Wattpad is a writer/reader platform, like a YouTube for stories. There are around 45 million users, so if you are a writer, looking for a home for your work – it could be right up your street.
I joined Wattpad in 2011 and since then I’ve posted 3 short stories, 2 novels and a collection of essays, and had over 2.4 million reads of my work. These are my top ten tips to starting out.
Have a read
The first thing I would recommend is something all writers are good at – grab a cuppa, put your feet up and enjoy a good read. There’s all sorts of stuff on there. The majority of the users are female teens, so there’s plenty YA. The Romance and Fantasy genres are strong but there’s also loads of other stuff such as Sci-Fi, Historical and Poetry. Hopefully there’ll be something that will float your boat. There’s an app if you like reading on your phone.
I am featured in an article in the “Lancashire Telegraph” today talking about my wattpad experience and the fact that I am currently searching for an agent to represent my new manuscript.
Lancashire is my home county in England the place where I grew up and blossomed into the adult you see before you today. In case you didn’t know Lancashire is famous for hot pot, flat caps and pigeons (see below).
News just in… The first draft of ‘Animal’ is now officially finished! Yey woopeedoo!
I have been faithfully uploading chapters every Monday for over a year and now the final chapter has been uploaded. It has been an incredible adventure and I was a bit sad when I posted the final words. However as with all good sagas, this story is far from done. In fact I like to call it the ‘end of the beginning’. Alas, this is a first draft, meaning – there are more drafts to go!
And let me tell you for the last three months I have been working on a most awesome re-write of this story. From my wattpad experiences I was able to know that the central idea is well loved by readers. So that gives me a huge starting point. And great characters sprung up from this ‘fly by the seat of my pants’ style of uploading a story. And yet – me being a planning sort of an author – I am now using this first draft as more like a springboard for a much more complex, advanced and developed final version.
This re-write is taking place in the coming months and I really can not wait for the end result as the whole thing excites me just to think of it! At that point I will be seeking official representation for my beloved ‘Animal’. Plus of course – not to forget – this is the first in the TRILOGY – yes, that’s right – there are two more books to go. So as you can see this really is the end of the beginning and the start of a lot more to come.
In total, to date (it continues to rise by the minute) there have been 691,939 reads, 19,429 votes and 2,910 comments on ‘Animal’
(a few images that evoke the feeling of the book, see more here on my Pinterest board)
I’ve been using wattpad for over 3 years now, I’ve written a book on there, published two short stories and am in the middle of my second book ‘Animal’. Here’s why I love wattpad.
1. Find an audience
This is numero uno. The first time I saw my first story on wattpad had ‘1 read’ I was out of this world excited. Before that it had been a real effort to get even my best friends to read my work plus they weren’t the exact person I wrote the book for – I write for younger people but until wattpad I didn’t really have many I could ask. With wattpad I have literally thousands, including nearly 8000 followers. I’ve now had over 800,000 reads and I receive messages, likes, comments and new followers every day. There are young people from across the globe writing to me to say how much they enjoy my writing and that alone is a glorious, brilliant thing.
2. Instills discipline
I have learned this through experience – wattpad readers need to be satiated regularly. They are not content for a one off – they want to receive regular updates or else they get super demanding or wander off. So I now religiously write a new chapter every single Monday, without fail come sun, rain or shine. This has meant at times writing the chapter at some ungodly hour through half closed eyes. However it means that no matter how tired or busy I am – I have to get to that computer and spend those hours writing. This is great and I can hardly even imagine now how people get out manuscripts without this constant pressure. As the weeks go by it begins to add up and a few months down the line, hey presto – you have a book.
3. Know your audience
I find that its not just about having an audience, its about knowing them. I talk directly to my readers – I know what other books they read, what music they like, even what their deepest darkest thoughts and feelings are in some cases. I care about and respect the people that read my work and that helps me to write the kind of stories that they genuinely want to read.
4. Gauge success
There is a great new tool on wattpad called ‘stats’ which allows the writer to see the statistics of every update – this means the likes, reads, comments are all available to see and it is incredibly insightful. I can see which types of scenes get more likes and which ones don’t. This helps. No one ever really tells a writer what to write. They decide and yet, knowing the work hits some sort of emotional button on the other side is certainly important for me, I like to know what my readers are enjoying.
5. Gain credibilty
I recently dipped my toe into the world of ‘proper’ publishing by submitting a manuscript of another book I wrote which isn’t published on wattpad. Through the conversations I’ve had with agents and publishers it has shown that they are seriously interested in digital presence. From what I can tell they look at the numbers in terms of followers and hits and they use that as some kind of proof that you are actually good, or at least appreciated by your ‘target audience’. I don’t really think in these terms whilst using wattpad – its more about connecting with readers but it has to be said that the incredible ‘platform’ one can build up on there does seem to give a boost to the offering.
I have two teenage rabbits called Peachy and Buttons, the two most adorable animals that ever lived. Quite contradictory little creatures: gentle yet naughty, quiet yet terrorising. Sweet and small yet able to decimate entire areas. Can’t wait to get them spayed, that’s supposed to settle it all down. They do make great writing companions though, even learning to jump up next to me whilst I work. Today whilst I wrote the new chapter for my book they were settling down for a wee stroke. Cute.
Last week my husband and I attended the Scottish Adventure Awards in Glasgow. We are both homebodies that prefer watching TV box sets with our bunnies running around our feet than flouncing around town however this particular awards evening we didn’t want to miss as it consisted of all the most adventurous people in Scotland under one roof.
Sure enough whilst there we met a guy who swam the entire circumference of the United Kingdom, another man who had just come back from an encounter with six lions and a partially blind guy who had climbed a mountain alone. My husband is the one into all the actual real life adventure stuff for instance, he was hanging off the side of a cliff filming a model in an evening gown last week.
I’m not really one for dangling from ropes or deep sea diving however I do love a bit of adventure in writing. The story I am developing on wattpad is currently becoming increasingly adventurous and my heroine is getting up to the kinds of things I would love to do. My theory is if I can’t do it in real life write about it and in many ways that is almost as good, and probably just as time consuming and hard work at times!
the guy with the yellow helmet? That’s my crazy husband.
My goodness I love the Greeks. Even studying them at school didn’t put me off, in fact I chose to study the Greeks when I got to sixth form college. We had a dusty, corduroy wearing teacher who knew everything about what the Greeks got up to. This was quite a rare thing to stumble upon in the further education field of Lancashire which wasn’t exactly Eton.
Regardless I found it way more fascinating than all that depressing World War II stuff we did in History, no – Classics was all about the art, the architecture, the pottery, the plays and of course the myths.
I still marvel at how they came up with them all, so perfect in their brevity and insight into the human condition, so thrilling to hear with their unexpected twists and turns. That’s not even to mention the characters, the heroes, the Gods, the Goddesses who are invariably huge and flamboyant, always ready for the most twisted of adventures. I’m definitely the kind of person that likes to imagine I’m somehow part of it and I most definitely like to draw inspiration from it.
Apparently I’m not the only young adult writer who likes to do so. Harry Potter is supposedly full of Greek references, there’s the whole Percy Jackson the Lightening Thief series which brings the Gods into the modern-day. Not to mention one of my favorites from Philip Pullman with the His Dark Materials Series.
Philip Pullman spent twelve years before publishing his first novel teaching Greek mythology by telling his students stories of the Gods and heroes including oral versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. This is what he says about this period in this life:
“the real beneficiary of all that storytelling wasn’t so much the audience as the storyteller. I’d chosen—for what I thought, and think still, were good educational reasons—to do something that, by a lucky chance, was the best possible training for me as a writer. To tell great stories over and over again, testing and refining the language and observing the reaction of the listeners and gradually improving the timing and the rhythm and the pace, was to undergo an apprenticeship that probably wasn’t very different, essentially, from the one that Homer himself underwent three thousand years ago.”
Wow. The classical references in his trilogy are clear – the name of the heroine Lyra for instance, comes from the Greek instrument the lyre and it is also the name of a small constellation which was shaped after the legendary poet Orpheus.
There’s also the Hunger Games which was openly inspired by the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur which tells of how in punishment for past deeds, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete where they were thrown in the Labyrinth and devoured by the monstrous Minotaur.
The idea for my first book Dovetail Diaries came straight from a Greek myth about the brother and sister God/Goddess team Apollo and Artemis. It’s a tale of jealousy about the one and only time Artemis ever fell in love.
I’d say I’m very thankful to my dusty old Classics teacher for introducing me to the intoxicating world of ancient myth and legend. For me the Greeks are now and probably always will be an endless source of fascination.
Quite a few people have expressed interest in the book trailer for ‘Dovetail Diaries’. I was asked yesterday by a girl on wattpad a few questions about it so I want to answer them here so others can see how it was done too. First of all I have to admit my secret weapon – my husband. He is a film producer who loves cinematography, he is well into his cameras – like, well into them and he knows how to make a good film. So that helps, obviously. Saying that in this day & age anyone could create a great trailer if they wanted to.
First of all we sat down and had a creative brainstorm on what we wanted to communicate. My husband has also read the book so he knew the mood and feel of it. We wanted to include a girl who would hint at the main the character, Amber. We also decided it would be simple and effective to use certain objects that we thought would be in her house – film those things and then put them all together in the film to create a certain mood and feel.
So we asked my young cousin to be the girl – she’s absolutely gorgeous & about the right age. Then we went to a sort of junk yard and got hold of some objects that we thought would be perfect for Amber. This took some searching for the right stuff but we didn’t spend much at all. We also used objects we already had around the house and I borrowed the china cup from my Mum!
Before the shoot we did what’s called a ‘shot list’ where we wrote down every shot and in what order. Then we took one morning to do the filming – just by clearing out a space in our house, inviting my cousin round and filming until we had all the shots on the shot list.
Music is an interesting one – did you ever notice how it can make or break a film? Especially something like a trailer. My husband found the music for this trailer – it is from a YouTube cellist called Jaeyoung Chong who makes the most beautiful music. My husband just wrote and asked to see if he would help and he agreed. The editing was done in Final Cut Pro but there are much cheaper and easier editing programs such as iMovie. In total I’d say the whole thing took about a day or a day and a half to do.
Here are the main tips I can think of:
– Look around to see who & what you already have that could contribute in some way
– Use locations that are easily accessible and free
– Gather together friends & family for a fun day of filming – make them cake if necessary
– You don’t have to have an expensive camera, it could be done on an iphone. This trailer was filmed on a Canon 7D, you may possibly have a friend who owns a good camera & could also be persuaded with cake to help out
– Plan to do the whole thing on a weekend or a few evenings so it doesn’t take up lots of writing time
– Use your powers as a writer to create an effective script/storyline for the trailer
– Don’t forget to direct the viewer at the end to the book – so they can easily read it
– Always ask permission to use someone’s music – they will probably say yes
I hope this helps and anyone who makes book trailers, please let me know I’d love to see them!
Well hello! I have been off the beaten track for a wee while creating the new universe of my next book which is cool, like really cool. I’m already in love with a few of the characters and I haven’t written the first chapter yet! There’s also been an explosion of interest for my first book ‘Dovetail Diaries’. The book was chosen months ago by the wattpad team to be Featured on the website once it was complete, they liked the story and thought it had potential.
So last Monday the book went onto the Featured list. Since then there’s been a humongous influx of interest. The number of reads has more than doubled. From about 46,000 to 103,000 and counting. People are adding it to their libraries every hour, votes and likes and comments are coming in on a steady stream. It’s almost too much to keep up with as I want to respond to everyone that takes the time to respond to the book. All I can say is it’s a lot of fun and I love the idea that all these people are reading the whole book and enjoying it.
G. S. Banks 