History
Freelance writer Chris Baty started the project in July 1999 with 21 participants in the San Francisco Bay area. In 2000, it was moved to November "to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather." and launched an official website, designed by a friend of Baty's. That year 140 participants signed up for the event, including several from other countries. Baty launched a Yahoo! group to facilitate socialization between participants and, after the posters began asking about guidelines, he set most of the event's basic ground rules: the novel must be new, cannot be co-authored, and must be submitted in time to be verified. Of the 140 participants, 29 completed the challenge as manually verified by Baty himself.
The following year, Baty expected similar numbers but 5,000 participants registered, which he credits to news of the event being spread by bloggers and later being reported on by various news organizations including the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Though Baty was happy with the large turnout and popularity of the event, it nearly did not happen as the website had a number of problems leading to participants being asked to post themselves as winners on an honor system; in the end, 700 people would do so.
2002 saw technical improvements and increased automation to the site and media attention from National Public Radio and CBS Evening News drew increased attention and a participant count of 14,000. The next year, the NaNoWriMo team began the Municipal Liaison program and sent out the first set of pep talk emails. Baty also began work on "No Plot? No Problem!" during the 2003 NaNoWriMo, writing the NaNoWriMo guide concurrent with his own fiction novel.
The event continued to grow strongly every year, and by 2010 over 200,000 people signed up and 2,872,682,109 words were written.
In 2011, the NaNoWriMo website was given a new layout and forums and Baty announced that he will be stepping down as Executive Directive in January 2012 to pursue a full-time writing career. Grant Faulkner will be taking his position as Executive Director. The redesigned website moved from being based on Drupal to Ruby-on-Rails. During the first month after launch the new website supported over 1,000,000 visitors and more than 39,000,000 pageviews.
Read more about this topic: National Novel Writing Month
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