90 days on Wattpad: the good, the bad, and the ambiguous

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Three months ago I began a Wattpad marketing experiment with my first novel Baby Jane. Wattpad had approached me to feature Baby Jane on the site; at the time, inclusion in Featured meant your book was promised a slot in the top 20 for two weeks; after that you went into the general Featured pool, which was rotated at random. So what has happened in the intervening weeks? Drop in Readership During those first two weeks, the number of reads per day for Baby Jane ranged from a low of Read More …

Amazon’s new Giveaway – how does it compare to Goodreads?

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Amazon announced their new Giveaway program today that allows authors to run contests for free print books or other items sold by Amazon. The program is based on the giveaway concept first offered by Goodreads, which is now also owned by Amazon. So which program is better for the indie author? Some comparison points: The Goodreads giveaway: may be started before your book is published, allowing you to generate a bit of pre-release interest. is open worldwide, allowing you to target readers in any country you believe you have a Read More …

Amazon to pay authors only by the page

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Amazon officially announced yesterday that as of 1 July 2015 the Kindle Select Fund will only pay out based on the number of pages in your ebook the consumer reads. Amazon refer to their standard page as the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) based “on standard settings (e.g. font, line height, line spacing, etc.).” The rationale behind the change was that Select was weighted too heavily in favour of short works: Kindle Owners’ Lending Library paid authors by the download regardless of the length of the book, while Kindle Read More …

Kindle Scout’s potential landmines

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LAST UPDATED 9 September 2015 Back in October 2104, when Kindle Scout was first launched, I wrote a blog post of my opinion on the program. I also directed readers to Writer Beware’s post evaluating the program’s contract. Recently, I was approached by a journalist for my current opinion on the program, and the request made me take a look at the contract myself, a contract that was updated just recently, on 3 March 2015. In it I found two items in particular that raised a red flag for me, Read More …

Conclusions on my Wattpad Experiment

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Well, my time in the top twenty of Featured on Wattpad has come to a close. Baby Jane has been relegated to the Featured back pages; this morning I was on page 24. Although the back pages, like the top twenty, are rotated randomly every few hours, I must now rely mostly on word of mouth to generate any further interest in the book. I must now rely on the 239 people who added Baby Jane to their reading lists to return, and for those who read and enjoyed it Read More …

Wattpad day 7: is a new energy developing?

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It’s the end of my first week on Featured. In theory I should now be relegated to Featured’s back list, but the cutoff is not set in stone, and Baby Jane is still displaying in the top twenty (fourth at this moment, actually). When Wattpad will take me out of the top twenty is not certain. There seems to be a new energy developing. I’m up to 9100 reads (then 9200 in just the hour it took me to collate my data and write this), and my number of unique Read More …

Wattpad day 6: the culture of free

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Well, it’s now been six days on Wattpad’s Featured and nothing of significance to report. Reads have gone up another 800 (11%), the number of unique readers has gone down by 70 (but only for the day?), yet engagement has remained constant. I have also gained new readers in two new countries, Afghanistan and China, bringing that total to 71. I have not lost any countries despite the decrease in the number of unique readers; this suggests to me that my suspicion that the countries data represents total number of reads, not Read More …

Wattpad day 5: but what does it all mean?

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Day five on Wattpad’s Featured list and there are small improvements. The number of reads has gone up another 20%, and the number of unique readers has also gone up again, to 244. I have gained readers in another eight countries — Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Fiji, Guyana, Jordan, Norway, and Venezuela — bringing the total to 69. I’ve even had a sale: one, on Kindle in the U.S. (I may have had sales through my aggregator but, not only will I not know for a while, I think the Read More …

Wattpad day 4: the warnings are starting

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It’s day four on Wattpad and things seem to be devolving: the number of reads has increased to 6000, but my readership has declined from 255 to 237, confirming my earlier suspicion that the increase in reads is people making their way through the book then moving on. There are certainly a few who seemed to have devoured it, voting on each next section as they finished it. There’s also a lot of people who have added it to their reading list, but counting them requires me to scroll through Read More …

Wattpad day 3: not much to get excited about

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It’s three days now on Wattpad’s Featured. The number of reads has increased by only 37%, and is attributable mostly to readers working their way through the chapters: the number of unique readers has gone up by only 46 (22%). Not overwhelming. Reader age and gender have remained constant. I’ve gained readers in another 11 countries. As noted in my earlier posts, the country demographic is difficult to analyze beyond seeing where you have readers. Why? Well, for starters the data is in percentages (that also add up well past Read More …