Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Etiquette - How to be Nice on Wattpad

For Writers: 

Every writer should thank anyone who sends you a comment or adds you as a follow. You can write on their wall, private message (pm) them, or just respond to the comment directly. If you are ambitious, you can return the favor and comment on one of their stories. This may cause them to come back and read more of your story in return. Engaging writers in discussions about their story is a good way to make friends and long time followers. 

You should always respect your critics. Thank them for their advice, and for god sake's avoid arguing with them. Even if they are rude or boneheaded (more next), that doesn't mean you should get defensive. As soon as you put your work out for criticism, you need to be able to accept criticism. Your work isn't perfect. Mine isn't perfect. Even professionally published works aren't perfect. Nobody is above criticism... especially if you ask for it. Mind you, when I say "don't argue", I'm not saying you can't explain what you did, but avoid being defensive, and definitely avoid trying to guilt a critic. 

You should also appreciate your readers. They have no obligation to star you, to comment, or to do anything. You put your work out there, and they read it, that's as far as it goes. Avoid complaining you don't have stars and comments. Most people won't give you either. Just appreciate that they looked at your work. And honestly, if you have a five to six chapter book and someone reads the last chapter, chances are they read the ones before it, and you should just be appreciative someone read through the whole thing.

For Readers:

You know what I just said to the writers. Now promptly ignore it. You should be starring and commenting on every chapter you read. If you can only say bad things about it, then you should ad constructive criticism to help them grow. You owe it to them to say something. They wrote that, they care about that, and you have no clue how much it means to them when you say something.

No, don't look at that other paragraph above For Readers-, That's not important to you. You are a reader on Wattpad, and you got free entertainment through the hard work of someone else, who most likely spent ten times as long writing it as you spent reading it. Give them some kind of boon. Commenting and stars are the life blood on here. People must continually get comments and stars for their work to be acknowledged.

That means you should keep starring and commenting on every chapter. This gets their work more noticed, it brings more traffic, and thus lets more people read it. So even if you don't care about the writer, who is often a young person with their sense of self-worth already low and their need for compliments and justification high, if you actually like the work, you owe it to other readers to help it get noticed, so other people can get the same free enjoyment you had.

Just, when you comment, like I said before, engage them. Ask questions, try to fill in gaps, get to know the author and open dialogue with them. Don't post "great!" then say nothing else.

For Critics:

Don't lie, you aren't doing this because you love writing and you want to help others get better. You're doing this for the payment. Most of you are at least. How do I know this? Probably because when I'm on the asking end of critiques, the critique I give people tend to be better than the critiques they give me.

It's against the rules to beg for stars and reads for your book, even when trading for critiques. There is a grey area when it comes to critique in exchange for critique. However, if all you want is someone to critique your work, and you're willing to give them one in return... do that. Don't act all high and mighty, like you are some great critic, when all you writing is a half paragraph of crap. That's not critiquing, that's doing the bare minimum to trick someone into critiquing your work.

And half the people in the forums who look for critiques not only demand payments and deliver crud in return, but they often demand more payment than they are willing to give. I've seen people demand follows, critiques on multiple chapters, dedications, just for their measly paragraph that often lies to make the writer feel better.

Now, I'm an advocate of politeness. You should be nice and polite to people. You should tell them positive things and things you like in the story. You should not just tell them it's great and not move on.

Also, and if you read my critiquing 101 you'll see more of this, you are not an editor. Don't edit my work. You are there to comment on plot, setting, emotions, feelings, structure, and how the book flows. Don't tell me that in paragraph three, page 2, I used there instead of their. How does that help anyone be a better writer? It's a cop out, especially when that's the only criticism you offer the work.

Sorry, but decent critics on Wattpad are hard to find. I hope a lot of you take note of this and try to do better. I will be writing more aids to help people critique in the near future on top of critiquing 101.

For Editors:

Obviously, editors should be polite. You should have a method to perform your editing already set up, and you should make it clear how you plan to edit their work. Do you exchange emails, use google docs, or just make 150 comments? Your customers should know this. The one thing I think editors really need to start doing that they don't already is tell us what grade level your skill is. On various points, I've run into people who could barely edit anything. They miss some of the most grade school stuff. I literally took something that had went through two separate editors, pasted it into word, and word caught dozens of spelling errors. Try to let that sink in, Word was a better editor than some of the people on Wattpad.

Don't try to fluff your ego, just be honest with what your skill level is and what you can handle, it will make things easier for everyone involved.On that note, I'd say it'd be a good idea for critics to be honest about the level of sophistication they can provide to a critique too.