Wattpad day 4: the warnings are starting

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 2: the plot thickens

It’s ten a.m. and time to check my progress on Wattpad. Since yesterday’s report, the number of reads has gone up another 75%, and the number of unique readers has gone up 67%. However, what I failed to notice yesterday were the number of readers who added the book to their reading list for later. To date I have 54 additions. Will they actually read it later? Wattpad asks that featured books remain on the site for at least 6 months, and an author whose book is in Featured is Read More …

Wattpad: new opportunity or new time sink?

UPDATED November 27, 2014 With all the hype around Wattpad with its 35 million users worldwide, it seems time to get on board. I had previously ignored the site, largely because it is built on the all-too-tedious model of authors providing free content while the site owners make a fortune off advertising revenue. (Dear Wattpad: why can’t you share ad revenue like YouTube? An author with thousands, sometimes millions, of reads is making you a LOT of money — don’t you think it’s time you shared? But I digress.) For Read More …