When it comes to publishing, many writers will think about big publishers first. However, there are a lot of different publishing options out there to explore. NaNo participant and author, Clara Ward, talks about their experience publishing with a small press and gives you questions to consider while you think through your publishing options!

NaNoWriMo inspired me to write. Signing with a small press gave me the support I needed to publish a book I love. 

I’d published books before—starting with NaNoWriMo sponsor deals in the early days of online publishing—but I never had the right skill set to promote those books. As a result, they never truly found their audience. 

In November of 2020, I poured my heart into a genre-blurring near-future tale of sailing across the Pacific and building a neurodiverse, queer, and possibly magical chosen family. In 2021, I titled it Be the Sea and asked myself: What am I going to do with that?

NaNo participant Demi Michelle Schwartz shares her story on how NaNoWriMo helped her sign on with a literary agent! She also offers some lessons she learned from taking on the challenge — and maybe it’ll inspire you too!

Are you an author with dreams of being represented by a literary agent? If so, I’m here to tell you that NaNoWriMo played a key role in my journey to signing with my agent, Michelle Jackson at LCS Literary.

I received an offer on the manuscript I drafted during my first NaNoWriMo in 2022. Fun fact, I signed my contract during November in 2023, exactly a year after writing the book. Reflecting back, there were choices I made that I hope will give you insight into how your NaNoWriMo project could lead to securing representation.

When submitting your manuscript to an agent, your pitch letter is the first thing they read. But with hundreds of emails pouring into agents’ inboxes every day, how do you get yours to stand out? Author Jeff Herman has some tips:

On any given day, there’s a massive surplus of desperate manuscripts clamoring to fill way too few opportunities. It resembles hordes of famished zombies ripping at the walls and doors where a remnant of agents and editors have found sanctuary. This helps explain why the barriers to your success seem to be unreasonably extreme, not to mention insensitive and discourteous. The harsh process is a form of self-preservation for the gatekeepers. However, access is possible; sometimes you just have to reframe what you’re seeing.

Now that November is over, you may be taking some time to rest, recover, pursue things other than writing—or possibly continue to work on your story! Today, author and baker Amy Wallen shares some ins-pie-ration for moving forward with your novel:

Coming off the adrenaline rush of NaNoWriMo, so many feelings rush through us—relief, pride, and exhaustion are just a few of them. 

Relief because, woohoo, you survived! Those last few days as you rounded the bend when your family wanted a pie, and you had to be nice to your in-laws, you just about gave in, but instead you bought a pie at the store, kept your mouth shut, and got your writing done. Or, like me, maybe you wrote extra before and after to make up for taking that day or two of rest (shhh, don’t tell) over the holiday. But, whew, you typed the 50,000 words by the end.  

Pride! You should be dancing the Snoopy dance because you did it, you met your goal; or even if you didn’t quite meet the goal, you kept at it and reached the finish line—first draft of a novel, or a hell of a start. 

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Kindle Direct Publishing, a 2022 NaNo sponsor, helps you self-publish eBooks and paperbacks for free. Today, author Denise Grover Swank shares some tips to help you get your novel ready to publish:

Congrats on completing NaNoWriMo! I completed my first book with NaNoWriMo in 2009, and was thrilled when I’d finished, but I wasn’t ready to hit publish just yet!

1. Have someone else read your novel.

Every book needs revising and editing. Trust me, I’ve written over seventy books at this point and still need to revise books. 

You’ll either need to find a developmental editor or alpha readers. Alpha readers—well-read readers and/or other authors—are great for writers on a budget and are usually free. You can find them in writers’ groups or your friends who are readers. Just be careful if you’re using friends and family: they’re going to be biased. (Unless they’re my aunt who read my paranormal thriller and told me I should write children’s books.) 

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. ProWritingAid, a 2022 NaNo sponsor, helps you turn your rough first draft into a clean, clear, publish-ready manuscript. Today, Hayley Milliman, Head of Education at ProWritingAid, shares some tips on how to successfully edit your own manuscript:

So you’ve finished NaNoWriMo? Congratulations! You should be proud of the hard work you did to complete your manuscript.

Now is when the fun begins: editing.

For many people, the editing process is murky and complex. Drafting is straightforward: your goal is to end up with a finished manuscript. But how do you know what to do when editing? And how do you know when editing is done?

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Scrivener, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is an award-winning writing app that has been enthusiastically adopted by best-selling novelists and novices alike. Today, they’ve partnered with author Joanna Penn to share some tips on what to do after you finish your first draft:

If you’ve completed this year’s NaNoWriMo, congratulations! But finishing a novel is only the first step on a publishing journey. We spoke with Joanna Penn, author of non-fiction books for authors, as well as best-selling thriller author as J. F. Penn. 

Joanna did NaNoWriMo in 2009, and, while she didn’t write 50,000 words, or finish her novel, the experience helped her decide where she wanted to go with her fiction, and how she wanted to develop her career as a writer. Joanna offers six tips for writers who have completed their first novel: 

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Kindle Vella, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is a publishing platform for serialized stories. Today, the folks at Kindle Vella are here to share some tips from author Kimberly Titus on how to get some extra noveling motivation:

Anyone can pen their next great novel if they put their mind to it, but having the support of a community to cheer you on makes all the difference, especially in those moments where you feel impostor syndrome creeping in. Like NaNoWriMo, Kindle Vella makes reading and writing a fun and interactive experience.

Kindle Vella is a serialized reading experience in the Kindle app where authors receive immediate feedback on their story as they publish one episode at a time! Readers can champion their favorite stories leaving a review or giving a ‘thumbs up’. Additionally, authors can interact with readers by leaving notes or teasers at the end of each episode, as well as create polls to get feedback on what should happen next in the story.

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. ProWritingAid, a 2022 NaNo sponsor, helps you turn your rough first draft into a clean, clear, publish-ready manuscript. Today, Hayley Milliman, Head of Education at ProWritinAid, shares some tips on how to successfully copy-edit. For more in-depth explanation, catch the webcast on Wednesday, February 23!

The Writer’s Goal: keep your readers immersed in the world, characters, and story you’ve created.  

Your imagination, understanding of story, and ability to write to the human experience will help you achieve that goal in part. Your work also needs to be reader-friendly, clear, and free of errors. 

Why Do I Need to Copy-Edit?

Clunky, error-filled work sabotages your efforts. Readers will give up if they keep having to untangle unclear thoughts or stumble on grammatical errors or poorly structured sentences and phrases. 

Remember, “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Use it not just to create characters and their universes, but for copy-editing those universes and giving your reader a rich, engaging, un-put-downable experience. 

Follow these 10 tips to help you through the copy-editing process. 

Some people love writing dialogue, and others find it tricky. What’s the best way to show who’s talking? Where does the punctuation go? Luckily, today, author Annelise Driscoll has some tips for formatting your dialogue:

It’s no secret that formatting dialogue can be a tricky business. From tags to trail-offs to interruptions, there are so many things to consider when you start throwing quotation marks into your stories. But fear not! Formatting your dialogue is easier than it seems. 

First of all, it’s important to note that there’s more than one to write compelling dialogue—and whether you use tags, avoid tags, or constantly interrupt your speaker with actions or other characters, each choice you make has a simple formatting solution.

Dialogue Tags

We can’t assume that everyone knows the world we’re talking about, right? Luckily, author and previous Camp NaNoWriMo counselor Cass Morris has a few suggestions to help us more deeply explore our worldbuilding:

One of the most powerful things we can do as writers is create a world. What we write holds a mirror up to reality, where we can examine and criticize our own world or try to build a better one. We get to play god with our characters, and in doing so, we exercise a great deal of power in what we choose to reflect, to magnify, to laud, and to condemn.

So how can we make interesting choices, rather than relying on stale tropes, biased perspectives, or common assumptions about “the way things are” or “the way things were”?

Here are five basic concepts I suggest you explore to develop a richly detailed and unique world:

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Hermit, a 2021 NaNo sponsor, is a fast, elegant, and free to use web-based writing application that also lets you print physical copies of your books. Today, Alex, its founder and developer, shares 3 tips to create a professional looking book design by yourself.

Step #1: Make It Breathe (Spacing and Margins)

When designing a book, white space is important. Too little white space and the text will be so condensed that it’ll be hard and unpleasant to read. Add too much and you’ll end up with a huge amount of pages that’ll cost extra for each print.

For a 6x9” book, 0.5” is a reasonable amount of margin. It’s also good to add a bit more on the “inside margin”, the side of the page near the fold of the book — 0.75” would be a good amount.

Additionally, whenever a new chapter starts, it’s quite common to add a lot of top margin on its title page. This will give it some importance and help the reader understand that this is a new chapter and not just another heading.

To find an agent, or to self-publish? That is the question many authors ask themselves. Whichever way you choose, no publishing journey is easy—and no publishing journey looks the same. Today, long-time Wrimo Elayna Mae Darcy, author of Still the Stars, shares their publishing journey, and the things they learned along the way: 

When put under a microscope, NaNoWriMo turns out to be much more than an annual writing event—it is an idea that contains vast multitudes. As individuals, it teaches us the joys of dedicating ourselves to a task and striving to achieve it. As writers, it provides us with a community of like minded dreamers and word weavers to lift us up when all feels lost. And as I recently learned, the Wrimo’s journey also proved to be an unlikely mentor on the pursuit of self publication.

As a seasoned Wrimo with seventeen years of participation under my belt, the NaNo Way comes easy to me now. Pick an idea, chase it with reckless abandon for 30 days, revel in whatever I manage to accomplish at a brewery with writing friends when it’s all over, repeat annually. But as my boy Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, NaNo looks quite different “from a certain point of view.”