Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Tag Your Story 101

Since Wattpad has changed, selecting appropriate tags for your book have become more important than ever. However, tags don't just exist for Wattpad. They exist everywhere, and whether you're building a website, launching a blog, or releasing a book... getting your tags right can be the difference between popular content and nothing.

However, despite the relative importance the internet seems to put on tags, whenever you look up "how" to select tags that are relevant and useful, the answer seems to be to just do it. The internet treats selecting tags like a given innate talent of every internet content creator. I've grown to the point where unless I'm absolutely forced to, I tend to avoid tags in my books. I KNOW this causes me to lose readers. I KNOW I could be doing better. Yet, despite that, tags are just way too much of a pain in the ass, and I don't want to.

So, to encourage myself to start caring about tags, I've decided to create a little guide. I'll be using the same principles often used when trying to pick meta tags (those are tags websites use for google search) and youtube tags. So, if you're having problems coming up with tags, here is what you need to do!

Create a Blurb

The first batch of tags you select should come from your description of your book. Therefore, having a well-written blurb is important. Before you do anything like picking tags, you need to be able to explain what your novel is about. This can be harder said than done. I have other chapters in this book explaining how to do so. In them, I recommend narrowing your story down. At the end of the day, you should be able to describe your entire book in a single sentence.

That sentence is the theme/goal/intent of your book, and it's very important both for writing the book and for writing a decent blurb for the book. You'll find it's also very important for the Tags you want to write. If you can't even explain what your book is about, how can you expect people interested in what your book is about to find it?

Once you have a blurb, refine it to the handful of words that have the greatest meaning overall to your book. These should include the genre and the keywords to the description of your book. You should pick keywords in a branching pattern, picking the highest order words, and then slowly breaking down your work into my specificity.

What do I mean? Well, remember my chapter on describing your book? I told you not just to describe your chapter based on genre, but to be more and more specific. Let's pick an example you're probably familiar with, Harry Potter. How would you define Harry Potter? You'd first think perhaps of the genre. Fantasy... Young Adult... Maybe you can add in Urban or Contemporary if you wanted. Then, you start selecting tags that add more specificity to it. Magic. Highschool. Then you break down into the more specific tags. Male protagonist. Hero. Ghosts.

Do you notice what words I'm not picking? Muggle. Voldemort. Hufflepuff. Now, if you were trying to sell a copy of Harry Potter, these identifiable words would do you well. However, when you're trying to get people to read your book, a book I presume to be not world popular and well known, things like made-up names, character names, locations.... These are NOT things that someone would every use to search for your book. It may be a convenience for you to write in the search engine "Muggle" to quickly find a Harry Potter book... but unless people are as familiar with your book as Harry Potter, they're never going to google the word huyman... the made-up name for the human race in your alternative timeline.

Keeping an idea on the order of your tags is important, that's why your next step is to focus on making sure you know which tags belong in which categories.

Sort Your Tags By Group

Broad-Spectrum Tags are genre and all-encompassing tags. They are the tags that describe your book in general. A Supernatural Romance for Teens. Supernatural, Romance and Teen would all be considered broad-spectrum tags. They catch your book in its entirety, but ultimately don't inform about the specifics of your book in the slightest. There is any number of supernatural teen romances, from my very own "Bad Boys of Fairmont High" sold on Amazon (formerly Hawtness), to Twilight, to the shape of water. These spectrums are very useful in catching a lot of readers, and having a good 4-5 of them will help narrow down what people are looking for while casting a wide web.