The traditional publisher has absolutely no place in the reading lives of these users. There are millions of users reading millions of stories a dozen at a time and absolutely nothing offered by a traditional publisher matters to them. The editing? Design? Advertising? All irrelevant. Some of the hottest, most-viewed titles on the page barely qualify as amateur. Things you might consider to be fundamental to a novel like spelling, grammar and, oh, I don’t know, an ending are routinely disregarded on Wattpad. But secondly, many Wattpad users don’t seem to care. The average age of the Wattpad user is 20 – no small number of the stories are written by the 14-16 year old bracket. Two things you have to understand: an enormous amount of what is on Wattpad is terrible.
#Write wattpad stories update#
A book or author that doesn’t update might be forgotten as new, active, hot reads are found. Each book might only update a couple times a month, so they read more of them at a time. Not surprisingly, a typical Wattpad reader has a dozen or more stories on the go at once. With new updates every few days or weeks the novel has constant activity and thus a high ranking. The reward for getting those favours is a higher ranking in the search engine, which hypothetically will result in more “real” reads from actual Wattpad users. A system like this rewards the serialized novel. New writers are encouraged to get the word out, to stump their book amongst their friends and relatives. A long-completed book will tend to flounder. So will a book that doesn’t get enough “activity”, which means reads and votes. The highest scoring books will show up first and most often when readers go to find new books. You get points for receiving “reads, “votes” and “comments”. There are points for new chapters being added. The default browse option is the “Hotness” chart. “Hotness” is determined by a top-secret Wattpad blend of activity measures. Readers can browse by vague criteria like “What’s Hot”, “What’s New” and “Undiscovered Gems”, they could choose to investigate your book if it happens to pop up in your randomized “recommended” window, or they can be directed right to your story with a link – if someone brings that link to their attention. Getting read on Wattpad depends on readers finding your story. Readers “discover” future reads through browsing (much like Kickstarter) rather than with a more fine-grained searching process.
![write wattpad stories write wattpad stories](https://a.wattpad.com/cover/33100995-256-k210997.jpg)
Stories are tagged with genres – most popularly, Romance, Teen, Vampire, Fan Fiction and Fantasy – as well as some miscellaneous write-in tags, then sent off into the ether. These stories (and poems) can then be read on Wattpad’s website or with Wattpad’s app by any number of its 3.5 million registered users. In June it reportedly hosted more than 5 million user-generated stories in 25 languages. Wattpad lets users upload content, usually grouped as a project divided into “parts”. Is this the future of publishing? Or, at least, a straw on the back of traditional publishing’s camel? Wattpad is a fascinating service, and I can see why traditional publishers are hand-wringing over their future given the existence of this and other similar services.
![write wattpad stories write wattpad stories](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/okFIizMTPDQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
By conventional Canadian bestselling wisdom, The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home is a bestseller in just under two weeks. As of today, Monday, November 5th 2012, it is being read by approximately 4,300 people.
#Write wattpad stories free#
On October 24th 2012, Margaret Atwood released her latest novel, a serialized zombie horror novel co-written with the relatively unknown young British author Naomi Alderman, through the free online reading service Wattpad.