My own resources and realizations regarding writing, and getting what you want across to the readers.
It's not a tutorial on writing beginnings, endings or plot themselves , but the little things in writing that go beyond matters of English skills.
I've always redirected people to Wattpad community whenever they asked how to become more popular or get their stories seen, but seeing how Wattpad community has been taken down, I thought I'd write these things down in a chapter for reference.
No matter how good or bad your writing is, being discovered depends on knowing how the Wattpad algorithm works so you can get higher ranks to get discovered. Especially seeing as the Wattpad searching algorithms are subpar in relevance, new or all time popularity.
Thus the first thing to note is this:
1. Wattpad determines your rank taking the last week into consideration.
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With what I estimate, each day during the week isn't equally important either, with newer days holding more importance.
Posting new chapters does boost your story's rank regardless of the readers. This is important to keep in mind.
This all means that your rank will increase right after posting a chapter, and then decrease a couple places over the following week, before likely dropping more drastically if it goes beyond a week. New readers discovering your piece can create a buffer to keep your story afloat, but if you're working on getting a higher rank, then you want to use those boosts to get a higher rank.
What does this mean in practice?
It means that posting once a week will keep you at the rank you currently have, with only new reader discoveries boosting your score.
If you want to have a higher ranking then you should post twice a week.
2. Chapter lengths
Wattpad is not a book. While there is a bookmark function in Wattpad marking how far you've gotten, it doesn't give the same effect as an actual bookmark. This also means that people generally aren't that fond of extremely long chapters.
The approximately ideal chapter size for Wattpad chapters is 1500-2500 words.
This is long enough to make the reader not feel cheated, get into the story and not get tired before they get to the natural stopping point that is a new chapter.
Going above or below this once in a while is fine, but if you're around 4k+ words you should consider if it's possible to split the chapter into two. This means finding a good cliffhanger point in your chapter. As much as people whine over cliffhangers it also keeps them excited (;
Both for your ranking score and reader focus, don't make Wattpad chapters as long as book chapters.
3. Prewriting and Consistency
Let's be honest. There's a certain charm to posting a newly written chapter immediately to see people's reactions, but we also know that a writing block will eventually come crawling along with life problems.
