Calling all NaNoWriMo's who have published: care to share how did you did it?

I sold the last nano I did in 2009, Cy Gets a Sex Demon to Amber Allure, a publishing house who had invited me to submit. I didn't do another nano until 2012, but the nano I wrote in 2013, the Care and Feeding of Sex Demons as a sex demon reboot, came out in January of 2014. It was a pitch hit; the manuscript I had sold was having problems in the editing process and I suggested switching the manuscripts. I had sold it by the 23 of November of 2013.

My in house editors were great for the reboot. The first one was pretty much just done for house style. But Loose Id had a content, copy and line edit that, with such a tight turn around with the publication date 2 months from the delivered manscript was insane. I wouldn't recommend.

I used my old publishing house. Once you get in with a place you're happy with, stay with them until you're ready to move on.

I'd already had a dozen or so things out, so the only investment was time. I'm old school; I don't think writers should pay for publishing. Promotion, yes, but you really need to have a product that other people want to buy and you are not objective when it comes to that.

The more you write, the more you can write. Having a cheque every month writing paranormal smut is the best job in the world.

Pros: the story wrote itself and it was an absolute joy. I wrote it using the frost giant method; every time my characters were just sitting around, I threw something worse at them and had them deal with that. Some books feel like you need to pull your teeth and use them as quills on the flesh that you've flayed off your own body, and some emerge fully formed from your head and all you need to do is hit yourself with a rock. This was a rock manuscript. Cons? I wish we had more time. But that's never not the case. I'm still thrilled with the final result.

Publishing isn't your focus and shouldn't be. You should be focused on writing stories that have a sense of newness to the reader. We are an exceptionally jaded crowd where even the cliches have been mined. You're not going to pull anyone's attention by giving them something they've seen before.

So writers need to focus on pushing limits. They need to dig down to the true emotional pain and joy of being alive while introducing a world and a problem that feels real and unexplored. The same old same old is dull. Human brains create dopamine when a new connection is made in their heads. They're not going to be emotionally rewarded by reading a retrod story.

Once you have that new thing, selling it will be no problem. When you publish, no one is doing you a favour. You're giving them a thing that other people want and they're going to give you money for it. You can only sell what people want to buy, and if you trick them and sell them something subpar, second chances are more expensive by far than first.

Focus on your craft. Learn how to write well. Anyone can take a story and polish it with enough time and money to make it saleable. The question is, can you recreate it in 18 months? If you want to publish a book, that's fine. If you want to be a career novelist, learn what it was that made your first book awesome and recreate that, not your story line.

/r/nanowrimo Thread