Is Writing on Wattpad Worth It?

 I've seen the question floating around the internet about whether or not Wattpad is actually a good place for aspiring writers to post their stories in hopes of someday being discovered and published and the answer that I usually see given is no. 

There is, as you might guess, a lot more to the answer than just that no. There's usually also an explanation about how not much is actually known about how much writer's make in the Wattpad Futures program, and how in interviews the writers for the Futures program have given, and in stories that have been written about the program, the answers on the actual amounts writers are paid is always left deliberately vague. 

Obviously I didn't take that advice, and honestly I have yet to regret sharing my writing on Wattpad. I'll start at the beginning, or at least the beginning for me. 

I've wanted to be a writer since around the third grade. I had other dreams too that got thrown in there, so sometimes I wanted to be a writing veterinarian, or a writing astronomer who lived on Mars (go big or go home), but I always knew that being a writer would be part of whatever I ended up doing. 

Even before I hit third grade I was pecking away at my dad's old Macintosh IIE, writing about who my cat didn't like in my class when I moved to a new school (spoiler alert: anyone who was mean to me).

By the time I graduated college and got married I'd been published in a national magazine and some newspapers and I even went to work for a newspaper for a while before I decided to stay home with my kids. I even had a few novels that I'd written and then had printed out at Kinkos sitting on the back of a shelf in my closet. 

And I started reading books about query letters. Somehow writing a query letter to an agent was even more intimidating than writing a novel. Some agents said they'd like to see a book from me, but not the book I'd written. Then there were lots of nos. 

But another novel with a tiny baby seemed impossible just then.

For years I blogged instead of writing novels. I wrote about anything and everything, but mostly about what it was like to be a mom. After all we were in the age of the Mom Blog in those days. 

And then, finally, one day I started writing novels again. Because magically, somehow, it was time.

And I realized something. 

It would be amazing to be published traditionally, but I'd been writing for about three decades and it would also be pretty awesome just to have someone other than family or friends reading my work. After all, it wasn't like family or friends would really tell me what they thought about my writing (at least mine wouldn't, they were way too sweet). 

That was also around the time I decided to come up with a pen name and open a new Wattpad account. I wanted something completely fresh where my writing could sink or swim, completely on its own. 

Now I've seen writers get upset when stories don't take off overnight. But that isn't how Wattpad works, at least not most of the time, and I'd been on Wattpad long enough to understand that. So I set up a schedule for myself, with a promise that I would post two days a week starting off.

Friday is always a good day to post, because it's the most popular day of the week for readers on Wattpad, so if there's only one day that you're going to be posting, make it Friday. 

I usually do start off by posting five to seven chapters right away, just to kick off a book and give people a good start that will hopefully get them sucked into the story and capture their imaginations. It's hard to do that with only one or two chapters. Then I drop back to weekly or bi-weekly stories. And that usually works pretty well at getting and keeping people engaged. 

I don't advertise my stories on other peoples stories, or email them to read my stories, or anything like that. I also don't respond to those sorts of things. I do read stories in the same genre and I comment on things that I like. I don't ever mention that I'm a writer or what I'm writing. But if you make insightful comments about what you're reading, oftentimes, people will come over and check your profile out. 

That's not why I do it at this point, but it is a place to start in terms of building community, and meeting people on the platform. Also, other writers look forward to comments too and its just nice to do. 

Once things start to take off there's a good chance you will start to get offers from other platforms.

I'm not saying that these will be good offers. I'm sure some people get fairy tale offers on Wattpad, I just haven't seen that happen personally.

I'd say generally the going offer I've seen for my novels, about ten times over now, has been $200. I'd much rather do what I'm doing, sharing my novels for free, and having my Patreon, rather than give up the rights to my work, and all the hours I've put in, while saying goodbye to the exclusive rights to my stories.

In the future I might start trying that whole querying agents again. Actually, I'm planning on starting to look when the kids go back to school in the fall. But for the time being having a Patreon keeps me on a schedule and having Wattpad has really given me a larger audience for my writing than I could have imagined a year ago. 

And that is invaluable to me.