Hugh Howey: How NaNoWriMo Trained Me to Be a Professional Author

Just a few years ago, Hugh Howey couldn’t have anticipated his current well-deserved success. A three-time NaNoWriMo winner, he self-published Wool , only to see its momentum explode. A New York Times bestseller, it’s been optioned for a film by Ridley Scott, and will be published in hardback this March. For our “Now What?” Months, he’ll join Sarra Cannon for a self-publishing webinar next Monday, and tells us just how NaNoWriMo prepared him for a career:

Nobody has ever been so well-prepared for National Novel Writing Month success as I was in 2011. It was my third NaNoWriMo in a row. The previous two years had been wonderful successes. This time was going to be even better; I was going in with confidence and a game plan. For the first time ever, I’d actually outlined what I was going to write. I was champing at the bit to get started!

But then October happened.

A novelette I’d published in July through CreateSpace, a 12,000 word piece entitled WOOL, began to rack up sales and reviews unlike anything I’d ever written. It was like a dare. October was messing with me. As the month wore on, I began approaching a thousand sales of a single title in a single month. It was far more than I’d ever sold of anything in such a span of time. And a common theme ran through the reviews: Where was the rest of the story?

I didn’t have a rest of the story! I began to think I needed to drop my perfectly conceived novel and write more in this universe, instead. Here was my chance, the dream we all have of getting a sliver of a readership. I decided I would use NaNoWriMo as my springboard. I would give myself a chance to build on this tiny bit of momentum.

Since the short length of WOOL seemed to work so well, I chose to write three more stories for a total of 60,000 words. It helped that I was volunteering at my local library, the Watauga County Library in Boone, NC, with their NaNoWriMo Young Writers program. Owen Gray, a librarian there, is a huge supporter of NaNoWriMo. Being a model to him and his kids meant I couldn’t slouch. 

I was also working a full time job and taking an astronomy class that included a night lab. Every ounce of my free time needed to go into writing. Many mornings, I would get up at 3 AM to get started. It wasn’t hard, because I was in love with my story. And the sales and reviews were continuing to pour in, which provided motivation.

By the end of November, I had exceeded my goals. Not only were the three stories complete, WOOL 2 was already edited, given cover art, and published on Amazon. At the wrap party with the library youth group, I was able to pull up my Amazon publishing dashboard and show a thousand sales of a story I’d started four weeks prior! 

I can say with confidence that I wouldn’t have written the same books if I’d written them any other way. The compressed nature of a NaNo-novel makes for a tighter plot. It reinforces the importance of not taking a day off. NaNoWriMo isn’t a writing exercise for me. It trained me to be a pro.

By January, the Wool Omnibus was complete and self-published. It contained 5 stories and clocked in at 160,000 words, 80,000 of which had been written during NaNoWriMo. The Wool Omnibus has cracked the top 20 on the New York Times bestseller list. It won IndieReader’s Best Indie Book of 2012 Award in science fiction. Ridley Scott picked up the film rights this summer; it will be released in hardback by Simon and Schuster this March; and is being translated into 19 foreign languages.

I pinch myself every day. I still feel like the same kid working in a bookstore, taking classes at night, and writing in his spare time. What I do know is this: the festival of carpal tunnel that is NaNoWriMo has been the greatest thing to happen to me as a writer. For the past three years, it has led to books that I’ve been proud to publish. It has led to wonderful and lasting friendships. It got me in touch with my local library, made me feel like a hero to young writers, and taught me the importance of advertising my progress to the world. 

I get emails from writers all the time who praise me for the word count indicators on my website. My response to this praise is invariable: “Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo?” I ask. And then I tell them. I tell them how this outpouring of words has turned my life upside down. And that maybe they should look into it as well.

Last October 31 was a year to the day that I realized something was happening, something I could seize or ignore. And in November, my incredible writing journey didn’t just come full circle. It began anew. And yours did, too.

Where do you hope to be this fall, on the anniversary of your novel’s beginnings?

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series.  Hugh lives in Jupiter, FL with his wife Amber and their dog Bella. When he isn’t writing, he’s reading or taking a photograph.

Photo by Flickr user Smieythe.