A Writer's Guide To Wattpad

Tip #1: Share Your Story

This is by far the easiest, simplest, and most well known way to promote your story. Simply share it with others!

The easiest way to do this is through the pinned discussion in the clubs, titled Share Your Story. You're allowed one post per week, and it's a great way to advertise. It's like a little community bulletin board you see at grocery stores.

I use this method, but it's not one of the best ones. There are many pros and cons to this method.

Cons:

- There are just so many works out there. In one week, sometimes there will be as many as 10 pages of works. This doesn't mean 250 works, but 250 authors, some with as many as 5 works in one post! Your story can easily get buried.

- People go to the share your story thread to share their stories. The majority of website users are writers. Many readers stick to the app. Posting there doesn't guarantee anyone will read it.

- If you're a minority, you're out of luck. For example, if you're a fanfiction writer, and you go to post a Fall Out Boy fanfiction, you will be posting under the Share a celebrity or music fiction here thread. This means that you will be one of maybe 5 people not posting a One Direction or 5 Seconds Of Summer fanfiction. If anyone is going to the thread to pick a story to read, they're probably reading one of those.

- Meanwhile, if you're in the majority, there's a billion stories like yours. They're probably going to pick one on the first page. This means you have to be fast. It's refreshed once a week, so try to post on the day that it is refreshed!

Pros:

- It's a great place to start if you don't know where else to.

- Some writers may post there, and then see a story relating to their fandom, and just click on it.

- If you're in the minority, you're going to stand out. a simple control + F search of Justin Timberlake may take you to the only Justin Timberlake fanfiction in that thread, and it's yours!

To me, it's not my number one greatest method to use. However, it's one of the only ways to directly promote your story on wattpad. Also, what's the harm in doing so? It takes hardly a second to copy and paste your ad into a comment and send it. 

Here's a little guideline on how to format a simple ad:

- Put a picture of your cover. Upload the cover to photobucket, and do a quick google search of how to use html to put a picture in a post.

- Write the title of the story. It's good to do this in all caps, bold font, etc. Again, you can use html to make the font size bigger and stand out more.

- Include the genre and/or tags. This is great because people may go and do a quick search of the page for a key word such as vampire.

- Include the link to your story. How else are people going to get to it?

- Finally, include your description. There will be a later tip about how to make a great description. For now, a good tip is to keep it simple, letting people know what it's about without giving too much away.

Basic html codes:

Just remove the *s.

Bold: <*b*> Your text here <*/b*>

Italics: <*i*> Your text here <*/i*>

Underline: <*u*> Your text here <*/u*>

Align to center: <*center*> Your text here <*/center*>

Adding a picture: <*img src="URl of picture">

For more coding, my favorite website to go to is http://www.w3schools.com/html. It will give you tons of different codes to use, and even has a place for you to test them out.

I hope this tip has helped! If you'd like to request how to do something, feel free! Stay tuned for more tips!