nanowrimo – President of Outskirts Press

You Won NaNoWriMo. (Now what?)

So, I won NaNoWriMo. I wrote over 50,000 words in less than 30 days. In fact, true to my word, I’m still writing, even though I crossed the 50,000 word “finish” line on Thanksgiving (and boy was I thankful!). I’ve earned every Badge available on the NaNoWriMo website except for the last one, which doesn’t seem to be available to “earn” yet — and involves something having to do with revisions. Presumably, that will become available on December 1… I’ll keep you posted as I continue to write in the meantime.

The problem is, my novel, Idle Hands, is longer than 50,000 words. In fact, if you look at my outline below, you’ll see that I was supposed to write the major event (in the center) below, where Fen kills Jacob on the cruise ship, on November 15-18.

But here it is, November 29th, and Fenderson has only JUST admitted to Brad that he killed Jacob, and even so, it’s not entirely clear whether or not he’s telling the truth. So I’m just over 60% of the way done with my novel. Will I have the fortitude to keep writing 2000 words a day until it’s done? Probably not. But will I have the fortitude to keep writing some amount of words every day until it’s done (as I suggested with Wednesday’s post)? I certainly hope so.

At least writing my novel is going better than my OTHER 30-day goal of losing 20 pounds…

Here are my NaNoWriMo stats for November 28:

Average Per Day	1860
Words Written Today	1927
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	52,085 WINNER
Words Remaining	1,455
Current Day	28
Days Remaining	3
At this rate, you’ll finish	27-Nov
Words/Day to finish on time	0

#1 best self publishing company, Amazon, best self publishing, Brent Sampson

Winning National Novel Writing Month and Saving $200

I did it! I wrote over 50,000 words in under 30 days for National Novel Writing Month. When I validated my word count, I was lucky enough to witness this video from the NaNoWriMo crew:

Along with the following words of recognition:

You, brave authorial knight, have officially slayed 50K during NaNoWriMo 2014. Now, claim your dragon’s cave worth of treasure!

And the following certificate:

And a picture of a t-shirt (which I have to buy if I want one, and I would… but, I’m sorry to say, it’s just not very appealing):

And some winner’s “web badges”.

In addition, some “winners-only” codes for offers from the NaNoWriMo sponsors will be available to me soon, which I discussed in an earlier post. A better offer comes by way of a non-NaNoWriMo sponsor (they told us they were ‘full’ when we offered to give them money), where you can get a FREE Amazon Extreme Marketing Package when you start publishing your book with Outskirts Press. This marketing package includes a free Amazon Kindle edition of your book once it is published, submission of your book to Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” program, an Amazon cover enhancement for your Amazon listing, and a free copy of my bestselling and award-winning book Sell Your Book on Amazon. And all our publishing packages always include between 3 – 10 free copies of your book (which is better than 2, right?). All the details of this offer, including the necessary promotion code, can be found here: http://outskirtspress.com/promotion.html. Hey, look at that: you don’t even have to get to the “Winners” page on NaNoWriMo to get this offer!

Or…. if you prefer saving money instead of receiving free stuff, today also happens to be Black Friday (what great timing!), so if you order your Diamond or Pearl full-color publishing package today only, you can save an instant 20% (that’s an average savings of over $200) on the cost of your all-inclusive, full-service book publishing. Simply enter the promotion code: 20DSCT2014 into your shopping cart at check-out.

I’m sure I’ll be seeing the rest of my mentorees and writing buddies on the NaNoWriMo site crossing the finish line soon. Way to go, fellow WriMo’s!

My NaNoWriMo stats for yesterday, November 27:

Average Per Day	1857
Words Written Today	1613
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	50,158 WINNER
Words Remaining	0
Current Day	27
Days Remaining	4
At this rate, you’ll finish	27-Nov
Words/Day to finish on time	0

Brent Sampson, NaNoWriMo

I’m THANKFUL for writing 50,000 words in one month

Happy Thanksgiving.

We’re down to the last few days of National Novel Writing Month. When I began this adventure over a month ago, I set out to earn all the “Participation” and “Writing” badges on the NaNoWriMo website, and one of the Participation Badges required adding “Buddies” to my account, so I could interact with them, and find motivation in their success. Another Participation Badge required that I post to the forums, which I did, by offering to be a “virtual mentor” for other WriMo’s as they joined me on this writing journey. In fact, those two badges went hand in hand because as I interacted with WriMo’s I was mentoring, I naturally added them to my Buddy list, so I could watch their progress.

Out of all my “Buddies” on the NaNoWriMo site, two of them are official “Winners” as of yesterday afternoon. That means they have validated their official word counts with NaNoWriMo and their word count has met or exceeded 50,000 words.

I hope to join them sometime today, by “carving” out time away from the turkey to reach the 50,000 word goal and then validate my word counts. I have less than 1,500 words to go, so my confidence is high that I’m going to become a NaNoWriMo winner on Thanksgiving day (and hence the headline to this posting — just some extra motivation for yours truly).

Some of my other buddies and mentorees still have some work to do, with word counts ranging from 27,000 – 46,000. Join me in urging them to cross that finish line with me in the next couple of days!

Here are my NaNoWriMo stats for yesterday, November 26:

Average Per Day	1867
Words Written Today	1642
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	48,545
Words Remaining	1,455
Current Day	26
Days Remaining	5
At this rate, you’ll finish	27-Nov
Words/Day to finish on time	291

Brent Sampson, writing tips

An hour of writing a day

As we endure the final stretch of NaNoWriMo where half a million writers from around the globe challenge themselves to write 50,000 words in 30 days, I’d like to offer some words of motivation, if not inspiration. It’s been difficult for me to find the time and the energy to write more of my novel, Idle Hands, every day of the month. I’m happy to report that out of the whole month, I only skipped one day entirely (and it was a bear dragging myself out of the “word hole” that resulted from that lapse). Even on days where I REALLY didn’t feel like writing, I at least kicked in 400-800 words.

And here’s what I discovered: I was extremely disappointed in myself the whole day (and the following day) when I skipped writing entirely. That’s 48 hours of disappointment that could have been averted with one single hour of creativity. Talk about a positive return on your investment! One hour of time invested for 48 hours of satisfaction. And even if you can’t always contribute an entire hour of time, as these monthly stats have shown, every word counts. Every word contributes to your final goal of finishing that book. Even if you only put in 100, or 200, or 500… that’s more words than you had yesterday. More words than you had the day before that. Books are not infinite. They have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you always find a way to contribute SOME words to your book every day, there will come a day when you finish it.

And those days when you write your book, you’ll feel better about your craft, and your writing career. You’ll find that those hours of satisfaction and accomplishment are longer than the time you spent writing. And that beats the 48 hours of feeling bad for NOT putting in a single hour.

Here are my NaNoWriMo stats for yesterday, November 25:

Average Per Day	1876
Words Written Today	2423
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	46,903
Words Remaining	3,097
Current Day	25
Days Remaining	6
At this rate, you’ll finish	Nov 27
Words/Day to finish on time	517

Brent Sampson

50,000 words, here I come!

It’s going to be a busy week: Work. Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Family traditions (shopping, eating, decorating, etc).

And writing.

Lots and lots of writing to finish up 50,000 words to Idle Hands. Even though I have through next Sunday, my personal goal is to reach 50,000 words by Friday. I’m mainly doing this because the “confirmation” instructions sent out by NaNoWriMo have alluded to the fact that their word-count might differ from my own when I undergo the process of validating. I’m not quite sure why it would be different, but I don’t want to be caught off guard on the night of the 30th by suddenly realizing I have 1000-2000 words more to write in order to reach the 50,000 word milestone. Luck favors the prepared, as they say, so I plan to validate my word count with NaNoWriMo on Friday, just in case I need the weekend to make up any differential between their “official” word count and my own.

And speaking of which, here are my NaNoWriMo stats for November 24:

Average Per Day	1853
Words Written Today	2046
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	44480
Words Remaining	5,520
Current Day	24
Days Remaining	7
At this rate, you’ll finish	November 27
Words/Day to finish on time	789

Brent Sampson

The Month of Living Dangerously

In the month of November I’ve been trying to write 50,000 words to a novel AND lose 20 pounds to my waistline. What was I thinking??! I was thinking I’d take a break from writing (and blogging about writing) and starving myself, to create a disturbing poster in which I replace Mel Gibson’s face with mine. Talk about a bad idea! What was I thinking??!

Here are my Stats for NaNoWriMo for November 23:

Average Per Day	1844
Words Written Today	1768
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	42,434
Words Remaining	7,566
Current Day	23
Days Remaining	8
At this rate, you’ll finish	November 28
Words/Day to finish on time	946

Writing a book is proving EASIER than losing weight. I’ve lost 13 pounds so far, and have a week to go. That’s 1000 words and 1 pound each day.

I have a feeling I’m going to cross the 50,000 word finish line before I cross the 20 pound finish line, especially with Thanksgiving approaching.

What was I thinking??!

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Winning word-count confirmation begins today at NaNoWriMo

“Winners” begin being crowned today on the NaNoWriMo website for successfully writing 50,000 words in … 20 days (10 days faster than required!). If you’re one of those overly-ambitious few, first of all, congratulations; that’s impressive! And secondly, reaching 50,000 is no reason to stop writing. I know I’m sounding like a broken record (do people even know what a “record” is anymore? ) by constantly repeating that we should all keep writing after 50,000 words, but I’m mostly doing that to encourage me to continue writing once I reach 50,000. I know it’s going to be hard since Idle Hands is on pace to be about 90,000 words, 50,000 words just isn’t going to cut it. And like I said the other day, but it bears repeating again– one doesn’t publish 50,000 words. One publishes a book. And once you finish your book, where should you publish it? Well, I’m glad you asked. Tomorrow we’ll talk about comparing the top self-publishing firms in an analytic way.

In order for NaNoWriMo to accept your word count you need to cut and paste your manuscript into their word-count validator. Sounds easy enough, but I’m surprised so many writers are so willing to give their hard work to an organization without a second thought. Perhaps I speak from experience, but some of the writers I’ve worked with exhibit hesitancy about sharing their work; and that’s even AFTER a contract has been signed expressly protecting them and their copyrights. No such agreement exists on the National Novel Writing website (at least, not what that I’ve seen, or agreed to).

I personally don’t have those reservations, because I know how official US copyright “works”, but if a certain percentage of our writers have expressed that concern (and that number is lower than the 500,000 writers NaNoWriMo claims to be participating in this year’s adventure), it surprises me that this isn’t more of an “issue” for National Novel Writing Month and its organizers, too.

It’s clear that it has come up from time to time because on their forums, they provide a link to another website that “scrambles” your manuscript for the specific purpose of only providing your word count to NaNoWriMo, rather than a book that makes any sense. But that’s just robbing Peter to pay Paul — or, in this case, giving your manuscript to 3rd-party Website X in order to scramble it for NaNoWriMo. Frankly, I’m surprised that’s even a suggested solution since an author who is worried about such things (which I already said I am not) is probably more likely to trust NaNoWriMo than some nameless third-party “scrambler” website.

Anyway…. here are my NaNoWriMo stats for yesterday, November 19:

Average Per Day	1854
Words Written Today	2231
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	35242
Words Remaining	14,758
Current Day	19
Days Remaining	12
At this rate, you’ll finish	Nov 27
Words/Day to finish on time	1,230

My estimated day of completion moved one day sooner, to November 27th. Of course, now the goal is to to keep it there, or at the very least, prevent it from moving later than the final deadline again…

Brent Sampson

Getting over the hump (day)

Happy hump day, otherwise known as Wednesday on any given week, but this Wednesday is particularly “humpy” because it marks the time when National Novel Writing participants really SHOULD be over that 25,000 word hump and on the downhill slope of their novel. I’m proud to say I have only 2 writing buddies on the NaNoWriMo site who have not yet traversed that 25,000 hill yet, although they’re both in the 20,000’s, so it should be any moment now. My other buddies have word counts ranging from the lower-to-mid-30’s (which is also where I am) to the upper 70’s (over-achievers!).

If the NaNoWriMo stats from the Denver area participants are any indication, this arduous task becomes harder the longer you’re at it.

Let’s analyze this graphic I uploaded when I passed 25,000 words, most notably the graphic in the lower right hand corner, which shows the cumulative word count of all the WriMo’s in Denver. You will notice that we all passed 8 million words half-way through day number 6, but by day 14, we still hadn’t doubled that to 16 million. In fact, we’re now at day 18, and it still doesn’t look like the cumulative word count has reached 16 million.

We’re all slowing down… Maybe that means the books have been finished and the word count totals have been reached; I would need to know the total number of Denver participants to determine that. But my guess is that this Hump day REALLY is a hump day, and we all desperately need that downhill slope. Well, it’s there, right at word 25,001 it begins going downhill. So I challenge the rest of my mentorees to get over that hump. And for those of you who already have, keep it up. You’re doing great.

Here are my stats for NaNoWriMo for Nov 18:

Average Per Day	1833
Words Written Today	2538
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	33,011
Words Remaining	16,989
Current Day	18
Days Remaining	13
At this rate, you’ll finish	Nov 28
Words/Day to finish on time	1,307

NaNoWriMo, self publishing, writing tips

Under 20,000 words to go on the novel

If you’ll look at my NaNoWriMo stats for yesterday (posted below), you’ll see that I’ve crossed over 30,000 words written, which leaves less than 20,000 words to go. So does that mean I only have to write 20,000 more words to finish my book? Well, no. It means I only have 20,000 more words to write in order to “win” National Novel Writing Month (they consider it “winning” if you write 50,000 words in 30 days). Whether or not you actually FINISH your book is not of much consequence to them.

But that seems like a pretty arbitrary goal, doesn’t it? Writing 50,000 words in 30 days? So, yes, while I’m on track to write 50,000 words in 30 days (in 28 days, actually), I’m afraid I’m not on track to actually finish the book. You see, I just got to the point in the plot where Fenderson takes Brad on a road trip to Las Vegas on their way to the port to get on the cruise ship. If you’ll remember the posting that introduced the original outline for Idle Hands, you’ll see that Las Vegas wasn’t even mentioned, and you’ll see that by November 17th, Fen was supposed to have already killed Jacob. And, here I am, on day 18 and they haven’t even gotten to the cruise ship yet.

That’s okay, rarely are today’s modern works of fiction only 50,000 words. Idle Hands was always going to be longer.

But the point of this is to realize, for all of us WriMo’s out there, that writing (and finishing) a novel is the real goal, no matter how long it takes. They just put a 50,000 word number on it, and an arbitrary starting and ending date, to put us all on the same page (pun intended).

So if your book is less than 50,000 words and you finish it before the end of the month, start writing a new one. And if your book is going to be longer than 50,000 words, and therefore not finished by November 30, keep on writing, even if you “won” NaNoWriMo.

You don’t publish 50,000 words. You publish books.

My NaNoWriMo stats for November 17:

Average Per Day	1792
Words Written Today	2236
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	30,473
Words Remaining	19,527
Current Day	17
Days Remaining	14
At this rate, you’ll finish	November 28
Words/Day to finish on time	1,395

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Freemium Self Publishing

The November 5th episode of South Park, titled “Freemium Isn’t Free”, finds the boys addicted to “freemium” mobile apps. According to Wikipedia, “freemium” is a term coined in 2006 and is the pricing strategy by which a product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge; but money (premium) is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods.

Apple and its iTunes app store received so much heat over “free” mobile apps that, in reality, are not free, that they had to re-identify them as “freemium” apps and disclose the manner in which those apps actually made money. It makes one wonder when other businesses are going to have to disclose the same thing?

What does this have to do with self-publishing? Well, a lot, as it turns out. Many large self-publishing companies use this exact same business model, although the population at large hasn’t quite identified the similarities between mobile apps that do this, and businesses in general that do this. But if you look closely enough, you can identify all the same practices, because some of the largest self-publishing companies are actually “freemium” in nature. They tout “free” on their website, but once you’ve drank the Kool-Aid, or downloaded the app, or whatever you want to call it, writers are discovering what they probably suspected all along: Nothing is free. And suddenly they’re paying $999 for custom covers at Company C*, or $3,199 for book video trailers at Company L* — services that they can get for under $299 and $499, respectively, at Outskirts Press.

Some of the most popular freemium mobile games right now are Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, and The Simpsons, and it might surprise you to know that the average amount of money those companies make per user exceeds the $0.99 they would make if they simply charged for the game in the first place. The way freemium mobile apps manipulate you into paying is by wasting Earth’s most precious resource: time.

Freemium self-publishers use tactics that aren’t quite so obvious, but include overcharging for additional services (like the custom covers and book videos), overcharging for author copies, and the coup-de-grace: manipulating you into actually giving away your e-book to their customers under the guise of “marketing” (but, you only “earn the right” to do this if they have an exclusive on your book, thus preventing you from making money elsewhere). Talk about adding insult to injury.

Most authors are so attracted to the “free” part that they don’t bother to investigate their long term costs; if they did, they might be surprised to know that the average amount those companies make per user exceeds the $999 they would make if they simply charged for self-publishing in the first place.

There is no such thing as “free” self-publishing. But there is freemium self-publishing. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware.

My NaNoWriMo stats for November 16th are:

Average Per Day	1764
Words Written Today	1611
Target Word Count	50,000
Target ~ Words/Day	1,667
Total Words Written	28237
Words Remaining	21,763
Current Day	16
Days Remaining	15
At this rate, you’ll finish	Nov 29
Words/Day to finish on time	1,451