Why Wattpad Works

by Benjamin Sobieck, Editor

On Wattpad: @BenSobieck

Wattpad works because it makes it easy for readers to fall in love with your words.

I should not be writing this. When I joined Wattpad in 2015, I was skeptical. No, wait; that's not doing it justice. It was more than that. Try "suspicious." Post my stories for free? Why? What kind of scam is this?

I'd written what was some of my best work, or so I assumed, and put it up for sale using the usual self-publishing methods. Few readers cared. Even fewer picked up copies. Self-publishing, this panacea for jaded writers turned off by the typical grind, didn't work. The small presses I signed with weren't much better. The big, traditional publishers weren't answering the door. To be blunt, I was stuck, feeling hopeless and more than a little frustrated with myself, my writing, and the publishing game.

So I had every right to be cynical back in 2015. Soon after my meltdown, I read an article about a writing conference featuring a website out of Toronto called "Wattpad." The article detailed how writers post their works for free on Wattpad and then benefit from the readerships they build. Not "free*," not "free," and not even "free for a limited time." Just free. Free-free. As in, forever free, until the sun turns into a red giant and swallows the Earth or I delete the story from Wattpad, whichever comes first.

Were I not so thoroughly finished with the "normal" rules of the writing game, I would've given in to my skepticism. But at that point in time, listening to the digital crickets chirp — or maybe laugh — at the frozen response to my fiction, I had absolutely nothing to lose. I shelved my skepticism for the time being, posted a couple of works, and sat back to listen to the echo of my writer buds: "This is against the rules. You're not supposed to post your work for free." There were, of course, exceptions but none reserved for this "What-pad."

Like most rules about writing, this one was to be tossed into a meat grinder and scraped into a dog bowl. Posting those stories to Wattpad turned out to be the best decision I ever made. The reason is the same one that explains why Wattpad works. It's a simple reason, really, and brilliant. But like so many brilliant things, the apparent simplicity disguises the genius beneath. Wattpad works because it makes it easy for readers to fall in love with your words.

If you take nothing else away from this book — although I hope you take a lot more — let it be those sixteen words. Highlight them; memorize them; cut that sentence out of this book, and staple it to your forehead, whatever it takes. Because that same sense of panic and self-doubt that pushes your writing forward with questions like "How can I get better?" and "Am I good enough?" will also interrogate this decision to give your life's work away on this "Wattpad thing." And make no mistake: All writing is your life's work. The response is that same statement: Wattpad works because it makes it easy for readers to fall in love with your words.

It took me a solid year on Wattpad to learn that. I wasn't even floundering during that time. My reads on the site were going up, up, up. I understood that much, but I didn't grasp the meaning behind the metrics. What does one hundred thousand reads on a story mean to my larger writing career? Are four hundred thousand reads four times better than that? So many questions. The light bulb popped when that sixteen-word statement hit me. I wrote it down at the time, not even knowing it would end up in a book. To pull from Hemingway, it is the truest statement I can make about Wattpad, and that's why it's here.

How else can one explain the site's popularity? As of this writing, sixty-five million people visit Wattpad every month. That'd place it at number twenty-three on the list of the world's most populous countries. Wattpad didn't start out with sixty-five million users, though. The key is, again, in how Wattpad makes it easy for readers to fall in love with your words. The stories, from novels to short works to nonfiction to epic tomes, are available to read for free. It couldn't be easier to dive in. Go to Wattpad.com, or download the Wattpad app. Create a free account. Start reading. Were it any simpler, it would cease to exist in this particular corner of space-time. And speaking of laws of physics, here's one about the way people behave: They're like water. They'll pick low barriers over high barriers every time. With that in mind, sixty-five million seems low, not high.

Still, that's only part of the reason why Wattpad works. Were free content alone enough to build an online audience of readers in the tens of millions, I wouldn't be writing this. I'd be busy copy/ pasting public-domain phone books to my proprietary e-reading app. Readers need writers and vice versa, so Wattpad made the experience of writing as easy as the experience of reading. If...