NaNoWriMo No More?

If you have recently participated in NaNoWriMo, you've probably already heard that NaNoWriMo has officially stated they are shutting down the NaNoWriMo organization. I'm not going to go over everything here, but Literary Hub has a good breakdown of it and links to much relevant information.

What was NaNoWriMo?

For those of you that didn't know. NaNoWriMo was short for National Novel Writing Month. It started in 1999 as a silly little challenge to try and write a 50K word novel in 30 days. Then in 2006 it became a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and grew into a worldwide phenomenon.

It also expanded to offer other challenges throughout the year, but the big one was the official November challenge, which often had hundreds of thousands of writers participating in NaNoWriMo (November) or Camp NaNoWriMo (April and July).

This worldwide growth also spurred the creation of local writing groups and communities. We often had our own NaNoWriMo group here at the guild during November, and that tradition is likely to continue, we will just no longer be able to use the NaNoWriMo site.

So what's the alternative?

Several alternative tracking sites started up when NaNoWriMo started having problems in 2023 and I have checked many of them out. The one I liked the best is a FREE app called TrackBear. I've been using it almost since it came out (early beta user) and I must say it's pretty solid and a great app even just for general writing.

It's almost identical to the NaNoWriMo dashboard and can even IMPORT your NaNoWriMo history, so for us veteran WriMo's with years of history, we can preserve it and continue on as normal. It also allows us to setup our own writing competitions and create groups to track everyone's progress, so we'll likely use it for any DVWG events.

So what is TrackBear?

TrackBear is essentially a habit-builder for writers. Progress on a project can be tracked, interchangeably, by “words, chapters, pages, scenes, lines, or time.” You can even import your old projects from NaNoWriMo into TrackBear! The platform also explicitly states that “TrackBear is designed with privacy in mind and will always be free to use. TrackBear isn’t a social network, a chat platform, or AI-powered, and there is no premium tier or pay-to-play. There are no ads, no third-party tracking, and no data harvesting. It’s just a place for you to track your writing.”

Sign onto TrackBear to IMPORT and SAVE your NaNoWriMo history!