your profile, say hello in our forums, and add writing buddies.  NOT DONE

4. On October 1, you’ll be able to add information about your upcoming novel to your profile. Giving your work a title or brief synopsis gets you 225% more pumped for November. It’s a fact.  NOT DONE

5. You can also use October to read past author pep talks, grab participant web badges, meet folks in the forums, and learn more about our nonprofit.   NOT DONE

6. At midnight on November 1, start writing. Work on your manuscript using any method where you can track your word count. Word-processing program, notebook, typewriter, stone slab: they all work.  NOT DONE

7. Update your word count whenever you can. Some like every day; others prefer a few times a week. No matter when, you can do it in that word-count update menu at the top of every page on our site.  NOT DONE

8. Stay motivated with pep talks (we’ll send them to your on-site inbox and your email), forum chatter, and in-person events in your region. There’s also a big world of NaNo out there in social media: find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Pinterest.  NOT DONE

9. Starting on November 25, you can validate your novel to win. If it’s over 50,000 words, paste the text into the word-count validator. A few robotic calculations later, we’ll declare you an official NaNoWriMo winner! From there, you’ll be able to collect a few prime novelist goodies.  NOT DONE

10. If you enjoy your NaNo experience, please donate to support our mission. We believe in making this a more creative world, and we’d love your help getting there. (Here’s more about why others donate, as well as additional ways to give.)  OUTSKIRTS PRESS SPONSORED NANOWRIMO TWO YEARS AGO; CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO DO IT AGAIN…

So, who wants to join me and write a book (or at least a large chunk of a book) in 30 days?

The 20th Annual EVVY Awards took place at the Santa Fe Arts District this past Saturday night and multiple Outskirts Press authors were on-hand along with the Outskirts Press executives to see which finalists walked away with awards in this Colorado Independent Publishers Association event.

As usual, Outskirts Press had the most finalists among all participating publishers; however this was the first year of the CIPA EVVY Awards when being a “finalist” did not guarantee winning an award.  In year’s past, when we have received our list of “finalists” from the CIPA judges, we have been confident that every author on that list would be winning a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or Merit award on the evening of the banquet. Not so this year.  I’m not quite sure why CIPA would have made this change. Just last week during a meeting about the Colorado Book Awards, the executives at the Colorado Humanities had expressed to me a concern about having finalists travel to Aspen only to learn on the night of the awards that they didn’t win anything.  I suggested to them that they adopt the CIPA method of ensuring that all finalists at least receive a “Merit” award (or something similar).  Ironic, then, that CIPA changed that fundamental element with this most recent event, and it is my hope that they change it back next year.  I don’t like the idea of our “finalists” personally attending an event in Denver and walking away empty-handed (nor did one of our authors who attended).  Luckily, another Outskirts Press author, who drove all the way from Florida to attend, ended up winning the 1st Place Award in her category…

And on that note, below are the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners from last Saturday night.  Our full list of winners, including all the Merit Award winners, will be posted on the Self Publishing News blog in the coming days (one of the perks of following my blog is you sometimes get news like this early).

FIRST PLACE

 

 

 

 

  SECOND PLACE

 

 

THIRD PLACE

 

 

Winning the annual Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award (and it’s $1,500 Grand Prize) begins with winning a CIPA EVVY Award. Are we looking at the Best Book of the Year finalists among these books above? We will find out soon when the finalists are announced in the coming days.

Yes, I am still in the middle of the Guy Kawasaki series of postings focusing on his “10 Steps to Enchantment” speech that I heard during the Inc. 500/5000 conference in Phoenix this past October. I will get back to that in the new year.  In the meantime we are currently looking at holiday pictures from the present and past to get a “snapshot” of the people and accomplishments of Outskirts Press over the years.  There are many familiar faces year in and year out, and the 2008 image is no different:

Even in this small, intimate gathering from 2008 you see faces that have attended each and every holiday party since (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012): Cindy, Tony, Donna, Brent, Shirley, Patrick, Ellen, Lynn, and Jeanine. And the other faces (Heidi, Karl, Michele) were in 2009 and will be in the past years to come (if that makes sense).

A little over a week ago we held a poll on our Outskirts Press blog asking our authors if they were interested in a new option we were considering, called the “Featured Book of the Week” option, which would give our authors an opportunity to increase the exposure for their book by basically sending out an Amazon announcement to all our published authors and social media channels.

We received a LOT of votes (not surprising) and the overwhelming majority liked the idea (also not surprising).

What was surprising was the number of comments we also received in the “Comments” section of the blog posting.   Surprising because we’ve asked our authors to complete polls before and never have we received so many comments.  This showed us that our authors are continuing to appreciate being a part of the decision making process at Outskirts Press. We plan to continue this trend even more.

For example, in the middle of this month, our blog will post a poll asking everyone to vote on what promotion they want for October, and whatever the majority votes for will be the promotion we offer.

We are also close to offering a “Social Media Market Research” option for our authors, enabling them to “harness the power of social media” to help them make market research-based decisions regarding their book (as it involves their cover, or their title, for example).

The vast majority of the comments we received from our poll were positive and I’ll share some comments we have received recently over the next few days. Then I will return to the “How to Get Featured on our App” series soon (although next week I’ll probably first continue this interruption with a few posts on our recent Inc 5000 accomplishment).