Wattpad: One Author’s Review

In case you haven’t heard, Wattpad is a huge online community for amateur writers and their fans. Unlike other sites that focus on completed e-books, Wattpad features serialized stories, with many readers getting hooked on the first few chapters of an ongoing story and tuning in for new chapters when they drop. With over 70 million users spending 22 billion minutes a month reading content, Wattpad can be a great place to start telling a story and see if it has legs with a particular audience.

After a month on Wattpad, I’m hardly an expert, but I have a pretty decent idea what it’s about. From what I’ve observed, Wattpad is GREAT for:

• Stories targeted at Millennial and Gen Z readers
• Genres that tend to be popular with female readers (e.g. romance, fan fiction, anything with vampires or werewolves, stories with girl protagonists)
• Mature content

This mean the more boxes you check up above, the more successful you’re likely to be on Wattpad. It also means that if you’re writing a family-friendly medieval-themed adventure story, you’re probably not going to do well.

This doesn’t mean Wattpad is a bad fit for me, but my current WIP isn’t the right fit for Wattpad. There’s still plenty I can use Wattpad for as an author — it’s a large and highly engaged community, which has obvious pros, but also some cons. Some of the downsides of Wattpad are intertwined with its perks:

• It’s FREE! – Both readers and writers can create an account in minutes for no cost. There are paid tiers of content for more popular works, but you can access 90+% of the content for free. This means you can give it a try with very little risk — and potentially a big reward.
• Authors and readers can communicate directly – this is clearly a big perk for everyone involved: readers can actually interact with writers they like (and sometimes even have a say in where a storyline goes), while authors can get much more immediate feedback from their audience about what they like or don’t like in a work-in-progress. Like any community, it takes time to build an audience and make connections, so don’t expect to get tons of interaction until you invest time really reaching people (not just spamming them with “read my stuff!”).
• Anyone can publish – this encourages a wide variety of voices, including people who have never published anywhere else before. You can certainly discover hidden gems, but there’s a lot more low quality writing than you’d find in more selective outlets. I’m all for the democratization of creativity, but any open-to-all platform requires a level of discernment from its audience and self-promotion from its content providers. Sure, YouTube has some great stuff on it…but good grief is there a lot of garbage to weed through. Every kid wants to be a YouTuber, thinking they’ll be the next Mr. Beast. It takes a ton of work, a lot of great ideas, and yes, some luck, to be successful when you’re competing with everyone. Wattpad lowers the bar to allow many more voices reach potential audiences than could ever do so before. That’s awesome. Just know in advance that it’ll take a lot of work from everyone involved to create, promote, and find the best stuff for you.

So by all means give Wattpad a try. As a writer, it’s a great place to get your feet wet, discover avid readers, and maybe even connect with fellow authors in this typically isolated field of work. As a reader, it’s like a potluck of free writing from countless authors across all genres. Just like a real potluck, be mindful: everyone’s tastes are different, so try a little bit of everything before you decide what to dig in to. If something was bad for you, there’s a polite way to let someone know you didn’t enjoy their dish. And if you liked something, it’s always nice to let that person know you appreciated what they brought to the table.