A few people, like Rich and science fiction author James R. Strickland, go into the month with no expectations and come out with the novels that start their writing careers. Rich, a former stay-at-home mom, signed up on a whim in 2002. "I thought, I'll give it a shot," she says. "The worst possible scenario was that I would start writing and not finish." But by the end of the month, Rich felt that she had a workable manuscript. She joined the Romance Writers of America and soon signed a book deal. Her first novel, Time Off for Good Behavior, went on to win the RWA's Best First Book award.

Strickland revised or rewrote about two-thirds of his 2004 NaNoWriMo manuscript, Looking Glass. He shopped it around to different agents before selling it to a publisher he met at a science fiction convention. And Sara Gruen, author of the New York Times best-seller Water for Elephants, published her NaNoWriMo novel, Flying Changes, in 2005.

Despite Success stories like these, NaNoWriMo is not without its critics. Eric Rosenfield, a computer programmer who runs the literary blog Wet Asphalt, wrote  the post, "Why I Hate National Novel Writing Month, and Why You Should Too," claiming the event trivializes novel writing.

Rosenfield emphasizes that he has nothing against the participants and is not attacking their right to write a novel. "It's the attitude that [the creators] take toward it," he says. "The way that they're presenting it indicates to me that they're not taking the idea of writing a novel seriously."