The Wattpad Experiment

day 6 - shook

I only woke up at around 11 am, and didn't check the account for another two hours. So imagine my surprise when I checked my account to see that I had 63 followers, but get this 103 reads! What absolute fantastic progress - I was 10% of the way to getting 1,000 reads and it was only day 6. I do have to admit that on day 3 I was getting severely worried that this challenge would massively backfire and that I wouldn't succeed at all but this had given me hope that all was not lost.

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It had only been a few hours since I had checked the account, but there had been exciting news. I had a new active reader! Seeing new comments and votes coming in really validated my work, and I felt a lot more comfortable with the book. At least I knew that people liked it.

It is very important to be nice to people if they do something nice like helping out a new writer, and so I made sure to be extra extra polite and sweet to people in order to make a good first impression. I cannot stress how important it is to engage with your readers, they are more likely to stay with you if you acknowledge them.

I had come to realise over the first week of this challenge that being nice to people does pay off. If you engage with other people's books, more people are likely to engage back. As well as this, I had learnt the importance of posting regularly. I didn't have enough time to only be posting once a week, I needed to be posting everyday which actually didn't turn out to be as hard as I thought it would be due to the fact that I got so excited writing the book. It practically wrote itself.

This day alone I wrote the next six chapters, meaning I had practically a week's worth of chapters to post. I was on a roll. Checking my reads for the final time this day, I was shocked at how much they had grown compared to the previous days. It wasn't just the reads that had increased, but the votes and comments as well which made me incredibly happy. I guess things can only get better from here.

Statistics at the end of day six:

135 reads

71 followers

Lesson learnt: The more chapters you have, the more your reads will grow. Find something that you genuinely cannot stop writing, and then you'll have to stop yourself from updating more than once a day.