Press Releases
Coming soon
High-Resolution Photographs
High-resolution photographs from the 2006 event coming soon
Newsletters
In the News
"If this growth rate is constant and participation is cumulative, then every American will be writing a novel in November 2027. We'll be a country made entirely of boozing, tortured authors." 11/06
"Amiya Seligman, also 10, was about halfway through her 8,000-word story about a land of magical creatures, a baby who's reincarnated every 5,000 years, and an epic battle between good and evil." 11/06
"To help you along, we've asked fiction writers from all genres for the essence of noveling: how they write, how they overcome writer's block and their best written sentence. Each weekday this month, we'll publish another novelist�s thoughts. Check back for novelists as varied as Neal Pollack, Rita Mae Brown and Joyce Carol Oates." 11/06
"Forget the archetypal image of the brooding writer buried in a heap of crumpled paper. There will be no time for perfectionism or procrastination in November as a projected 75,000 would-be novelists attempt to pound out 50,000 words in 30 days." 11/06
"Still, she says better than any prize is the discovery you've done something you didn't think possible." 11/06
Statistics
Founded: 1999 in Oakland, CA
Annual participant/winner totals:
1999: 21 participants and six winners
2000: 140 participants and 29 winners
2001: 5000 participants and more than 700 winners
2002: 13,500 participants and around 2100 winners
2003: 25,500 participants and about 3500 winners
2004: 42,000 participants and just shy of 6000 winners
2005: 59,000 participants and 9769 winners
2006: 79,813 participants and 12,948 winners
Number of official NaNoWriMo chapters around the world: Over 500
Number of K-12 schools who participated in 2005: Over 100
Number of K-12 schools who participated in 2006: Over 300
Number of NaNoWriMo manuscripts that have been sold to big-time publishing houses: Many (details below)
Percent of NaNoWriMo's net proceeds from donations and merchandise sales that went to build libraries for children in Southeast Asia 2004-2006: 50%
Number of libraries NaNoWriMo has built through this program: Twenty-two (three in Cambodia, seven in Laos, an anticipated twelve in Vietnam, pending 2006 financials)
Number of words officially logged by participants during the 2004 event: 428,164,975
Number of words officially logged by participants during the 2005 event: 714,227,354
Number of words officially logged by participants during the 2006 event: 982,564,701
Contacts
Participants
You can contact local participants in your area for interviews by checking out our Contact page to see if your area has a Municipal Liaison. These goodly folks are the volunteer chapter heads for the area, and they can help put you in touch with participants and let you know when the next writing event in your area will take place.
If your area doesn't have an ML, you can get in touch with participants directly in several different ways. The first is by going to our Author page and searching under your city. Of the people listed, some will have chosen to leave their emails visible, and you can contact them directly via email about setting up an interview. You can also post a message in your area's Regional Lounge on our Forums. To do so, you'll need to sign-up for the event. We ask that journalists make themselves conspicuous by putting PRESS (in all caps) somewhere in their username. This also helps with our housekeeping, as we can go in and delete these accounts at the end of the event.
Published NaNoWriMo Authors
(Five Star/Gale, 2006). Contact: Five Star/Gale
If you have more questions, or if you would like to interview a member of the NaNoWriMo staff,
email us at press@nanowrimo.org.