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To drive book sales from Wattpad, forget sounding like a salesperson and load up on … hummus?
Wattpad is a powerful tool for writers to turbocharge book sales. I started out as an amateur Wattpad storyteller in 2013 and climbed my way to a thriving career as a full-time author four years later. My young adult debut novel, Follow Me Back (Sourcebooks, June 2017), and the sequel, Tell Me No Lies (Sourcebooks, June 2018), both began as Wattpad stories before snagging a traditional book deal in North America, with translated editions selling in more than ten other territories. Meanwhile, my Wattpad new adult romance, It’s Only Temporary (Hachette, August 2017), was released in audiobook format around the same time.
I consider my Wattpad presence the most important weapon in my book-marketing arsenal, but it’s not some magic money-making machine. Over the course of my debut year, I learned a ton about what works—and what doesn’t—when attempting to translate Wattpad reads and votes into book sales. In this chapter, I’ll share my four key rules.
First and foremost, writers must approach Wattpad as a place to share stories and engage with a community of readers. Sales are a side benefit, not the primary goal. As a writer, you must always bear in mind that your readers joined Wattpad for two reasons: to access stories for free and to share their own stories with others. A large segment of Wattpadders have no interest in paying for content, and they may face barriers that prevent them from buying books. Many are teenagers who don’t have credit cards. Others are from parts of the world with limited access to bookstores, libraries, and retail websites.
For writers selling published work, these readers still have tremendous value. They hold the power to make your work stand out in a sea of books. Every set of eyeballs can increase a story’s popularity and its likelihood of being discovered by other readers, some of whom will have purchasing power. For this reason, every Wattpad reader should be viewed not as a potential sales lead but as a potential member of your marketing team, helping to extend your story’s reach.
With that philosophy in mind, let’s get down to business. There’s one particular marketing tactic I see on Wattpad all the time, and it’s always a recipe for failure. In fact, I see this mistake so often that I consider it my second key rule.
This rule may come as a surprise to seasoned authors. Teasing with an excerpt is Book Marketing 101, right? Give away the first chapter for free, hook the reader, and then use a call-to-action to close the sale. This book-marketing tactic works like a charm on retail websites, where potential customers can “Look Inside” virtual pages of a printed book or download sample chapters from an e-book. So why doesn’t it work on Wattpad?
To answer that question, let’s take a step back from the book business and consider an analogy. Think of your book excerpt on a retail website like a salesperson giving away free samples of hummus at the neighborhood grocery store. It works in the store. Not everyone who takes a sample will turn into a paying customer, but no one will find it strange to see you standing there hawking your wares.
Now imagine you’re at a friend’s house, attempting to sell your hummus to the guests at a potluck dinner party. There you stand with your little plastic sample cups, flanked on all sides by an array of homemade casserole dishes. (Are you cringing at the awkwardness yet? You should be.) Many other people at the party have brought their own dish to share. If you offer them a tiny helping of hummus and ask them to pay for a full dollop, they won’t whip out their wallets. More likely than not, they’ll give you a dirty look and move on to the full-sized dishes being offered all around you.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, if you want to sell hummus at a potluck party, you have to plunk down a whole vat of the stuff and let the guests help themselves to an unlimited portion. Let them rave to their friends about how delicious your hummus tastes, until a whole gaggle of partygoers have gathered by your dish. Then stand around, and make small talk. Try the other dishes. Exchange cooking tips. Once you’ve established a rapport, tell the story of how your homemade hummus was recently discovered by some gourmet food packager—and now it’s available for sale at the local grocery store.
“Amazing! I’m so happy for you,” your new friends will say. They won’t buy any hummus at the party. They probably didn’t even bring their wallets. But a few of those partygoers might find themselves in the market for hummus sometime soon. When they see the refrigerator case packed with twenty different brands, yours will be the one they put in their cart.
The same concept applies when selling books on Wattpad. Don’t offer a tiny sample. Share a complete book, and give it away without so much as a whisper of money changing hands. Once that story has found a large audience, then offer a related published product available for purchase. Package it professionally, and make it available in stores where your Wattpad readers shop. Then, the next time your readers are in the market for a book, yours may be the one they recognize and buy.
“But wait!” I hear the naysayers shouting. “There’s a big difference between hummus and books! You can eat your fill of hummus and still be hungry the next day. But a story, once read, has already been experienced. Why would anyone shell out money for a book they read for free?”
This is a valid concern. Whether you’re self-publishing or working with a traditional publisher, there is a second ingredient your “hummus” must contain. The book you make available for purchase needs to have some added value beyond the version you posted online. There are various ways to accomplish that task, and I’ve experimented with a few of them. I’ll share three techniques and how they each applied to my own portfolio of work.
Make your completed Wattpad story available for purchase in a different format.
Works best for:
Sometimes a Wattpad story breaks through and achieves mass popularity. If you browse the list of books in huge genres like romance or teen fiction, you’ll see plenty of read counts in the tens of millions. I found myself in the enviable position of writing one such book with my new adult (NA) romance, It’s Only Temporary.
In Fall 2015, the story trended up on the romance Hot List, bringing in a whirlwind of new readers. It’s Only Temporary soon leapfrogged all my other works to become my most-read Wattpad book. As thousands of reader comments accumulated, I noticed a trend: A growing legion of devoted fans came back to reread the complete story over and over again.
The opportunity to publish was staring me in the face, but I had a problem. I had a freshly minted book deal on a totally different book, and I couldn’t commit the time to work on both projects at once. My answer came along when Hachette announced a new line of Wattpad sourced audiobooks. With a deal from Hachette, I spent a few days on a single round of copyediting before the publisher produced the book in audio format only. The final product was the exact same story that my Wattpad readers knew and loved but with a professional narrator bringing my words and characters to life.
The audiobook format created a new product with added value for my fans who had already reread the Wattpad version multiple times. The same idea could be accomplished in print form simply by hiring a professional cover designer and putting out a self-published collector’s edition, available on a print-on-demand basis. Such a product might only appeal to a small fraction of the story’s Wattpad audience—but with a large audience, a tiny fraction can add up to a steady stream of sales.
Flesh out your completed Wattpad story with substantial additional content in a for-purchase version.
Works best for:
What about a story that isn’t mega popular? If you find yourself with a read count in the thousands, don’t despair. You can still use Wattpad to launch a published version, but you’ll need to roll up your sleeves and do some work.
My teen thriller, Follow Me Back, originally gained popularity in the Wattpad mystery/thriller genre. It trended to the No. 1 spot on the Hot List in early 2015, but success in mystery/thriller translated to a much smaller read count than a popular story in romance. With under a million reads, I knew I needed to do more than simply repackage it in a different format.
As soon as I completed the Wattpad version, I embarked on a time-intensive off line editing process. I took my 65,000-word Wattpad draft, added 25,000 words of new scenes and then cut the whole thing down to a tightly paced 70,000-word final package. The project took multiple rounds and months of work, but the end result had ten chapters of added material that never appeared on Wattpad. When Sourcebooks released the book in 2017, I had no problem creating demand for the published version. My original Wattpad draft still provided a complete and satisfying story for online readers, but the added chapters gave fans a tantalizing reason to buy the paperback or e-book. Combined with an attractive new cover and an affordable price point, I had all the ingredients in place for a successful book release.
Post a complete spin-off novel, novella, or short story that features the same characters and world as your for-purchase novel.
Works best for:
My experience above can work for any writer, self- or traditionally published, who is willing to put in the time and effort. Problems can sometimes arise, however, when traditional publishers are involved. Some publishers require authors to take down their Wattpad version before a book hits the market, for fear that the free story will cannibalize sales. If you find yourself in that position (and the publisher doesn’t respond to your long-winded story about hummus salesmanship), there is one other strategy you can try.
In my case, I found myself with some free time in October 2016, nine months before Follow Me Back was slated for release. With Halloween around the corner, I had an idea for a scary spin-off story that would be set in the same world but focused on a minor character. I spent two weeks churning out a 10,000-word short story titled Whatever You Do, Don’t Read This. I posted it in the horror genre, and I included an author’s note explaining how it related to my forthcoming novel.
This spin-off story gave Wattpad horror readers a bite-sized free sample of my writing without the perils of posting an excerpt. Did the story result in any sales of my published book? I have no idea! It certainly didn’t hurt my sales, and it may have introduced my work to some new fans.
Whichever option you choose, you will eventually have a product available for sale, and you’ll have to ask your Wattpad readers to buy it. Tread carefully. Always remember that the readers on the other side of the screen view you not as a salesperson but as a peer.
Let’s return to the potluck dinner party. You’ve laid out your hummus, and it’s a hit with the crowd. The partygoers have wiped the platter clean, and they’re clamoring for more. Now you need to let them know about the store-bought version coming to a supermarket near them.
If you jump straight into a sales pitch, your audience will drift away in search of better small talk. Instead, tell the crowd a story. Share how your product came to be—how a self-taught home chef made it in the competitive hummus-making business. Was it hard? Were there obstacles to overcome? How did you feel when you realized your lifelong dream of professional hummus-making had come true?
In Wattpad terms, don’t just announce that your book is coming out. Tell your readers the story of how it happened. Let them feel like a part of your publishing journey, and thank them for the reads, votes, and comments that helped bring your publishing goals to fruition.
Once your readers know about your book, the next step is to build excitement. Don’t drop an announcement the day the book goes on sale. Make your readers wait, and give them a reason to buzz with anticipation. A preorder campaign can work well in the two months prior to publication as long as you keep it lighthearted and entertaining. For Follow Me Back, I created a raffle with a prize package of inexpensive items that “belonged” to my fictional main characters. The grand prize cost me less than twenty dollars, but it felt both meaningful and humorous to Wattpad readers who knew my characters almost as well as I did.
Chatty storytelling posts and preorder campaigns are both good ways to communicate with readers in the weeks leading up to the release date. While your audience is waiting and brimming with excitement, you can harness their enthusiasm to spread the word about your book far and wide. Marketing ideas that work well for this purpose include giveaway contests to win advance copies of the book and fanfiction/fan-art contests. In both cases, readers must share content about your book on their own Wattpad accounts or other social media in order to be eligible for a prize.
Whatever else you do, the most important component of your marketing plan should always be fun. Stay engaged with your readers. Write more stories. Hold chat sessions. Respond to messages and comments. Get to know your readers on a personal level, and let them truly know you in return. Your Wattpad readers come from an incredibly vibrant and enthusiastic community. If you embrace them, they’ll love nothing more than seeing one of their own succeed.
A.V. Geiger is followed by hundreds of thousands of readers on Wattpad, where she writes contemporary fiction under the username @adam_and_jane. Her debut novel, Follow Me Back, was an international sensation in summer 2017. The sequel, Tell Me No Lies, was released in June 2018. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and twin boys.