How to become successful on Wattpad: A beginners guide.

How to Become Successful on Wattpad: A Beginners Guide: Revised Version

Becoming a Wattpad star means writing your story, but it also means interacting with your fans, making friends, reading other stories, leaving comments, giving constructive criticism, posting in the clubs. There are so many things to do on Wattpad and all of them will help you become more a more popular user.

 

Without regular interaction with other users of Wattpad, people will not come to know your name or your work. Seeing a username around means checking out their profile, and checking out a person’s profile is the first step to reading their stories. If you really want your work being read, post around!!

 

I’ll talk about this a little more later, but just as a heads up, this does NOT mean posting “Read my story!” all over. This means being an actual person, leaving comments people will actually want to read. Tell someone what your favorite part of their newest chapter was! Offer your opinion on a thread in the clubs! Broadcast your favorite joke to your followers! Be interesting!

 

How long should a chapter be?

 

First of all, how long should a chapter NOT be? A chapter for a novel on Wattpad, in my PERSONAL opinion, should always be longer than one Wattpad page, or about 750-800 words.

 

Why should you do this? If a person only uploads 600 words at a time, I’m probably going to become disinterested in their story pretty quickly! Each chapter should be long enough that it keeps your readers involved and in your story. Short chapters are not involving to read, and they’re pretty hard to keep up with. The goal is to keep your readers interested.

 

Take my own chapters for example. I’ve grown as a writer, so I’m going to try to make my chapters longer, but before rewriting this guide, my chapters were just under 2,000 words. I would start looking for a stopping point around 1,500 words and ended up with a nice cliffhanger around 1,800 words.

 

In my personal opinion, shoot for chapters longer than 1,000 words! Anything less could be boring.

 

[If you’re wondering how to tell how many words a chapter has, Microsoft Word has a counter at the bottom left hand corner of the screen, and Wattpad has its very one word counter where you upload your stories.]

 

But what about chapters that are really long?

 

At the time of the first draft of this guide a few years ago, I had trouble writing more than about 7 Wattpad pages before uploading (about 5,000 words). Inevitably the perfect cliffhanger would come up and I’d end up stopping there. Now, I’m better at writing more content in a shorter amount of time, and I plan on uploading longer chapters. If you too can write long chapters, good for you.

 

However, there is one drawback to writing long chapters. Votes!

 

A person can vote one time on each new upload you post. So if you post a large chunk of work at one time, somebody can only vote once for all of it. If votes are really important to you, think about shorter chapters. 

 

The bottom like: Keep chapters long enough that your readers don’t get disinterested and stop reading, yet short enough that you get an appropriate amount of votes for the effort you put into writing.