How to become successful on Wattpad: A beginners guide.

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

EDIT Feb 24, 2014: You probably saw this in part 1, but as a reminder, I'm looking for honest critique on my story Parahuman. If you could read even just a single chapter and offer a comment on how I could do better, I'd appreciate it a lot! Thanks for reading!

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

Since this guide was first written, Wattpad has grown into one of the most influential reading and writing based social media sites on the web. There are quite literally millions of works published here with thousands and thousands of authors represented. Some of them are even New York Times bestselling authors. How could anyone compete with THAT?

 

Well, the good thing about Wattpad is that it's equal opportunity. Every single person on this website has the exact same chance of getting followers and votes. In terms of promoting their material, the most famous author doesn’t get any more special privileges than you do [exception being the Featured Books]. With this in mind, there are things you can do that will make your story more visible to other readers.

 

Success on Wattpad comes with two things: Hard work and time. Got that? Whisper it to yourself. Hard work. Time. We can even turn it into a math problem.

 

Hard work + Time = Success

 

The simpler one of these is time. For someone who has just started out writing their stories and posting them online, you will not get 1,000 reads in your first week, and you will not get 1,000 votes in your first month.

 

There are exceptions to this rule of course. There are some users whose stories seem to become famous overnight, but as a newbie, you should probably not expect this to happen to you! It takes a while for people to start reading your story, to share it with their friends, to become a fan of your work.

 

Be patient! Don’t give up!! Don’t be discouraged! If you’re just starting out, it’s not because your work is bad, it’s because you’re still a relatively unknown author. The really famous Wattpad authors will have been writing and posting for a very long time.

 

Right after time, you are going to have to work hard to become successful. Your story might become famous with only a few pages posted, but the odds of this happening are small. Many of the stories at the top of the Hot List are 60+ pages. In fact, four out of the first five stories at the top of the Hot List right now are 100+ pages and the other one is 90 pages long.

 

Each Wattpad “page” is roughly 700 words long. This means that even a 90 page story is 63,000 words. And writing out all those words takes a lot of effort- Effort that pays off in votes, reads, and a highly coveted spot on the What’s Hot List!

 

The bottom line here? Don’t stop writing your story! You might only have a few votes and fans right now, but their numbers will increase if you keep adding to the things you write.

 

But wait! There’s more!

 

“Hard work” applies to writing your story, but it also applies to another area: Being an active member of the Wattpad community!