Wattpad Article Two:

This is a continuation of the blog last week. Author, Lareena Goertz shares her experiences and knowledge on WattPad. This is a possible source of beta readers for authors and a great source for people who love to read to be introduced to new authors.

HOW MY BOOK TOOK OFF ON WATTPAD:

I began using the publishing platform Wattpad in 2013. It allows any
author to put up either short works or novels, one chapter at a time.
Anyone can publish on Wattpad and anyone can read them. It is free and
there’s no charge for its use or any of the software.

There are several handy things about the platform. For one thing, there
are apps that readers can download to their phones or tablets to read
their Wattpad books. These apps download and save the books so they can
be read when the device is offline.

All users gets a profile page, where they can put up a bio, including
their location and how long they’ve been a member on Wattpad. They can
include a facebook page link, twitter info, and links to other websites
if they want. This is handy for authors. Everyone gets an Inbox to send
email to each other within Wattpad.

Readers can browse through the Wattpad stories by category or search by
keywords to find stories that they want to read. Then they can save
links to the novels they are reading to a list called “Library.”

If a reader likes another user, they can “follow” them. The profile
pages shows who a member follows and who follows them, similar to
Twitter.

Readers can also give feedback on stories by leaving comments or
“voting” for stories / chapters that they like.

The profile page will also list the stories you’ve put up on Wattpad,
with the covers and a description. They can see a demographics page to
understand who is reading their story. More on this below.

Publishing on Wattpad doesn’t mean you give up your copyright. You
retain that. But you grant Wattpad some limited licenses when you upload
a story.

Wattpad has multiple copyright options: “All Rights Reserved” which
retains all the rights provided by copyright law; “Public Domain” means
you don’t want to save any rights to the story; “Creative Commons”
reserves some of the rights to your story.

Choosing “All Rights Reserved” doesn’t copyright your work but might
allow you to sue someone who takes your story. Wattpad recommends that
everyone copyrights their story with the copyright office in their own
country.

More about Wattpad copyrights here:
https://support.wattpad.com/hc/en-us/articles/200773104-Copyrights

FORMAT:

I liked the chapter by chapter format and it seemed an easy way to put
up sample chapters or novels that I wanted to get feedback on. So I
began by putting up rough drafts of a few novels I’d done. First, an
urban fantasy horror novel, named Magic Spawn, about a necromancer who
comes from another universe to terrorize a Nebraska town on Halloween
night, attacking them with skeletons and zombies. Horror with a little
humor.

MAGIC SPAWN: http://www.wattpad.com/story/42523928-magic-spawn-origins

When I wrote the sequel to this, Nethermost Realm: Prisoner of Arlunn,
where Rian, a 17 year old boy, goes through to the other universe to get
into trouble there, I also put it up on Wattpad. Here Rian must fight to
save his ten year old brother from those who accuse him of being cursed
and want him destroyed.

PRISONER OF ARLUNN:
http://www.wattpad.com/story/10007829-nethermost-realm-prisoner-of-arlunn

PROMOTING YOUR STORY
As soon as you put up a new chapter, Wattpad notifies all the people who
are reading your story, if they’ve saved it to their “Library.” Also, if
you have news, you can put up a comment on your wall and also send a
little note to all your followers. Also, if you like your Twitter and
Facebook accounts to Wattpad, you can send a tweet or post to Facebook
telling people about your new story or chapter.

Later, if someone is reading your story and they like a chapter, they
can also easily post it to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Wattpad also has various “Clubs,” which are basically discussion boards,
one for each genre. Plus a number of other “Clubs” on various topics.
There’s a place where you can put up a plug for your book in your genre.
Readings can discuss other Wattpad novels or stories there.

After putting up these two novels, I began plugging them on twitter,
mostly, and on Facebook. You can check my blogposts on how to do that
here:

7 Basic Twitter Tips: How to Tweet and Get more Followers
http://meredithskye.weebly.com/blog/7-basics-twitter-tips-how-to-tweet-and-get-more-followers

20 Facebook Groups to Promote your Free or .99c Ebook in
http://meredithskye.weebly.com/blog/20-facebook-groups-to-promote-your-free-or-99c-e-book-in

ARE PEOPLE READING MY STORY?

I began racking up quite a few “reads” but at the time, they didn’t
track unique views or complete reads just page hits. So each time I
accessed the page, the numbers went up. Then whenever I sent out a link
on Twitter, I automatically received 20 or 30 “hits”. I didn’t think a
human could respond that fast and suspected that some of the Twitter
users had a system to automatically follow a link. So, even though each
chapter got a number of hits, I couldn’t tell if anyone was really
reading my books or not.

I was discouraged. I took the first novel, Magic Spawn, down to rewrite
it. But I left the sequel Prisoner of Arlunn up there. Mostly because I
forgot about it, for at least a year.

When Melva encouraged me to write about my Wattpad experience, I went
back to look at the site again. To my surprise, I found I’d gotten a bit
of a following. My novel Prisoner of Arlunn had over 7,000 reads (those
count chapters read) and another novel I’d put up (not quite a complete
book) Tower of the Moon had almost 5,000 reads.

I’d ended the novel Prisoner of Arlunn with a bit of a cliffhanger.
Apparently some of my readers got on a campaign and went through and
“voted” on every single chapter. A few sent me emails or posted comments
asking when the sequel was coming out. Well, I had no idea, I’d been
busy publishing a scifi book: The Gods of Garran on Amazon. I hadn’t
worked the Nethermost Realm books since I’d posted it. And that book was
just a first draft.

WATTPAD DEMOGRAPHICS

I found a number of improvements in tracking the Wattpad readers via
their Demographic tools, most in the form of graphs. And I found them
very useful and informative.

OVERVIEW:

Unique Readers:
Shows a count of unique readers who accessed the novel.

Votes:
Total votes for the story. This is a good way to see how many people are
following your book.  Comments:
Total number of comments left for the novel (chapter by chapter). I had
very few comments.

ENGAGEMENT:

Complete Reads:
This shows how many readers actually read the whole chapter, not just
jumped to the first page. This is good, because I suspected that when I
posted on Wattpad that bots were following the link and opening it. For
Prisoner of Arlunn, I could see that for each chapter in the novel, it
had averaged about 100 complete reads per chapter. This told me that
people were reading the whole book, not just Chapter 1 or 2.

Votes by Parts:
How many people read each chapter of the novel. Prisoner of Arlunn got
an average of 9 votes for each chapter, dropping to about 7 votes by the
end. But this told me that people were persisting to the end, and liking
it.

Comments by Parts:
Total tally of comments on each chapter. Again, not many.

DEMOGRAPHICS:

Okay, here it gets interesting. I was quite surprised by the findings in
these visual graphs. These are things that are critical to know about
your audience.

Age:
This gives you a percentage for each reader in a group. Most of my
readers are age 13 to 25 years old. For Prisoner of Arlunn, it broke
down:

Age 13-18: 15%
Age 18-25: 40%
Age 25-35: 10%
Age 35-45: 3%
Over Age 45: 13%
Private: 20%

Gender:
(What up? Most of my readers are male for this book! I didn’t realize
this).
Female: 10%
Male: 65%

Country (World Map):
Here’s where it got crazy. In fact, I was sure at first that this was a
mistake. I didn’t know how international Wattpad is! Only 47% of my
readers live in the U.S. A full 25% of my readers live in Hungary! (Who
knew? I don’t even know anyone in Hungary)
U.S.: 47%
Hungary: 25%
Phillipines: 10%
India: 10%
Pakistan: 6.25%

The rest were 5% or less: Australia, New Zealand, Italy, U.K., Sweden,
Norway, Nigeria, South Africa, Italy, Iceland, Malaysia, Nigeria, and
Kenya.

People were reading my novel all over the world! This blew me away. And
I felt quite encouraged about my audience. I’d done nothing to promote
my books except mostly in the U.S. via Facebook and Twitter.

PLAN: USE WATTPAD MORE!

As a result, I’m continuing to study and experiment with Wattpad. And I
fully intend to use it more!