Ever Heard Of Wattpadd?

During my recent visit to the London Book Fair I attended Ben Galley’s
workshop on social media. He suggested you not spread yourself too thin and to limit yourself to just a handful of social media platforms. His favourite five, in order of preference, were as follows:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Goodreads
• Wattpad

Okay, the first four came as no surprise but when it got to the fifth I wasn’t the only one to mutter “What what?”

Just Another Marketing Tool?

I approached it not without some disdain at first as it would mean learning to tame yet another marketing tool that would ultimately pinch more precious minutes from my writing time. Disdain, however, quickly turned to pleasant surprise.

It turned out that Wattpad is not just another social network spawned by Facebook. In fact it is a writers and readers platform. Writers are able to showcase their work to avid readers willing to discover and digest it.

It’s a good way for writers to get feedback direct from the horse’s mouth. It is a direct channel to the consumer/reader without going through the filtres and secondhand interpretations of the usual intermediates.

Publishing On Wattpad

The interface is amazingly intuitive and simply to use. Once you have signed up you can start publishing your work from a one-page short story to a full length novel. If you are publishing anything with a reasonable length it is worth doing it in installments.

For my short story Subterranean Peril, for example, I have displayed the fact that I will be adding new parts on Tuesdays and Fridays until completion. For a novel I plan to test on wattpadders I shall probably publish one chapter per week as the chapters are generally longer than the parts of my short story.

Wattpad Clubs

The best way to attract readers is to engage with the community both as writer and reader to get your face about. You can join various clubs but you can’t leave comments, though, until 3 days after joining. The idea of this delay is to encourage you to take time getting to know about the philosophy and how everything works.

I found this website interesting for publishing on Wattpad.

This Wattpad guide by an indie writer who has clocked up over 1M views is well worth reading too before you embark on your first publication.

Have you used WattPad either as a reader or writer? Do you have a favourite genre or indie author?

Check out Subterranean Peril on Wattpad