NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

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