Cracking the Wattpad Code: Insider Secrets the Pros don't want you to know!

Code Crackers Episode 2: @KarimSuliman

Hey there boys and girls! I’m due for an update, and boy do I have something really cool up my sleeve. I managed to snag some time with one of Wattpad’s most endearing personalities! For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him, @KarimSuliman is the author of “Tales of Gorania” and “Bermuda”, the former enjoying a good stint on the first page of the Hot List, and the latter recently achieving the elusive dual #1 in Action and Science Fiction – no mean feat in today’s competitive landscape.

Karim is also one of the coolest and most fascinating writers on Wattpad. He shares many of the same ideas that I do, and we frequently bounce ideas off each other through PM. I didn’t feel like it was fair of me to hog all of his amazing insights for myself so I thought I’d interview him!

Warning in advance, this interview is loooooong, LOL! But the insights are so good I didn’t edit much of it. There’s a lot of interesting new stuff here (some of it conflicting with my own views on story promotion), but the bottom line is, if it works, the strategy gets shared, right here on Cracking the Wattpad Code.

Enjoy!

LOL!!! Thanks for being a willing "victim" Karim! I like to keep these interviews conversational, so there's no set format. Hope you're ok with that!

For starters, I can vouch for how interesting you are as a person, a character, and a writer, but can you tell our readers about yourself and how you came about Wattpad?

With an exception of 7 weeks of my life, I've spent my previous 30-31 years in Egypt. I'm married and I have a 5 year-old daughter. Currently, marketing is my profession and business management  is what I study, so being a writer doesn't make any sense for my acquaintances, because apparently numbers and analysis are my obsessions. To them, Karim is left-lobe-inclined-brained person (if there's something called so :P), who always speaks with logic and facts, and most probably he lacks emotions and imagination because he has an idle right lobe. In one of my performance appraisals, lacking creativity was the main area of improvement that I needed to work on. I guess my year on wattpad is proving my boss wrong. [ML edit: we are in the same boat, my friend :D]

Like almost all children, I loved stories, but the interest in creating my own ones started to show up when I was 4-5 years old. I kept writing only for myself until I became 18 and after that I had lost all motivation to write. I suppose it will make sense when I say "but it was Wattpad that brought me back to writing" but naah, not exactly. It was the curfew in Cairo in July 2013. Suddenly, I had like 12 hours with nothing to do at all. No work, no university, no hanging out. Nothing. Now, I realize this curfew was the best thing happened to me in the last decade.

I wasn't sure if I could still write after all those years, but I didn't bother. The whole thing was nothing more than a temporary fun activity till normal life was restored in Cairo. I truly believe it would be so if I didn't discover Wattpad later.

As the curfew lasted longer than I thought at its beginning, my 'new' activity went to the next level. What about posting my work on relevant websites?  I thought. And here came the moment when my lovely wife told me about a mobile application that had also a website where you could write anything you want. As I tried few websites before, Wattpad for me was a breakthrough. It was astonishing to me when I realized she had been reading on Wattpad since 2012.

The curfew is such an interesting thing. Other than help you write more stories, did that somehow affect your writing in a more profound way?

Oh, and so funny about your wife! Does she read your books and what does she think of them? :D

If you say so... remember that I have warned you once !