Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Self-Publishing On Amazon: Living the Dream

Alright, let's just start this off by coming clean and saying that I just published my first book on Amazon Kindle, and I'm pretty jazzed about it. Most of you, my loyal readers, are way more likely to check out a chapter of Wattpad 101, then a post I make on my message boards. I've attached it as the link for this chapter, so if you have $2.99 and any interest in supporting me or my work, I'd highly recommend you get it. It's based off of Hawtness, the book I did have up for free on Wattpad. Although if you noticed, it hasn't been up the last few days and I'm not sure if I'm going to leave the web novel up or not now that I'm trying to monetize it.

That said, if you have any interest in the field of self-publicizing, particularly through Amazon's Kindle store, either with the intention of making a buck or with the desire to just distribute your words for free to drive up a fanbase... then here are a couple of things I've learned about the process.

You Need To Create Manuscript!

If you're like me, then you have less of a Manuscript and more a collection of scribbles on various documents. Personally, each chapter of my book gets its own file. It makes editing, finding files, and protecting my work much, much easier. However, at some point, you're going to need to turn that word vomit into an actual manuscript.

It's going to be one document, and that one document is going to have every chapter of your book in it. How long should that book be? That's a hard question to ask. I've seen writers going as short as 10,000-word "books", and they can also go as high as 300,000 words depending on what you want to write. You can look at my chapter "How Long Should My Chapter Be?" if you want more of a breakdown on chapter lengths.

For me, I cut up Hawtness, which was a rather long, disorganized book exceeding 150,000 words, and delivered a 45,000-word novel detailing the first major arc and climax of the book. The way I see it, at $2.99 a book, by the time I sold the entire word count of Hawtness, it'd come to the ~$8.99 price of a standard normal novel.

However, I'm getting ahead of myself here, because when creating a manuscript, your pricing scheme really shouldn't be the thing on your mind. Instead, you should be thinking about other things. For example, the start of every chapter should have the chapter title. How else are you going to separate those chapters? Secondly, the chapters should have a page break at the end of every chapter. This forces the next chapter to start on the next page. This also means that when you return to the chapter and write more, it won't cause every chapter after it to be off center.

You need to create a book cover, but as a Wattpader, that shouldn't be foreign to you. Just be extra careful that the book cover you make doesn't use images that you can't legally use. That book cover does NOT need to end up in the manuscript, by the way. You kind of just have to trust it, but the final manuscript will have the book cover in it once it is generated.

However, it's a good idea to have a title page in the manuscript. The title page will just restate the name of the author and title of the book. It's a good idea to do this, trust me. It makes sure the name of your book is actually found within the text of your book, and it makes sure it's legible for everyone, you know, like people who use text-to-speech because they are blind?

The next page should be your copyright page. Unlike Wattpad, where copyright is a click away, you will need to have a page claiming copyright. It's just good practice.

Copyright © 2018 by Dorian T. Chase
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Released in the United States of America

Launched, 2018

Centerville, Oh 45458