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Wattpad bridges the gap between the solitude of writing and the need to be everywhere at once online.
The best and worst thing about writing is that it’s a predominantly solitary pursuit. The best parts are those times when you’re alone with your ideas and everything clicks: A scene emerges from a blank page, and the world shuts off around you as you chase ideas from one chapter to the next. Sometimes we wonder if we’d be happier at home on the couch, watching Netflix, rather than stressing about a line of dialogue in a crowded coffee shop while your neighbor slurps his latte directly into your ear. But at the end of the day, there’s nothing else we’d rather be doing. This is what you’re meant to be doing. This is what you love.
The worst thing, on the other hand, is that writing isn’t wholly a solitary pursuit. You won’t get your book into the hands of potential readers by sitting alone in the coffee shop forever. You have to switch from writer mode to marketing-and-networking mode as you attempt to navigate the world of publishing.
This is where writing often feels the loneliest—the days you spend wandering the literary landscape in pursuit of a home for your writing. The long, sluggish slogs through agent queries or Writer’s Market. Checking and rechecking the submission guidelines at the literary mag where you sent your piece weeks ago, thinking surely you should have heard back by now, but they’ve been publishing pieces that are nowhere near as good as yours. The #PitMad sessions that seem to spring up around you on Twitter like lawn sprinklers you didn’t even know you were standing on. (Wait, are you on Twitter? Should you be? What is #PitMad? HELP!)
Perhaps even worse, once your writing does manage to make it out there into the world, no one seems to be reading it. After all those hours toiling on your manuscript, now you spend hours staring at Facebook and Twitter (ugh, there it is again) and maybe even Snapchat, thinking: How do I get people to notice me and read my work?
For some reason, having written the thing is not enough. Now you have to be as social media savvy as any teen. You have to be entertaining and charming online 24/7, in the hopes that someone will eventually click a link to read what you’ve written. Basically, your life is one big HOW: How do you do all the things it means to be a writer today, after the actual writing is done? And why does everyone else seem to be better at it than you?
Establishing yourself as a writer, finding success as a writer, is about connecting with others and participating in a community of people who want to read and engage with your work. That’s why most of us do it. We spend those hours alone with our writing, hoping that it might someday help us connect with other people.
But at the same time, the world of publishing is changing. The Internet! It’s a thing. Literary journals are less important. There are stories of tumblrs, Twitter accounts, and YouTube videos being turned into books or TV shows. It used to seem fairly straight forward—you write a book, get an agent, get published, and boom—you’re a writer. Maybe there’s an intermediate stage of pitching to magazines and lit journals. If at times it seems as likely as winning the lottery, at least there’s a logic, a process to it.
Now these writers are coming out of nowhere—kids, people in their twenties, people with mega book deals—with stories that started out as Harry Potter fanfiction. Successful writers are just as likely (if not more likely) to have cut their teeth on online forums you’ve never heard of as they are to have honed their talents at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There are so many ways to be a writer and so many paths to publication and success that it somehow feels more challenging than ever to know what to do.
You can’t just be a writer anymore, sitting alone in your kitchen, writing your book, waiting for agents and publishing houses to come calling. You need a social media presence and a blog, and you need to share different types of content across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It can be overwhelming, to say the least.
You understand, there’s only one J.K. Rowling, but is there no happy medium between J.K. Rowling and utter invisibility? You simply want readers, people who will read your writing, engage with it, and make this artistic journey you’re on feel slightly less lonely. That’s really what Wattpad does: It connects you with readers. It delivers your writing to an audience of engaged book lovers. The site takes the long, solitary journey of writing, editing, querying, publishing, and marketing and condenses it into a few simple button clicks. It’s not a long, lonely journey after all. Your readers are already there, waiting for you.
Wattpad connects people who want their stories to be read with people who want to read stories. That’s it. Open the app, and you can browse books by genre—everything from fantasy to horror to romance to paranormal to historical fiction and more. Scroll through the lists, and see what jumps out at you. Notice the covers that catch your eye; that’ll be important later. Browse stories with thousands, or millions, of reads. This is a thing that can happen? The heart fills with hope. Open a book, and you’ll see that the app is designed with the reader in mind. The stories are comfortable to navigate; the text is easy to read. Very quickly, reading on your phone feels completely natural and intuitive.
Posting your own story to Wattpad is almost as easy. If you’ve ever tried to publish a book in the Amazon Kindle store and are still experiencing PTSD as a result, relax: This is the opposite of that. All the technical stuff has been extracted and handled for you. All you do is sign up, fill out some profile information, enter your chapter title, write (or cut and paste) your chapter, and press “Publish.” In minutes your story is ready to be discovered by the platform’s sixty-five million users (as of this writing), who are hungry for stories just like yours.
But what truly distinguishes Wattpad from more traditional forms of publishing, whether it’s compared to books, e-books, or literary journals, is the way Wattpad enables readers to engage with your work and you as an author. Readers can comment on your story and let you know what they’re thinking, what emotions they’re experiencing, as they journey through your story. They can post questions, compliments, and encouragement on your profile, and they can share your story with their followers, both on Wattpad and on other social media platforms.
This may initially scare some writers. (Readers tell me their opinions of my work? And I should want to read them?) We’ve been taught, after all our travels across the Internet, to NEVER. READ. THE COMMENTS. But the community on Wattpad is different from the rest of the Internet, and the people at Wattpad work diligently to keep things safe, polite, and thoughtful. These are readers and book lovers, after all: They’re your people. The first time you get comments from engaged readers encouraging you to write faster and post the next chapter because they can’t wait to find out what happens, it’s like an incredible release of endorphins in your brain. You’re hooked.
And that’s you, building your fanbase. Wattpad connects you directly with readers and recommends your story to people who are likely to enjoy it. Your writing, the stuff you’ve been working on so hard, all alone, all those hours, finds an audience, and you start connecting with them. Your engagement gets them more excited about your work, and those readers have the tools, through Wattpad, to be advocates for you, telling their friends and social networks about your writing. Your readers become your fans, and fans are your biggest evangelists.
Some writers may be hesitant to publish a book online, outside of the traditional publishing process. Does doing so mean that you’re not a real writer or that you’ve given up on traditional publishing? Will it hurt your chances should you wish to pursue traditional publishing later? Not even remotely.
More and more publishers are looking for writers who not only have books but audiences. Publishers like a sure thing. They want writers who’ve already demonstrated that they can engage readers. More and more, the writers with passionate supporters have a better shot at traditional publication than the ones writing alone in coffee shops, with their social media on life support. There are many stories of writers who began their careers by posting their books on Wattpad and later saw those same books released by traditional publishers. For others, their success on the site has translated to opportunities in TV and movies. You’ll read more about them later in this book. Doors open for Wattpad writers that might never have appeared otherwise. The world of publishing is changing because Wattpad is changing it. Wattpad provides a bridge—a bridge from stories to readers and from writers to audiences. It takes you directly from the solitary idle of writing to the enthusiasm of a community of readers.
Wattpad is a place for reading and publishing, but it’s also a place for finding readers and developing an audience of fans. Wherever your writing takes you, they’re the ones who are going to support you, rally for you, and share about you on social media when the next big thing happens in your writing career. So let’s go. You’re not in this alone anymore.
Kevin Fanning has been publishing things on the Internet since 1998. He is the author of Kim Kardashian: Trapped In Her Own Game and its sequel, Kim Kardashian: #BreakTheGame. His story, “Taking Selfies and Overthrowing the Patriarchy with Kim Kardashian,” appeared in Imagines (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books, 2016). He lives in Massachusetts and can be found on Twitter at @kfan and on Wattpad at @kfxinfinity. For a complete list of his books, interviews, appearances, and other projects, visit kevinfanning.com.