As you may have noticed from elsewhere on this page, I have published a novel called The Choking Rain at Wattpad.com. For those not in the know, Wattpad is a site where anyone can self-publish short stories or serialized novels, offered to Wattpad users for free. Wattpad membership is also free, so your potential audience is very large indeed.
Much of what one finds on Wattpad is fan fiction, and much of what finds appears to be worth exactly what you’re paying for it. This is not to denigrate Wattpad authors—not only are some of them quite good (I am not the only published writer using it, by far), but even those who are not so good are honing their craft, a necessary step for any author—in fact, it never ends.
The Choking Rain, frankly, is an example of that. I wrote it quite some time ago, and I like to think I’ve improved since then. I did review it before I put it up, and I would not have done it at all except that I personally like the novel and, although it failed to find a traditional publisher, it was rejected more for being too “niche” than any other fault I could determine. So, with a little updating, I felt it was safe to publish without tarnishing my reputation. It also helped that the story lent itself well to serialization.
In researching Wattpad, I found its offerings boasted an astounding number of readers. (The site keeps public count of “reads,” which is anyone who looks at a story or chapter. A full perusal of Rain by one person would yield 35 “reads,” one per chapter.) Even taking that into account, however, a lot of novels were recording several hundred thousand reads over the course of a year. Divide 100,000 reads by 35 chapters and you’re talking a lot of fans.*
So I tried it. At first, I was pulling in about 20 reads a day. Considering that before this, nobody had read the book, 20 reads was significant, even if most of them were restricted to the first installment. As I progressed, the number remained pretty static, but at least a few readers were following the story.
Then Wattpad contacted me and said they wanted Rain to be a Featured story. This means you get on their menu of promoted stories for a couple of months. No fool I, I agreed, and the entire book was Featured as on December 1.
It went from 20 reads per day to 500 in less than a week. And it has remained there, so that as of this writing it is just under 7500 reads. Most of them are still limited to the first installment, but there’s a fair number of people actually reading the book, and that’s cool. And around 500 new people per day are clicking on my story, so that’s very cool.
I don’t know that this is going to make me any money; I don’t know that it has so far, certainly, but it’s been fun watching the numbers climb, and the comments have been for the most part gratifying. People are reading what I wrote.
And that’s very cool, too.
*2,857, just to save you the trouble.
Graffiti on the Walls of Time 