Wattpad - A Cultural Artefact

What is Wattpad?

I have just spent three hours sitting in a school library and listening to the crowds of students socialising, doing assignments and using the printing machines. Less reading happens in what were traditionally silence spaces meant to be conducive to the solitary process of digesting codified printed texts. Yet, online on a platform called Wattpad.com, books and reading, albeit in electronic form, remain core. Wattpad has managed to redefine the entire world of written and visual storytelling by making it a more social experience with reading and writing as its essence. 

With Wattpad, readers can discover millions of eBooks on genres such as romance, adventure, historical fiction, etc (Click on the Browse button) and add them to their reading list. Not only that, but they can also follow their favourite writers, comment on texts, vote on chapters and get notified whenever some thing new published. Writers can create their own books on any subject, create suitable covers and publish them on their platform. Readers can message and start conversations with writers on public forums, or readers can choose to interact with one another and share thoughts on the stories they read. Online users join up with others to start their own writing contests, community groups around genres, fan fiction communities and be mentored by Wattpad stars. Users can send private messages and build online friendships. Readers and writers have the potential to co-construct texts in varying degrees.

Internet Matters (2020) has found that  "85% of Wattpad's 45 million-plus readers are between the ages of 13 and 30. 50% are under the age of 18. Wattpad has set a minimum age limit of 13, but the age limit is 17+ if downloading this via the Apple App Store and given a 'Parental guidance' notice via the Google Play store."  This age group from 13 to 18 who are high schoolers are the interest group of this book. The growth of Wattpad's spread as a platform has been largely due to the popularity of cell phone usage amongst adolescent and many of the social influences are similar to those described by Nurullah (2009) in her analysis of the cell phone.

Wattpad defines success for its community by highlighting the progress of its writers, not its readers, and this successful writer's journey as narrated in the online magazine Quartz is fairly typical.  The article traces the success of "She's With Me" written by Cunsolo from a Wattpad story to a television series produced by Sony Pictures TV.  The YA story has been read by 146 million Wattpad users. "That number doesn't include every time a user reads the full story. It counts only the times a user starts a chapter—essentially the literary equivalent of a YouTube view." (Epstein, 2021) 

Cunsolo's story is "quintessentially Wattpadian".  At 17, she started writing on the platform for fun, "discovering it through a friend". As a high school student, she had "no intention of writing a story that would later be adapted to television". Regularly and consistently, the teen "posted the story on Wattpad chapter by chapter, and probably would not have even finished it if not for the audience response". When she saw the votes, comments and reads increase she kept going. Her readers were "demanding more, so she obliged". Then.... "Wattpad staff found it, fostered it, believed in it, and pitched it to Sony." (Epstein, 2021). So success is defined here as taking a story from relative obscurity to a television series with a mass appeal and reach.

Yet, an alternative way of reading the same progression is as a journey from adolescence "toward an adult-like personality" (Kimstra, 2013). Cunsolo, as an adolescent at 17 years of age, was mainly interested in responding to her community of readers. Indeed, other "successful" teenagers tell the same story of starting out as writing stories they themselves would like to read and engaging with other peer readers. "Abigail Gibbs who wrote "Dinner with a Vampire", was probably not thinking of the six-figure advance from Harper Collins to turn her Wattpad story into a series of books. Similarly, Beth Reeks, a 15-year-old from Wales never imaged scoring a three-book deal with Random House U.S. for her young adult romance "The Kissing Booth" after it got 19 million reads on Wattpad". (Epstein, 2021)