Much Ado About Wattpad – Is It Your Ticket to Success?

Posted on by Chris The Story Reading Ape

Newly joined Author DeAnna’s discoveries so far 😀

21 thoughts on “Much Ado About Wattpad – Is It Your Ticket to Success?”

  3. @Charles (I can’t see a reply link under your comment so I hope this gets to you) Sadly I have no idea if it causes issues with KDP Select exclusivity. Perhaps someone else knows more about that than I do?

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  4. I thought Wattpad was just horrible!!! Full of terrible poor quality writing. Perhaps I was just being snooty, I dont know. It never did much for me but to be honest, I never used it properly. I have recently been thinking of serialising a novella on it, something different to my Conor Kelly books, to see how that pans out. As with all things, it depends very much on the time factor.

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  5. I remember trying out Wattpad about a year ago. Honestly, it didn’t impress me and I actually quit it first. Fantasy adventure didn’t really get much attention compared to the paranormal romance and I stumbled onto so many copyright infringements that it was terrifying. I’ve been told the second issue has been improved, but I think it’s really geared toward the teen audience. So the trend ones will do better. That’s just me though and I couldn’t really dive into other people’s work, which probably didn’t help.

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    • I joined Wattpad two years ago at the invitation of an author who wanted me to beta read his ongoing new book.
      While waiting between notifications from him, I explored and found quite a few young talented writers and helped them correct their ongoing works.
      But then my blog started climbing in popularity and I got (and still am) bogged down with it (NOT a complaint – just a fact).
      Someday, when I’m too old or out of touch to continue blogging, I’d like to get back and see what has happened to all those young writers and their works 😀

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      • That’s around the time I joined. A friend who teaches caught several students reading Wattpad stuff on their phones, so he told me about it. I wander back from time to time, but it felt like it took more dedication than I had to give.

        All social media seems to be falling to that current issue. I recently noticed that FB is terrible for promoting my books and most things require me to interact more than I write. So I’m starting to wonder what I can do in the promotion arena to keep some momentum going. I did look at Wattpad again and it fell by the wayside pretty quickly.

        Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if the really slow sales I see stems predominantly from me writing a lengthy series. The only other person I know who has a similar project does so much promotion that I wonder how they find time to write.

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    • I think you are right that Wattpad is currently geared towards a teen audience. However, like all things on the internet it will probably go through a popular phase with teens, I suspect next by those looking to use it for marketing and then (unless the site does something to maintain that youthful appeal) the membership will wane.

      If you write YA then I suspect the loss of teens there will be unfortunate. If you don’t then maybe you’ll find it becomes more a community of writers again as I’m told it once once during it’s origins.

      Right now I try to dedicate a bit of time in my AM to it just as I do to blogging and social media. I also do the same before bed. Each writer’s time available is obviously going to be different and we’re all at different points in our process. I think for those who are now focused on promoting a finished book – it’s a good tool. Also, I find it another fun writing outlet to break away from writing which I’ve (through my desire to be published) have labeled work. lol.

      Chris is right too. I notice in your next comment you mention marketing and the time it takes – for those who can afford it, having help with marketing seems the way to go. However, these days even traditionally published authors find themselves having to do the bulk of that work on their own. It’s daunting, especially if you can’t afford to hire help.

      My suggestion (for what it’s worth) is have a schedule and try your best to stick to it. Maybe Mondays you blog, Tuesdays you visit Wattpad and update there, dedicate no more than 30 minutes in the am and 30 minutes at night to social media each day and use schedulers for sending notices about new stuff on the blog or wattpad (but don’t spam!) And, of course, write something each day. Ideally this means I try to spend two hours a day on writing “work” … an hour actually writing projects and one hour on promotions and building a fan base.

      If two hours won’t work for you (maybe you only have one hour of free time each day) is half that. Your mileage will vary daily on social media and it’s value you for you will sometimes seem like none and other times worth it’s weight in gold. Be sure to note what gets you reaction and engagement. Post more of what works, less of what doesn’t. Play around with posting times (a scheduler like hootsuite can help with the social media postings – but again be careful of falling into the trap of being a spammer. It’s easy to do.)

      Engagement is about quality, not necessarily quantity. Take my reply here. It’s long, involved and ideally I hope it helps you or someone else. Will all my replies be this long? Probably not. I’ve got 20 minutes left in my morning now and a lot of stops to make. However, when I do comment I try to make sure it’s sincere and ideally people realize that about me.

      Wishing you all the best with your fantasy series, Windemere, Charles!

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      • Thanks for the reply. Timing is the issue for many people. In my situation, I can’t really do a schedule because I’m not the lone person around here. At the beginning, a schedule was easy because I only had one book out and very few people to interact with. So the distractions that came up were easily handled. Now I have 6 books, a lot of social media things to juggle, and the people around here who are still asking for me to drop what I do to help them. That’s created a situation where even that hour causes a ridiculous backlog. For example, I took 30 minutes to get my son ready for school, happy, and out to the bus. I came back to 20 emails that weren’t there before. So it does get rather daunting when you hit that certain level.

        I’ve found that I tend to get more out of the WordPress engagements too. Back when I did play around on Wattpad, I found that there was very little reciprocation. I would read a section and vote on it, but the other author would only reply with a pitch for the rest of the work. That really turned me off for a while. Yet I did see many authors (they were either paranormal romance or LGBT writers) getting a lot of back and forth. This is one of the reasons why I’ve pulled back and I’m using this year to evaluate what I’m doing in terms of social media. I’m on all the sites and I get nothing on most of them, so it makes me wonder if I should focus more on writing the next book than the marketing. After all, publishing the next volume seems to do a lot more for all of my books and social media sites than nearly everything else I do.

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          • It’s been working so far, but I’ve hit an odd stumbling block. I’m 6 books into my series with the 7th coming in March/April. It seems a lengthy series runs out of steam or the energy gets stretched across the books. So I have that ‘issue’ of them selling, but not at the same rate as before. It feels like foreign territory because most of the other authors I know do either stand-alones or smaller series.

            One question about Wattpad: Does it cause any trouble with the KDP Select exclusivity?

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