Writing is often an isolating, frustrating experience. An enormous weight is lifted when that final draft is complete and you send it out into the world. But that terminus is the origin of a whole new struggle: finding an audience for your story. Bridging the awareness gap is the most difficult hurdle to clear, and, for me, Wattpad has been indispensable in that battle. It also provided me with important data I would have otherwise missed. There are two types of readers I was surprised to find were fans of my Johnlock future AU stories — middle-aged super hardcore Sherlockians who know the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories almost by heart and teenagers who have never consumed any other Sherlock Holmes media (never read a book, watched BBC Sherlock or seen a film).
Wattpad is the Only Social Media Platform for Readers and Writers That is at Scale
Wattpad has 45 million unique monthly users who are ALL looking for something to read. They’re not looking for cat videos or gif sets or fan art. They’re looking for books. It is incredibly difficult for writing to get attention on sites where videos and images can also be posted. Reading takes more attention, more time, more focus, and most social media sites are optimised for shorter, snackable content. Everyone knows figuring out social media is the key to getting any marketing campaign off the ground, but so many writers aren’t on the only social media platform designed to showcase their work and provide a way to connect with their readers about their writing and only their writing. The focus of Wattpad cuts out the competition from other forms of media and puts you in a position to compete against only other books. In the noisy, ever-churning world of non-stop social media activity that is already a small victory.
Another victory is the ability to gather critical mass as your story gets read, voted on and shared. The more people interact with your story, the more it gets recommended by Wattpad’s algorithm, and the more people interact with it. Wattpad is an incredibly crowded, competitive space, but the algorithm makes small wins multipliable in ways they just aren’t on most other fanfiction platforms.
Wattpad understands the importance of other social media platforms, and on top of sharing to most of them, you can integrate YouTube videos into your stories and create quote cards like the one below for your stories to post on Instagram, etc.
Source: The Aglet
