Get Your Competition Seen: A Gamemaker's Guide

Tips and Tricks

Here at AGHQ, we can hardly imagine how hard it must be to gather up tributes when you don't have a captive population and guns to threaten them with. Sounds like a lot of work. So since we got things easy, we thought - well, Natela ordered us to offer some advice for the less fortunate. Whether you are hosting an Author Games, or any kind of interactive competition here on Wattpad, the tips below should help you to work towards the vibrant and active competitions we all love so much. 

First of all, this isn't the only place where we offer help for hosts. You can always send us private messages with any questions that this book doesn't answer for you. Things can get quite droll in our offices so we are grateful for the conversation.

In this guide, you might see that we are opening both trailer and cover shops. It's a great idea to pair visuals with your competition to catch the eye of potential competitors because... well, because people like flashy things. It's why I've treated myself to teeth implants. Unfortunately, they can be so hard to make, but the upside is that we have lovely and talented employees and volunteers ready to help you out if need be. Check out those chapters for more information and get your games some new digs.

Hey, looking good! Your game is all gussied up and ready for an audience. All we need now is an... audience. No contest can exist without competitors, but sometimes they can be the hardest to find because it will never be completely in your control. There are still ways to tend towards success, though. If you are hosting an Author Games, send this account any graphics or information you want to be shared about it just before, or during, your reservation period and we will make sure to put them up in our newsletter to advertise for you. A lot of competitors will see these newsletters so this is a great way to alert the Author Games community of your presence.

Keeping with the theme of getting your competition out there, but shifting away from what this account offers and towards the resources Wattpad has, the main way readers will find new books and competitions is of course by searching for them. Search results are influenced quite a bit by tags (which can be added in the "Story Details" tab of your work) and the people at Wattpad recommend that all competitions use the #competition tag so they are more easily found by readers looking to test their skills. If you are specifically hosting an Author Games, we also recommend using the #authorgames tag for the same reason. Add as many accurate tags as you can think of, because you never know how someone might stumble upon your works.

Wattpad also has an active club community filled with people looking for new things to try. Although advertising is usually strictly banned in the forums, there are a few where it is allowed. One of them is specifically for advertising your writing competition! The current link to this forum is right here:

https://www.wattpad.com/forums/vanilla/discussion/1204722/user-run-contests-and-writing-competitions-here-refresh-due:-1st-june-2018-.

And also in the comments below so you don't have to type it all out. Not even Ryn has the patience to do that! If the link doesn't work for you, you can find it by going to the Improve Your Writing club, then click on the pinned forum called "Writer Resources: Tips, Tricks, Advice, and Notices" and then scroll down to the button called "Writing Contests". Click on that and in there you can post an advertisement for your competition.

From that point, there are several fancy HTML codes you can use to help bring attention to your posting, but we'll be saving that information for a later chapter. 

We hope that collecting some of the basic information around advertising your competitions in a little guide will be helpful and give you an easy place to look back at and retrieve some of the harder-to-remember details of what to do. Like we've said before: any question on what we've covered or maybe even something we didn't? Just contact us. Got some secret tips of your own you don't mind sharing? We'd love to hear from you. More advertising information and help is coming to this space, but for now, we're signing off. Thanks for reading and happy hosting!