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 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: new opportunity or new time sink?

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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 …