Hi guys!
Just in case you've never gotten to meet the awesome, super talented and stunning Wattpad famous superstar and reader certified bad boy, Gabriel Pope...here's your chance! Please stand in a queue, no stampeding, I'll sure attend to everyone and sign you an autograph.
Oh, wait...that was supposed to be just in my head, I'm not famous yet. Ugh! Let's try that again.
Hi, my name's Gabriel Pope (obviously). I'm a writer, spoken word artiste and professional daydreamer. A three-time participant at the Wattpad Block Party-the biggest thing on Wattpad asides The Wattys, contributing writer in the Tenebris Somnia and Sharing Nightmares anthologies, featured on Fangirlish.com and author of Hostel M2(selected by @UniversalHorror, @ExorcistFOX and @IncarnateMovie) as well as Crypt 12 (Best SciFi at The Cryptic Awards).
In case you're wondering why I had to mention all of those 'irrelevant details', I'll tell ya. As writers, we often tend to stress ourselves out over not getting on the big screen so much that we fail to recognize the little achievements we've made along the way. So yeah, that's me trying to take catalogue of my small milestones- you should try it too, you'll be surprised how much you've missed all this while.
So, I'm really not sure why you decided to get into this large orange sea of stories called Wattpad but I can almost bet that along the way, you've been tempted to write a story with hopes that someway, somehow it'll tick and you'll be hitting 10k views a day like all those many books you've gotten so attached to. If you eventually did write and publish that story here, I'm sure you know better now.
You've probably read many many many posts about bumping your reads on Wattpad, the whole gospel about getting a good book cover, joining a book club, getting active on the club threads, reading and commenting on other's stories, blah blah blah...but do those work? Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. Maybe they do but you just haven't used a right approach! Here's me throwing in my three kobo on the subject (I'm Nigerian so cents won't work).
When I first joined Wattpad, I noticed a trend which over time seems to have died out probably because everyone started shifting their attention to 'more important things'. Today, I'll try to hint at these things again!
WRITE A GOOD BOOK
I can't really call this the most important thing. There's still that global debate on if a book's success depended on good marketing or a good story, talent or sheer luck. Now that's a whole semester's discussion (college students can relate).
However, one thing I know for sure is 'I caNt readabook Writeen, like. this'. Seriously, man! Get your act together and hone your skills. Follow profiles and writers who give advice on the art of writing, search for books on tricks from proven writers, gobble down several articles on different aspects of writing. Be serious about this!
If you intend to see positive results, you have to put in the extra work. A conscious effort at transiting from being a 'writer' to being an 'author'. In my opinion, those are two ends of a journey. You need to try mastering the elements of a good story and storytelling and importantly, how to intricately weave them into your 'bestselling idea' if you're going to see a bump in your read count. Wattpad readers have grown past Harry Styles fanfiction writing pattern so if you do intend to net a few new fans, you'll need to up your writing above Wattpad standard.
I never knew Sandra Grayson (@SheHopes) until I had a chance to read Phantom Lens which she'd been commissioned to write for the premiere of the movie Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension. Her writing style was beautiful, professional and very different from what I'd normally manage on Wattpad. Today, I'm first to point anyone looking for a good paranormal/mystery book in her direction! And that all started with her writing style which spoke volumes of her ability to weave a good tale. Same goes to how I'd met Jason Kucharik (@JasonKucharik) as well as the wonderful Ann Hunter (@AnnHunter82) and C. C. Gillings (@CCGillings) amongst many others.
My personal starter pack on honing your writing skills would include: Young Person's Guide to Publishing by @XimeraGrey, Bad Ways to Start a Novel by @Cytolene, For Writers by @hughhowey, The Write Place Journal and The Write Conference (Summer 2016) by @The_Write_Place.
PUT YOURSELF OUT THERE
Oh, so you wrote that amazing book that could easily pass as the next best thing after the latest season of Game of Thrones? Good for you...now stop gawking over how badass that plot twist at the end of your book is and help readers discover this gem that's worth more than 100 reads. You deserve more, right? Right.
There's this consensus that there isn't much you can do after hitting the publish button. Maybe that's true, but hey, it says '...there isn't much...' not '...there's nothing you can do...' Instead of just sitting there and praying the gods of Wattpad residing at Mt. Canada throw your book as a blessing to every Wattpadian seeking a good book for the weekend, how about enticing them to do so?
Just as in the publishing world, you need to put yourself out there. I know you might cringe at the idea of running Facebook Ads for your Wattpad book so I won't mention that. Let's talk about running free in-house Ads.
My friend, M. B. Dalto (@druidrose) calls this method 'shamelessly whoring yourself to every chance you find'. It's worked for her and today a Watty award winning author, cool right? One way she achieved this was through CONTESTS.
Consider submitting your work to as many contests as you can find (and believe me, there are loads of those on Wattpad these days). The idea behind this is that you're putting yourself out there in front of a fresh set of readers you ordinarily won't be able to reach on your own.
Now, say you did adhere to the first point about writing a good book and you get to say the top 4 of one of these contests...and appear on another contest, then another, and another. Chances are most readers must've seen your book somewhere and if they hadn't paid attention to it in contest A and B, they'd be willing to try it out during contest C, especially considering how well it must've performed at one or two of these contests. The idea is not to 'win' all of these contests, it's to put your book and name in front as many folks as possible as many times as possible.
You could consider trying out The Next Big Recognition Contest hosted by @DawnStarling (if you're willing to wait the queue).
Hand-in-hand with contests would be TRYING OUT WRITING PROMPTS. Many profiles today incorporate writing prompts to their schedule, you could also follow Wattpad's official page of your writing genre and try to keep up with their writing prompts contests. The beauty of this is that you'll be able to meet several authors writing in a similar genre as you as well as 'genre-devoted' readers of your kind of books! Bump into the same set of writers more than once while trying to clarify concerns on a given prompt and you have yourself a new friend who'd definitely sneak a peek into what you write. What other sort of self-promo do you need?
The importance of properly adding TAGS to your story can not be overemphasized. This takes work, rather than just tossing in 20 fun words you think describe your story. A properly tagged story enhances your book's SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Here's a shortcut I used once: Let's assume you write SciFi, that'll mean you're most likely a SciFi reader too and might have read a couple of great books on here with admirable read counts. While filling out your Tags, get on these books and see what keywords they must've used which resonate around the theme of your book. You could do this with the Top 10-20 books in your genre, try finding a trend which relates with your book's theme. Chances are that when people search for these 'big players' in your book's genre on Wattpad, your book would also pop up (here's where a bulk of the talk on book covers come into play).
Typically, the idea of putting yourself out there needs you to get your 'author-preneur' cap on! There's no rigid structure to getting your name out there and so this gives you the freedom to try out several creative ways to share your work! Twitter, Instagram, Facebook...utilize these mediums in optimizing your book's visibility. There's a Wattpad Squad group on Facebook if you ever feel like having a simple conversation with your favorite Wattpad Star outside the comments of their stories.
I'd advice against spending all day in the Clubs with a mindset that the more comments and contribution you make, the more people would get to notice your book. In reality, people would notice YOU, not your book and except you're always talking about your book (which might irk Wattpad Ambassadors and ultimately bore folks at some point), you stand very slim chances of a cross-over of your Club fame into your stories.
For a more detailed discussion on getting yourname out there, I'd recommend reading Cracking The Wattpad Code by @MicahelLimjoco as well as @KarimSuliman's A Cruise in the Orange Ocean at The Write Conference(Summer 2016).
GET A GANG!!!
I've had this idea for a while and I'm yet to actually give it a shot. Getting a Wattpad Gang! Yes, you read that right. Get a gang and together, y'all wreak havoc on each other's books and walls and inbox and even more fun, on other people's stories. Yes! Blow up someone's notifications while arguing over how a character sounds so much like a Gang member or reminds you of something that happened in real life! Sounds fun, right?
Uhh, maybe not.
On a more serious note now, ever considered being friends with other writers and readers? I mean genuine friends, not read-for-read friends-Meh. This trick here has worked over the years and still does except of course people barely ever use it!
Make friends with a handful of the many awesome Wattpad people here, get to know yourselves as buddies, read each other's works to show support, talk about your writing schedules, help one another with those scenes that seem hard to write, play with plot bunnies together, discuss what book the Gang's gonna blow up next while binge reading, schedule writing sprints, tell them about that boring joke your lecturer made in class today and the dumb assignment you're skipping just so you can finish the next chapter that's due by Friday, remind them just how awesome they are when life gets in the way.
Build a connection with real life people because at the end of the day, you'll need someone to tell you of the latest writing prompts on Wattpad, someone to nominate your book for that award contest you never knew about, someone to recommend your book to a bored Wattpad user as #1 in its genre, the possibility's endless with what you can achieve with a legit gang!
Imagine a gang of 5 all sharing updates about each other's works on their personal profiles and tagging three or four of their own friends who can relate to the latest chapter update! That should be epic.
Two classic examples of people who have done this with tremendous success are:
(1) Wattpad Class of 2014 (@JessicaBFry, @SarahBensonBooks, @amberkbryant, @BrittanieCharmintine, @Monrosey, @JayVictor, @JoshTownley, @linna1029 / @Red_Assassin, @Tim, @FarahOomerbhoy, @_Ahna_, @MoonZephyr)
(2)The wonderful ladies at @RomanceSparks (@fallzswimmer, @ajwinterbooks, @gabycabezut, @MichelleJoQuinn, @lavinialeigh, @sweetdreamer33, @BindingTies, @kristimcm, @XxSkater2Girl16xX, @knightsrachel, @Ysa_Arcangel, @AdelynAnn, @krazydiamond).
The struggle of being a writer is real and you have to learn to walk these waters if you really hope on seeing the outcome of the effort you put into those 'caffeinated nights' while working on that next chapter. While these are just my opinion and definitely not a sure bet to hitting jackpot, you might want to give this a shot, you stand nothing to lose!
Or you could just not take my word for it, after all, I'm just some random kid on the block trying to sound smart XD.
Feel free to comment and let me know what you think if you have any concerns or any tricks you might've tried or considered to get your piece of work in front of others!
Another Writer on the Block,
Gabriel Pope.
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