So your book isn't being read as much as you want. You might even call it dead in the water.
Have no fear, I'm here to revive your deceased Wattpad novel! You can do away with the outdated guides - this one is for the Wattpad of 2021. I answer quest...
Here's a confession: When I first joined Wattpad, I assumed that readers magically appeared to read good books. If you wrote something well, with an eye towards pleasing an audience, then that audience would automatically find your book, and read it. Simple as that.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. It's a matter of attention. Wattpad can't display every book ever written on the site! There's half a billion story uploads! Imagine trying to scroll through half a billion stories, trying to find one that you want to read? You'd have to sort through all the incomplete stories, and spam uploads, and random crazy people ranting to themselves about conspiracies, and so on...
So instead, Wattpad sorts through those hundreds of millions of stories for you. It has a machine look for meaningful, well-written, and relevant stories, and offers them to you on a silver platter. How it determines what is meaningful and relevant is known as the algorithm.
We will be touching on this later, but for now, understand that algorithm is there to sort through an impossible list of choices, and offer you what it believes are the best picks.
Only, there's a caveat. Because the algorithm is looking for specific qualities in order to sort you from spam, or to offer your novel over another novel, if your stories don't have those qualities, the machine will overlook your story. Thankfully, I'm here to suggest the qualities that the algorithm is most likely to look for.
The Editor...
Unfortunately, machines aren't perfect, and not advanced enough to provide the best possible results for readers. So sometimes, Wattpad uses humans instead. These are either specialists at Wattpad HQ, or volunteer ambassadors, who comb through the endless piles of stories out there, and select ones they think readers will find the best.
They'll display these stories where you know a human has selected them; places like Editors' Picks, or Ambassador's reading lists, or In the Mood for Historical Fiction? on the front page. To get on these lists, you'll either have to be miraculously found among the slush piles, or be recommended by someone else, or apply for them yourself.
...and The Reader
The last, and most important element of Wattpad selectors is the reader themselves. At the end of the process, both the machine and the editors have narrowed down a list of choices for the reader, but its up to the reader themselves to decide, what do I want to read today?
Sometimes these are conscious decisions, like, Hey, I'm in the mood for something romantic! or, That cover looks tacky and cheap, I'm not going to read that. But in the vast majority of cases, the readers are making subconscious decisions about what to read. Maybe their eyes just get drawn to a particular cover. Maybe they just feel bored while reading a particular blurb. It's hard to know, thankfully, I have a pretty good idea of what they're looking for. And I'm going to share those secrets in the next chapter.
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