How to write like a Pirate, Get readers, and other inspirational crap

You want people to read you story? Writing and Prewriting.

To help you do it the same why I did it, write 50,000 to 75,000 words before you post. This does a few things for you. First of all, if you can write this much and still want to write more then you should be able to finish. You should never post a book you don't plan on finishing. This should be obvious but look at all the unfinished stories are on wattpad alone that haven't been updated since 2015.

Write 50,000 words and then break it into 1000 to 2000 word chapters, post one every day, pick up where you left off writing and move on with your life.

Here is one of the most important things to keep in mind: Readers will trickle in not pop up in hoards.

And that is if you are doing it right. Do not post to get reads, post to share and adventure, to grow and maintain your audience. A flower doesn't grow if you plant it and never water it, and an audience won't grow if you plant one chapter and never update. It will grow slow, but you'll freak out when you see your hard work pay off and the first green signs of life appear from the dirt. Have faith, be patience, work at it, pray a little if you are into that, and don't just stick the seed in a pot and cry when nothing happens. I'm pretty sure salt water kills plants that way. 

Growing an audience (or community) takes effort and posting every day or at least every other day is a big part of that effort. That's how the wattpad Algorithm works, the more you post the more often it should appear to people looking for books, and then when they pull it up and check when it was posted it will say, today, yesterday, or one day ago. These words are like crack for people looking for books to read. And the more chapters you have the better. Nobody wants to read a dead book.

Trust me when I say: "having under 10 chapters and a lengthy wait between updates is a nuclear deterrent not an incentive to people discovering your books". If you are wondering why people aren't reading your stories and have less than 10 chapters (and Heaven forbid the cursed-and-haunted-dream-crusher-of-death-stepping-on-broken-glass-with-no-shoes-and-permanent-bad-hair-days of "1 chapter" story previews) Then I'm sure I've made it clear enough at this point without saying that you should just write more. 

I can not tell you how much it hurts me on a deeply visceral level when someone cries "read my story" and it's only 1 chapter and it's not a short story. That is not a story! There is nothing about a 1 chapter story expect Disappointment, Especially if it's good. Even worse if it's great or amazing. Because you want to read more and there is nothing to read. Only masochists do that to themselves.

Everyone is waiting until your story is LONGER and actually worth investing their time, energy, and emotions into it. And if is one chapter and hasn't been updated for a month you are literally putting nuclear waste on wattpad and asking people to step in it. In the sense that only the truly masochistic of time-wasters will open it let alone read it to the very end... of one chapter.

I'm going to say this one more time.

People do not read books with only 1 chapter! There are exceptions because there are always the exceptions, but 90% of people on wattpad, at minimum(Including myself), won't even give your story the time of day.

What I am really trying to say is: WRITE MORE!

WRITE MORE!

WRITE MORE!

WRITE MORE!

WRITE MORE!

WRITE MORE!

WRITE MORE!

For the love of God and every holy being in existence don't give up, just Write More. Jesus Christ. Don't ask me to hurt myself because you need someone to say something nice to you. I'll gladly help if you're stuck and you have something to work with, but I don't have time to solve every teen drama on the internet, I'm sorry. I'm in this to take people on adventures, not to feed egos, or patch sinking ships.

Don't feel like you're a bad writer because "your story sucks", you don't have enough of a story to have a story. One chapter is barely enough to introduce a decent plot, let alone introduce your characters and build up enough empathy for people to like them.

It's not a bad story because it's not a story yet. So write a story! If you have 50,000 words you have at least one book by NaNoWriMo's standards (Nation Novel Writing Month). My book Foxtails and Fairytales is 155 chapters and almost 250,000 words. So for someone as longwinded as me 50,000 is just the beginning of a story.

Another benefit of writing so much before you post is that you can run right into the meat of the story when you start it, and then go back and rework the first couple chapters before anyone sees or knows the first version of chapter one sucked balls. Another great thing is that if you make it to 10,000 or 40,000 words and you hate the story, you can drop it without any guilt of letting people down. So write as many starts-to-stories as you want.

Go nuts.

Do what I do and write a dozen good ideas that went boring-to-write or bad-to-read until you find the golden goose who keeps popping out good material. And another benefit is that if you hold onto those starts without posting you can Frankenstein the good elements of those stories into one that works.

The worst possible list of things you can do follows:

Post as you write

Write one chapter

Expect hundreds of people to come out of the woodworks and praise every chapter of your story

Get demotivated when your unrealistic expectations aren't met

Beg people to read your story

Nobody does

Give up after one chapter

Think you're a bad writer because you didn't get the memo

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You can be a bad(inexperienced) writer and still get reads if you post consistently. Even if J.K. Rowling(starting out) posted the first chapter of Harry Potter, nobody would read it until she had more than 10 chapters, and even then she wouldn't get anywhere unless she posted consistently. Her manuscript of the first book was rejected by publishers for crying out loud and look at her now! She failed, brushed off her knees, and kept sailing. Now she's a household name and everyone and their dog has a Hogwart's house.

Readers will trickle in not flood in. <- This is a truth you'll just have to accept.

We can argue that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. With some math you can make a 50,000 word text into 25-50 chapters. This is a story! At the very least a Beginning and part of the Middle.

Here is the most blatant exception the prewriting.

I have a friend who can, and does, literally write 3 chapter a day and posts as she writes. She can write at 45-80 words a minute. Ask yourself: can you write that much a day without stressing about it? If the answer is the unlikely yes, disregard everything I've said and go flood the internet with your works. That said, you'd have 3 chapters in the first day, not one. That's 21 at the end of the first week and 90 at the end of the first month. And you wouldn't be begging for reads.

Yes, she did put out 4 books in half a year. Edited, cover art, hard copies, and book signings locally. They weren't 250,000 word novels like mine, but they were full books. I have signed copies of them on my shelf. And I introduced her to wattpad! Go figure.

My way (which I discovered through trial and error) is basically: write a bunch, post little pieces as you go, and keep writing. 

This may not work for everyone, but it's one step better than giving up because you felt ignored by strangers on the internet. 

So take the first step, write a bunch. Maybe it will work for you and maybe it won't but you'll learn from it. You'll learn and learn and learn and then you have a story, and write "the End" and realize that you did it! But you'll never get to that point if you stop standing up after you've been knocked down. And you'll never learn to walk on you're own two feet if you never take the first step.