I've been gone for a while. Approximately twenty months. The past year and a half has been the best time of my life, and I'm ready at last to share my story. There's nothing dramatic. A lot of you already know, or you figured it out, but while this account has lain dormant since April 2016, I've been more active than ever.
When I left this account, I didn't go far. I created a new account, somewhere to start fresh, and the following is the write-up that HQ asked me to write about my experience of upping sticks and starting over. This essay is verbatim what I wrote in December 2016, so some facts are now out of date.
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My Experiment Experience
At the end of 2015, I was beginning to feel a little bit disenchanted with my Wattpad experience, and I wasn't sure if it was my writing, my account, or the site in general. Overnight, I had gone from gaining 60+ followers a day, to hardly getting one new follower each day, despite being a member of the stars program. Stories I updated were getting a handful of comments, if any: one update had a solitary comment after a week up, despite having 30,000 followers.
Over three years on Wattpad (I think I created my new account, dipthewick, a month after my 3 year wattpad anniversary), my writing has changed a lot. I don't feel like the stories I have on my main account, justlyd, represent me as a writer and it got to the point that being on that account made me feel kind of sad. I had all these story ideas, but I knew that if I posted them, they wouldn't receive the kind of feedback I used to get and it would only upset me more. As much as I tell other people that numbers don't matter, it's hard to believe that myself after experiencing such a massive drop. The work I am proudest of on my main account, Shrinking Violet, has lingered around the 90,000 reads mark for months, despite being featured, while stories that I don't like have hundreds of thousands of reads each.
I am a writer at heart, and Wattpad is my favourite place to be, so I decided to try something out. Rather than rage-quit, I decided to make a new account and not announce it to my followers. I theorised that the majority of my original followers were probably no longer active on the site, and the majority of my new followers were new users who only followed me because of my fanbase, and the fact that several other big authors follow me. I know that when I joined Wattpad, I initially followed the "famous" authors, and checked out the people they followed too.
The way I saw it was this: I am a far better writer now than I was when I began on Wattpad. I have an extra three years of writing under my belt, and I cannot imagine my life without the site. After all, I have my sights set on working for the company one day! I believe I am a good writer and that my stories are worth reading so the last thing I wanted to do was to give up, but I also didn't want to slave over an account that has had its time, pandering to followers who either followed me for my old works, or for no reason at all.
Turning twenty - leaving my teens - proved to be something of a seminal moment, and a few days later I created my new account, dipthewick. I wanted somewhere I could write what I wanted to write without having to worry about getting feedback: I had no followers, and no-one knew about the account, so I expected nothing. I thought that if the story went well, or if I even completed it, I might move it over to my main account. Initially, I just wanted to be able to write without constantly worrying about stats.
I mentioned to a couple of friends that I had made this account: Leigh (leigh_) and Noelle (hepburnettes). I also told them that I was keeping this account anonymous: I didn't want it to be associated with my main account in any way, as I wanted to see how different people's reactions would be to a "new" writer, as opposed to one who has been around. I am of the opinion that without Noelle, the account wouldn't have had the initial success. After mentioning it to her, she added the book I had posted to one of her public reading lists, therefore giving it visibility to around 160,000 followers, and commented on the first few chapters.
