NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

This is the kind of thing that only me and about four other people (hi, mom!) are interested in, but for those four people, I wanted to post a screenshot from Google Analytics showing yesterday's traffic to NaNoLand.

November 1 has always brought our servers to their knees. This year, Dan moved us to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform so we could try to better handle everyone who comes to the site in the Cyclone Window of October 30-November 4.

It's working. We saw "page timed out" screens during peak hours yesterday, and there are a couple other things we want to improve today and tomorrow. But so far this year's Cyclone Window has felt more like a Gentle Shower Window, despite the fact that we have 40,000 more people on the site this year than last. Then I got up this morning and saw exactly how much traffic the site had been handling yesterday and still chugging along. (For comparison, the 2008 traffic is in green.)

For the record, we had 271,320 visits in that 24-hour period, with our servers offering up 2,079,398 pages to visitors. Busiest day in NaNo history by an extraordinary margin.

Thanks so much to Dan for all his hard work (and lost weekends!). Thanks so much to all our halo'd donors for allowing us to improve our systems!

Back to my novel!

Chris

I've always found it uncanny the way perfectly healthy gadgets seem to implode during NaNoWriMo. Ipods that we're depending on for noveling soundtracks decide to spontaneously reformat themselves. Participants' laptops crash and burn with alarming frequency (usually taking everything from a few chapters to entire books with them when they go).

This is why it's such a great idea to email your novel to yourself via webmail every few days in November. It's also why I wasn't completely surprised today when the hard drive in my new Dell laptop got corrupted and died. Eeep! I've never had a computer just die before (see the sad photographic evidence, above). Anyone else getting the gadget meltdowns a little early this year?

Chris

So 2008 was a really great year for NaNoWriMo. We had an all-time-high win rate (18.2%), a record-smashing number of words written (1.6 billion), and a huge number of participants (119,301). After the event ended, we all spent a fair amount of time here on the blog scratching our heads over what made 2008 such a bountiful year for month-long noveling. Was it the recession? The historic nature of it being the 10th NaNoWriMo? The fact that November magically harbored five weekends that year?

Whatever it was, the numbers were very, very big.

This year is looking like NaNoWriMo will grow again. Site traffic is up 20%. Sign-ups are up 10% from this time last year, and we just sent out our annual "come back and write with us!" email to last year's participants (four days later than we did last year).

So here's the question: Why might more people be signing up to write novels this year than last? Is it still the recession giving people more free time for book-writing? Is it just more people hearing about the challenge through things like Twitter and Facebook? If this is your first year, what inspired you to take part now?

And does anyone care to take a guess on what this year's sign-up numbers for NaNoWriMo will be?

Excited and nervous,

Chris

On Friday, Lindsey and I spent the morning at Babylon Burning, the San Francisco screenprinter who is handling all the NaNoWriMo shirts (and new sweatshirt!) this year. We listened to the Strokes and the Shangri-Las, debated various Pantone colors and design dimensions, and watched as the team there began pulling the first of the new shirts off the line. Thanks so much to Babylon for hosting us! Here are some photos from the big day…

Arriving at Babylon

The line-up ahead of us

Boxes of blank shirts waiting to be transformed into NaNogoods

The films that get turned into screens

Mike, screening up a storm

Figuring out the right green color for the black NaNo '09 shirt took us almost an hour

The green picked, the shirts start rolling (and Clam starts stacking)

We wanted to make a fun, new NaNoWriMo shirt. Since NaNo feels a lot like camp to us, we asked our graphic design whiz Graham to make a design for "Camp NaNoWriMo." The slogan on the sign (hard to make out here) reads: "An idyllic writers retreat, smack-dab in the middle of your crazy life." We love Graham.

Close up of Camp NaNoWriMo shirts

One of the comments we get every year is that we need to offer more shirts for people who aren't participating that year, but who still want to show their support of NaNoWriMo. Designer Graham came up with a simple, all-purpose tee that we're totally in love with. It's the first white tee we've made since 2002!

We're doing the 2009 shirt on both black and cranberry. This is me proudly waving the first cranberry to come off the line.

And, for the first time ever: NaNoWriMo sweatshirts! We went with these incredibly thick, soft sweats that cost a little more. But they feel like you're being hugged by a thousand chinchillas.

Lindsey feels the chinchilla love.

Last Thursday the city of Oakland threw a big party to celebrate the "unveiling" of Uptown, the neighborhood where OLL has lived for the last three years. The neighborhood has really come a long way since we moved in, with a ton of great new cafes, bars, and the beautifully restored Fox Theater opening up in the past year. It's an exciting place to be!

Anyway, during the street party, our Development Director Elizabeth and I snuck up into a condo open house and I took this picture down onto the street party below. It showcases the great Fox theater sign, OLL's building, and the enormous black arrow that looms over our office day and night.

Has anyone out there in NaNoLand been to this part of Oakland recently? Does anyone else live with a looming arrow?

Yay, Oakland!

Chris

Wooohoo! I just got back Monday from a three-month sabbatical to Melbourne, Australia. I was there to commune with marsupials, see friends, drink coffees with exceedingly practical names like "flat white" and "long black," spend an embarrassing amount of money on Arnott's cookie products, and hole up with a NaNo-novel I started in 2005.

While I was down under, I read a bunch of great Australian novels, including Steve Toltz's wildly creative A Fraction of the Whole, and Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. If you've been following the discussions on our Twitter feed, Peter Carey is, ahem, relevant.

(Hint. Hint.)

I also had a chance to meet up for drinks and Mongolian barbecue with the local NaNo groups in Melbourne and Sydney (hello Melbournians! Hello Sydneysiders!). There's nothing better than traveling halfway around the world to eat stir-fry, drink beer, and swap stories with high-velocity novelists.

Below is my favorite photo from the trip, taken by my friend Jane. Has anyone else had the pleasure of hanging out with kangaroos on golf courses? It's the greatest!

So, so glad to be back with Tavia, Lindsey, and Dan here in the office, but so, so missing my underperforming Demons,

Chris

Last week I asked Wrimos to cook up some perspective-bringing comparisons that could help us wrap our heads around this year's record-setting, pants-melting collective word count. I was hoping we'd hit 1.5 billion words, and we ended up clearing that by more than 100,000,000 words.

Here are some of your explanations of how best to understand 1.5 billion's majesty. Got some more calculations to add to this groundbreaking mathematical treatise? Add 'em in the comments! And thanks to Sarah Panian for all her compiling help!

1.5 billion words…

We're still helping a few folks who had internet melt-downs last night get their novels properly validated, but with most of our districts fully reporting, we have some preliminary numbers for 2008. (These numbers don't include the Young Writers Program, which had over 21,000 kid and teen participants doing their own amazing and record-setting things.)

Okay, drum roll, please…

This year, we had 119,301 authors sign up for NaNoWriMo. That's a 17.5% bump in turn-out from 2007, when we had 101,510 writers.

Of everyone registered, 21,683 of us won. That's an 18.2% win rate. If you throw out the first two years of NaNoWriMo win rates as too small to be statistically significant (in 1999 NaNoWriMo had 21 participants, and in 2000 we only had 140), you can see that we just hit an all-time high in percentage of winners. Woot!

NaNoWriMo Win Rates,
A Historic Study
----------------
1999: 28.6%
2000: 20.7%
2001: 14%
2002: 15.6%
2003: 13.7%
2004: 14.3%
2005: 16.6%
2006: 16.2%
2007: 15.1%
2008: 18.2%

Holy cow.

What was behind the increase the percentage of winners so much this year, you ask? I think starting on a weekend was key. It meant people got an encouraging number of words under their belts right out of the gate, and that boost (combined with the fact that we all had four more weekends after the first one) helped keep us going. This was borne out by site traffic as well—we saw much less of a drop-off in returning visitors throughout the month than we typically do.

But I'd love to hear your theories! Post 'em in the comments section.

On the collective word-count front...Together, we wrote 1,519,501,005 1,643,343,993 words. That's a 28% 38% increase over last year, when we reached 1,187,931,929 words.

I'll be posting another blog entry this week to help all of us better grasp what 1,519,501,005 1,643,343,993 words means to humanity, and whether that many words would actually weigh more than a grocery store filled with donkeys (early results point to yes).

The top 10 wordiest regions this year were…
1) Seattle
2) Maryland
3) Germany and Austria
4) Los Angeles
5) Holland and Belgium
6) Chicago
7) Twin Cities (MN)
8) New York City
9) Portland, OR
10) London

I love the geographic spread! And my hat is once again off to Seattle, the city that managed to conquer the entire state of Maryland and the combined might of the multiple European writing powerhouses. Ducks of Seattle, we salute you.

Okay, let's hear it. Why do you think we had so many winners this year? Moon cycles? Global economic crisis? Starbucks dropping the price on drip coffees?

And thanks to NaNoWriMo winner and math scholar Mark Searles for all the numbers help!

Chris

As an anthropology major, I never thought I'd spend as much time as I do thinking about web servers. But over the last 10 years of NaNoWriMo, I've become completely obsessed with the way traffic flows through our sites. Russ and I have named all of our servers after coffee-growing regions in Ethiopia (the birthplace of coffee), and I love each of them like my little, roboty children.

In October and November, before I get out of bed in the morning, I grab the laptop and check our Google Analytics stats from the previous day. (For those of you who have real lives, Google Analytics is just a complicated hit-counter that tells you interesting things about the people who come to your website.)

From three years of Analytics stats, I've learned that we have very stable traffic patterns, but they're kind of weird compared to other sites. Basically we're pretty slow through the summer and early fall. In October traffic builds in a nonchalant, nothing-to-see-here-folks kind of way until October 31. At which point everyone in the free world suddenly appears on our site.

I have no idea where they come from. But faced with the onslaught of so many writers, cheerleaders, and curious onlookers, our roboty children tend to scream and run for the hills. And every year, Russ patiently coaxes them back to work with balloons and ice cream.

By November 3, the Great Drop-Off has begun, as thousands of the saner members of the NaNoWriMo community realize they have more sensible things to do than write an entire book in a month. From there, it's a pretty gentle slope down to December 1.

And that's our stable, weird traffic pattern. Because I thought it might be marginally interesting to those of you who are also obsessed with web traffic, I made a snapshot of what last October looked like on the NaNoWriMo.org site, and another one comparing this October to last October. Note: This doesn't include the Young Writers Program site traffic, which exhibits similar weather patterns but on a less stormy scale.

First up: October 1, 2007 through November 1, 2007.

October 1-November 1, 2007

And then this is what the last 30 days have looked like for us. The blue line is this year's traffic. The green line is traffic from the same day in 2007. That huge, sad, dip on October 1, 2008, is when one of our favorite children, Lekempti, died. (We brought him back to life a day later.)

September 23, 2008-October 23, 2008

Given those percentage increases from 2007, I think we're going to see an absolutely crazy November 1 spike this year. Hold on to your hats, everyone!

Anyone else out there have strange site traffic patterns they'd be willing to share? Post a link in the comments!

Chris