Writing Tips

Publishing Sins

Okay... I feel like this is some important info I have learned here on Wattpad and think is good to share with all of you.

Publishing stories in general help us share them, but there's also the fact we can update too slow or too fast. All of us do wish to get chapters out in a nice flow as well, correct?

Now, I'm going to talk about what the publishing "sins" are...

1. Posting an Entire Book at Once
While we think this may be a good idea, it is not. People are constantly updating and posting new stories to Wattpad, publishing an entire book at once will only wash it away. I can guarantee you that it will get very few reads that way as well.

1.1 Posting too Many Chapters at Once
This is a lot like number one. If you're posting two or three chapters, that's fine, but three should be the max you post at once.

2. Publishing too Late or too Early
There is a time frame when people usually get online to check out new things. It is vital that you try to post within that time period. Most people get on Wattpad after school and work, and that generally is 3pm to 6pm eastern North American time. Another factor to take in is the pacific time zone, add three hours past the eastern time plane and you can see that it will make a good posting range.
**Note: If anyone can help me adjusting this to common timezones, that would be greatly appreciated.**

3. Non-Consistent Updates
I admit I am currently committing this sin with my elemental story, and I feel ashamed of doing so. This one is the most common and most frustrating publishing sin out of all of these listed. This generally is caused by a spark of inspiration that motivates you to immediately publish your first chapter, and a few more chapters come out at a good pace afterward. But the updates soon slow down as you lose your motivation or if you've become busy with school or work. This causes you to lose readers from the slow updates, and it can also cause less people to pick your book up if they see the last update was a month (or more) ago.

Now, there is a solution to fixing these problems, especially the third one listed.

Write your entire book first.

No publishing it while writing it either. Write all the chapters and keep them as drafts! Once you have your book completed, it is best to review each chapter and check for any adjustments you should make to your story. Definitely check for any plot holes or anything that doesn't match up in the story. Fixing these things before publishing chapters will help save confusion from your readers if they have already read something and didn't know you changed it.

After all this is completed, set a day of the week that you will publish a chapter (or maybe more than one) and make it weekly or every other week. Find a good time placement too, that way you can have a dedicated time that you post each chapter.

This system will hopefully help many of you do better in getting more readers, but also help you with consistent posting as well!

Hopefully this chapter helped you greatly! Please leave a little star if you wish. And remember to comment anything that you would like me to discuss about!