I don’t like to think of my writing as a product to sell. I’d rather express what’s in my heart and let it find its own audience. However, as several session leaders reminded us, successful publishers don’t have quite that same attitude. Before they will print your book, they would like to know that you have thought about who might buy it. (Unless you’re paying them to print it, in which case you still ought to think about who might buy it. Because that’s not their job.)

I knew that publishers have fewer editing and marketing resources than most beginning authors would imagine. Writers BarCamp stressed the necessity of finding other resources to help you sell your writing, whether to an agent or to a publisher or to book buyers. I asked one session leader, a bespectacled PhD who writes hard-boiled detective fiction set in Hawaii, if he was surprised at how much work his publisher had him do after his novel was published. He responded that they had a lot of work for him to do before that.

Writing isn’t like engineering or chemistry. Most people know how to write. There are people who write especially well, either because of training or talent, but there are millions of people who can write a basic article or blog post that is good enough for the Internet.

And that’s probably the main reason why writers don’t earn more, even why many writers have left the profession. I’ve gotten many jobs simply because I was paying attention in school when others weren’t. I sometimes get paid a lot for easy work, but as long as other people have neglected to learn how to do it, I’m glad to take their money.

The Internet means that no longer are you guaranteed a job as long as you’re the one of the sharpest people in town. Now you have to be one of the sharpest people in the world… because your competition is now worldwide.

Okay, so everybody who finished sixth grade is a writer. Then we need to be better writers. If everybody can do something, we’d better learn to do something that not everybody can do.

• Find a specialty. John Hewitt’s specialty is writing software documentation. He isn’t afraid of being outsourced.
• Find a mentor. Don’t stop learning. Your competitors aren’t. As a writer, you may feel threatened by the 90 million English speakers in India, but don’t look now: 300 hundred million people are learning English in China.
• Find a voice. Everybody can write, but nobody can write like you. Unless, of course, you’re trying to write like everybody else.

I finished three novels under the inspiration of NanNoWrimo, including my obligatory semi-autobiographical first novel. It helped that I was doing it at the same time as 100,000 other people, and I ended the month in a victory celebration with local Wrimos.

But what if you want to write non-fiction in November? There is no official “NaNoFiWrimo,” though there are the Nano Rebels on the NaNoWriMo Forums – which is mostly people who are writing non-fiction instead of novels.

Caution: non-fiction can’t work unless you’re writing about a subject you’re intimately familiar with, allowing you to type like the wind. So how about 50,000 words of personal philosophy, theology, or advice to your relatives? Memoirs would also work – you could recount your life in November and check the facts with your mother later.