How to Rise From the Dead on Wattpad - A practical guide to getting noticed

Tip 1: Find the Right Tags

Tip 1 should actually be WRITE A GOOD STORY. If you need help with that, be sure to check out my other book, How to Write Stories People Will Love posted on my profile. (I'll put a link to it as a comment as well as an External Link for browser-users.) Without a good story, none of these tips will matter, so focus on that first.

Is your story ready for the public? Great! Let's begin with one of the basic things you need to address when setting up your story on Wattpad: tags. Tags act as keywords that people can search for when looking for stories. Book titles have the most importance in search results (this is why you see so many titles like "My Millionaire Quarterback Boyfriend") but if it doesn't contain keywords relevant to your story, tags can help.

Genre Tags

The first thing you'll want to do is add the names of the genres your book can belong to, like Fantasy, Romance, Adventure, etc. When the book starts getting enough activity to start ranking somewhere, genre tags help determine which hot list it goes on. (NOTE: This is true at the time of this writing. A couple years ago, the genre you chose during story setup was the category it showed up in, but then they switched to tag ranking instead. It could change again.)

This allows the story to belong to multiple genres. So if your story is a romance in space during an intergalactic race, you could add romance, sciencefiction, and adventure as your tags. I'm not sure if it matters, but use the exact wording of the genres listed in the Genre dropdown.

If the genre has two words, then smoosh the words together, like "sciencefiction". And then add another version separated by a dash, like "science-fiction". I have no idea if this helps, but it couldn't hurt. Only one-word tags are allowed (not phrases). You might also want to add both words separately, like "science" and "fiction" since people often search using spaces in their search phrase. Also include shorter versions of the genre name, like scifi.

Look at Tag Suggestions

If you type your tag in slowly, a dropdown will often appear with suggestions in it. These are tags that are already in use and likely being searched for by readers. If you see any that seem applicable to your story, select them.

Look at Similar Stories

Browse the genre you want to rank in. This is the "hot list", and the stories listed here have a lot of activity on them. Locate a story that looks similar to yours and click on it. Now click on "More" so you can see the entire story description. The tags used in that story should be listed below the description. Copy the tags that are relevant to your story.

Too Many Tags?

You are limited to 25 tags per story. It doesn't have a visual counter as you're adding tags, but you'll know when you hit the limit. You'll be unable to add more. If you have some good tags you want to use but have run out of space, I'd get rid of the tags with dashes in them. Most people don't search with dashes in their phrases.

To help you discover which phrases are more widely used than others, look at the popular book's tag rankings.

This lists how well the book is currently ranking with certain tags. The bigger the number on the right, the more books are using that tag. It's kind of pointless to use tags that no one is searching for, so if there are less than 100 books using a certain tag, you might want to skip that one.

Niche Tags

Popular tags might have more activity, but they are also harder to rank in. Don't discount the power of niche tags. If your story would be especially interesting to people who love penguins, then go ahead and add a penguins tag. Though few, niche followers can be extra loyal.

Trope Tags

A trope is a commonly occurring theme in stories. For example, "two single parents find love" or "villain finds redemption" or everyone's favorite: "good girl falls for bad boy". Most readers have particular tropes they love to read. Tropes often cross over various genres. You can have good space cadets falling for bad aliens. You can have two single parents solving a murder and finding love. This is why it might be helpful to put your popular trope into your tags.

I recently added a "slowburn" tag to Siena because, even though it's not a romance, it does have a romantic subplot going on that is a slow burn. Other examples of trope tags you can use:

badboy, goodgirl, singleparent, billionaire, alpha, lovetriangle, friendstolovers, newkid, romcom

Don't Mislead

The idea of tag selection is to help users find you, so don't start throwing popular yet irrelevant tags in there. I once saw a "how to be successful on Wattpad" book using the word "werewolf" as a tag. (It was not a popular book, so I don't think it worked in their favor.) This strategy is deceitful, so I don't recommend it.

FUN FACT: I totally forgot to add "nonfiction" as a tag to this book. I was pleased to see it already ranking on many of the tags I gave it, but wondered why not nonfiction? Well duh, would help if I added the tag. XD

Any of you have strategies for tagging your stories? Share them here!