Wattpad – My Experience So Far
It took some time for me to choose the main social platform I was going to use to promote my brand, and in the end I decided for Twitter and Facebook first, added Wattpad later (tried Reddit, tried Inkitt, no good results).
Facebook and Twitter are a must, even if you don’t use them, you must be present, and share some stuff if you want to build your brand. But what about specialized platforms like Wattpad?
It has only 60+ million users, but they are all there to read, so if you are looking for readers, there’s nothing better! Moreover, people will look for your books using keywords and search phrases: your new chapter will not be lost in a sea of advertising of different products and services, as it in on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube…
You have the possibility to personalize your author’s profile to some extent, with links to your website or social platform. It allows you to use tags to make your book easily searchable.
Statistics by age, gender and country, allow you to understand better which is the target of your writing, and use this information for other platforms or to make a better segmentation of your potential users base.
But there is a catch
While Wattpad is a good place to do some self-promotion and gain followers (that you can later notify about new chapters, or even message them when you release your next book on Amazon 😉 ), it has its problems.
First: plagiarism. There are lots of stolen books, and you risk your book to be stolen, too. My suggestion is to either publish only parts of your books (that make sense as a whole, of course) and later the whole book on Amazon if you plan to sell it, or just short stories you’ll unlikely sell.
There are lot of users copying smut from sites like Literotica, for instance, and getting millions of views. I always notify them to the admins, they have never removed those books.
Second: there are 400 millions of books, there. A very high competition.
Third: 85% of readers are Millenials, and it’s not easy to sell to Millenials. As far as my experience goes, they come to Wattpad looking for smut. They enjoy it, they give a like, maybe a comment, they follow you if you’re lucky enough, but that’s all.
I don’t think it’ll be easy to leverage this kind of followers to get actual conversions on Amazon or other selling platforms.
Wrap it up
So, my conclusion is that, as an author, you can use Wattpad to promote and build your brand, but you should not use it as your main platform. The risks associated with using it are probably balanced to the gain you can get.
Just remember to
- add all your social info to your profile
- create good enough covers for your work! A good cover makes a hell of a difference in Wattpad, like in the real world!
- always follow back your followers, to comment their work, to be friendly as in any other social platform, and you’ll surely also make some friends, there
update:
One of my 100.000+ reads collection on Wattpad disappeared. It seems they decided it wasn’t abidig by their rules (which it was, but since they deleted it and didn’t want to give any explanation, I can’t prove it. Be aware of it.)
