Novel Writing Month in 2026, Who's Running It, and When
For close to two decades, one nonprofit organization ran the best-known version of this: write fifty thousand words of a novel in November, together, on a shared clock, with a public tracker to mark progress and a community built around the same deadline. Regional forums, a shared tracker, a sense that the whole month belonged to one event: that was the shape of it for most of the writers who took part. That organization closed in April 2025, citing chronic financial strain and concerns about moderation on forums used by minors (TechCrunch, April 1, 2025; Publishers Weekly, April 2025). What it left behind wasn't silence. It was six different groups, none of them the obvious single successor, each running some version of the same month on its own schedule.
What's actually running this year
Each of these is real, dated, and open to anyone, whatever tool they write in.
They all count novel words, which is the tradition. The shape underneath — a fixed window, a daily number, a finish line everyone reaches on the same date — is what actually does the work, and it fits a novel, an essay, a screenplay or a run of articles equally well. Plenty of people quietly use the month for one of the other three.
| Initiative | Organizer | Dates (2026) | What it focuses on | |---|---|---|---| | Novel November | ProWritingAid (Hayley Milliman) | Preptober Oct 1-31, writing Nov 1-30, editing Dec | A 50,000-word goal, daily sprints, then a December stage built around revision and pitching | | NaNoWriMo 2.0 | Chris Baty, the original founder | Nov 1-30 | A minimal page: badges and encouragement, no forum, no validator, no prizes, pointing participants to the existing r/nanowrimo community | | Novel Sprint | Reedsy | Nov 1-30 | A month-long sprint run alongside Reedsy's existing weekly short-fiction contest | | Order of The Written Word | Holly Rhiannon | Nov 1-30 | A community built from scratch, centered on a public group rather than a dedicated platform | | Novel90 | AutoCrit | Oct 1-Dec 3 | A longer window spanning preparation, drafting, and editing in one continuous stretch | | NovelEmber | World Anvil | Nov 1-30 | A month focused on world-building alongside the draft itself |
What these six have in common
Underneath six different names, the same three ingredients show up in every one of them: a fixed window of dates, a self-set goal rather than one imposed from outside, and some way to mark the days as they pass, whether that's a public tracker, a community feed, or simply a shared sense that everyone doing this is doing it during the same thirty days. None of them require a specific piece of software. They don't check what you wrote in, either. The commitment is the calendar, not the tool.
Where they differ is scale and structure. Novel November and Novel90 both stretch preparation and revision around the drafting month itself, one contained mostly in October and December, the other spanning nearly ten weeks in one continuous run. NaNoWriMo 2.0 and Order of The Written Word are the leanest of the six: a page, a goal, and a community to show up to, with the actual accountability happening in conversation rather than in a dashboard. Reedsy's Novel Sprint sits inside a company that already runs a much older weekly contest for short fiction, so the November sprint borrows an existing audience rather than starting from nothing. World Anvil's NovelEmber is the only one of the six built around a specific kind of writing, one that treats the world a novel is set in as its own project alongside the manuscript.
That range is wider than the original single event ever offered. A writer who wanted less structure than the official tracker provided, or more of it, had nowhere else within the same tradition to go. This year, that's no longer true: the amount of scaffolding around the same thirty days is itself a choice.
Why there isn't one answer
These six aren't a direct continuation of the original in any formal sense, and some sources describe the landscape as fragmented on purpose: writers who took part in the original event have said, in public commentary, that they'd rather build something new than carry a closed organization's name forward (ettagraceauthor.com, October 17, 2025; CipherWrite, 2026). One outlet has singled out ProWritingAid's version as the closest thing to a designated successor (Round Table at Beloit College, October 1, 2025), but that reading isn't shared everywhere, and the other five initiatives are drawing real, separate participation of their own.
What ties all six together is simpler than any one organization's history: a shared clock, a shared goal, and a habit that outlasted the group that first popularized it. Camp NaNoWriMo, the smaller, off-season version of the same idea, already ran its own July session this year, organized less around any single site than around independent communities and trackers that grew up around the original event over the years it ran.
What the split actually changes
The practical difference for a writer showing up this November isn't the absence of a big organization behind the month. It's the absence of a single default choice. Before, joining meant one website, one forum, one tracker, one badge at the end. Now it means picking, deliberately, which version of the same commitment matches how much structure feels useful: a defined word count and daily sprints, a bare page with nothing to configure, or a community organized around a specific kind of story. That's more choosing than the tradition used to require, and also more room to pick something that actually fits, rather than inheriting whatever the one available option happened to look like.
Picking one, or none
Joining any of these six doesn't require a particular app, a membership, or advance notice. Some ask for a sign-up; some ask for nothing beyond showing up in November and writing. Choosing one is mostly a question of which shared clock, and which small community around it, feels worth showing up for: a heavily structured month with daily sprints and a defined word count, a bare-bones page with no infrastructure at all, or something built specifically around building the world a story lives in.
It's also fine to treat this list as reference rather than a decision to make right now. Preptober, in October, is largely the same regardless of which November community a writer eventually joins, or whether she joins one at all: a premise, a cast, a rough shape, an opening scene. The choice of which clock to write against can wait until closer to November 1, once it's clearer which kind of company suits the specific book underway this year. Every one of the six is a reasonable choice, and picking one is optional. Plenty of writers do November without joining any of them at all, on their own calendar, which is its own long-standing version of the same tradition.
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