Conclusions on my Wattpad Experiment

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 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 …