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 …

Wattpad day 2: the plot thickens

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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 …

How useful is Wattpad as a marketing platform? I am about to find out.

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Near the end of November 2014, I joined the Wattpad site to see if it would be a useful tool for connecting with readers. I uploaded a few chapters each from my novel, my self-publishing manual, and a work in progress. I was active for about a month on the site, but then work took over and I admittedly dropped off the radar. Then out of the blue I received an email at the end of March from Wattpad with an invitation to feature my novel, Baby Jane. “Featured” is Read More …