Have you heard of Wattpad?
Are you interested in finding an audience for your story? Or getting published somewhere along the way? Enjoy writing YA, sci-fi, or fantasy? (These are the dominant genres on the site). Or maybe just want to read some great, new fiction for free?
Wattpad might be the place for you.
I confess, when I heard about it a year or so ago, I didn’t know much about it. I’ve heard people call Wattpad the “YouTube of Writing.” Basically, you can upload your own writing (often serially, a chapter at a time) and let the readers find you. You can read other people’s work too and the community is uber-supportive of new writers. It’s free for users and free for writers. There’s nothing to buy or sell here. But ultimately, Wattpad is a social media site. The forums are alive and kicking, lots of back and forth conversations start over posted pieces, and the usual follower/followers paradigm exists.
So…how popular is Wattpad?
Wattpad enjoys 10 million readers per month, who collectively spend 2 billion minutes reading and networking on the site. Those numbers blow me away! I know many of my blogger friends from the last few years are enjoying success on Wattpad with hundreds of thousands of views of their books, like February Grace.
Has Wattpad ever led to publisher deals?
Yes. Here’s the story of author Brittany Geragotelis whose work received 15 million views on Wattpad before getting a deal with Simon and Schuster. And another story of a 17 year-old whose Random House deal followed 17 million views of her work on Wattpad. Wow!
There’s FanFunding!
Need money to make a particular project happen? Check out the vid here. Even with FanFunding, the stories are still free!
There are awards!
The Wattys are an annual award for some of the most popular fiction on the site.
Come read free excerpts of CONTROL on Wattpad!
So I’m excited to announce that I’ll be posting free sneak peeks of CONTROL on Wattpad! I’ll be posting five pages at a time, and I’ll be uploading more with every 50 reads+comments+votes! So if you haven’t had a chance to check out Wattpad, here’s some more incentive. 😉 The first pages of CONTROL go up Wednesday, October 16th. Check it out here!