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 those unfamiliar with the site, Wattpad is a website where authors can post their works, whether finished or in progress, and readers can read, vote on, comment on, and recommend it to others. It is estimated that about 90% of Wattpad users are readers and 10% writers.

Of greater interest, however, is its demographic: Wattpad skews heavily toward teen females, with the majority of the site’s users aged 13–25, and the bulk of those between 13 and 18.

As such you will discover that Wattpad exercises a watchful eye over content, with anything graphically sexual restricted to users over 18, and the site’s system will also flag anything with profanity. As authors you must indicate the audience for your works, from General through to Restricted, and if the system disagrees with your designation it will automatically upgrade it. Considering the language and sexualization of today’s average teen, the automated system seems overly sensitive, grading both Baby Jane and The Global Indie Author as Restricted after flagging shit in the first book and erotica in the latter. If this happens you will have to request a review to have your lower rating restored; I did and the site’s administrators were quick to respond and rectify the rating.

The other key factor in Wattpad’s demographic is its choice of medium: about 85% read on mobile devices.

Works that do not lend themselves to mobile devices do not do as well as others. On the Wattpad blog, authors are informed that the site’s users “want works that are typically easier to read to pass the time or that have shorter parts to make it easier for [readers] to progress … this also means that extraneous chapters before the beginning (author’s notes, copyright pages, extra synopsis, character bios) slow down the experience and can turn readers off. Placing those at the end of a book makes life easier on readers…”.

Baby Jane, as a long-form work with a complex plot, may not appeal to the majority of the sites users, but if even only 1% were to be interested, that’s still 350,000 potential readers. Similarly, The Global Indie Author will only appeal to writers, but at 10% that’s still over three million potential new readers. My next step in the process is to start putting up my flash fiction, works that I have been writing for many years and will now begin to compile into a collection. Will see how that goes and report back.

Finding these new readers, however, is the challenge.

By coming late to the party, I now have to work much harder at finding these kindred spirits on the site and cutting through the noise. As with sites such as Goodreads, this means spending a great deal of time networking with its other users. Will the investment prove fruitful? Or will it simply turn into another social media time sink that will take me away from the business of actually producing content? And then there is that nagging issue of providing free content to a site that still refuses to share its revenues with the very people who are making the site the phenomenon it is.

If you write “clean” teen girl fiction, Wattpad could prove a valuable resource for you. If you write anything else, perhaps not so much.

I plan to give it a try and, if it does not translate into sales, will have to try something else. That’s all we authors can do.

UPDATE: according to an article in the Globe and Mail, nearly 70% of Wattapad’s users are from outside North America, “with explosive growth in the Philippines, Turkey, and Latin America, and more moderate gains in Germany and England.” The site is available in no less than 28 languages. This provides a large audience for works in languages other than English. For writers in English it means the potential to reach a vast foreign audience who have shown an increasing appetite for English-language books. My first follower on Wattpad is a lovely 18-year-old writer and aspiring doctor in India (with whom I’ve been having a wonderful dialogue), a country I have yet to sell a book in. (I’ve had only one sale in the region, in Pakistan; the rest have been primarily in Australia, N.A., and Europe). So far, these events have been encouraging.