Web Novel Platforms

[hunterjwizzard]

Hi folks,

My latest foray into publishing(and there have been MANY over the long decades...) is a "web novel" platform called Wattpad. I am getting no traction to speak of; and was wondering if anyone else on here is familiar with the platform(or others like it)?

I've tried various discord servers specifically for wattpad but the results have been "poor".

Thanks.

 

[pmmg]

My understanding is, for a serial, you have to get 20 or more chapters out before any one will want to start. I dont know how lively wattpad is, but i am sure you will have to do something xtra to get noticed.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Wattpad is supposed to have somewhere north of 80 million users and apparently zero organic discovery. I've got something like 30 chapters released, I can't remember(I put the whole book up on auto-release) and still only into hundreds of views. I would challenge anyone to go read a few chapters and tell me its bad, but I can't work out how to get noticed.

 

[Insolent Lad]

Royal Road is supposedly better for fantasy-oriented writing (as well as, ah, 'spicy' stories) but it's hard to be noticed on any platform.

 

[pmmg]

On RR, I saw stories popping up so fast, anything you posted would quickly slide off the page. So, it would be hard to get traction that way. I think, like anywhere else, you would need to get known, build relationships, and get an initial group of readers. They might push you into the a rising star queue, or use word of mouth to get you noticed, But...it would still be an undertaking.

I suppose you could just get 'lucky' and have lightning in a bottle. But...I am not sure that alone could get you readers. Most don't care... but then, most of the readers on RR are not the types that post in their forums. There is no way to measure them, or possibly even reach them. I think you can buy ads, which is great for RR, but maybe not for you.

I will note: When I was considering if RR would be useful to me, there were some aspects that were concerning me. 1) Every story posted on RR get stolen by scrapers, and the site does not appear to feel that is a problem for them. 2) RR itself began as a site pirating work. 3) the community there is very heavy in portal and manga themed stories, which is not for me.

I find there is really nothing there for me.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Royal Road is supposedly better for fantasy-oriented writing (as well as, ah, 'spicy' stories) but it's hard to be noticed on any platform.

Royal Road is exclusively dedicated to LitRPG. Granted, nothing stops from putting non-LitRPG on there. But if the audience is 99.99999% LitRPG fans there's no point in posting anything else.

The various platforms are weird like that. There's another platform called ScribbleHub which is entirely ruled by smutty LitRPG(who knew that was a subgenre?!), and another one called Inkkit that is ENTIRELY werewolf fiction. Neither advertises itself as being about that, but that's what dominates it.

 

[skip.knox]

Do you mean get noticed on Wattpad or get your work noticed more generally?

It's somewhere between devilishly difficult and even more difficult. But you coudl enter a search string like "how do I get my book noticed on wattpad" and the range of answers will give you a notion of the difficulty.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Discoverability is always hard, for any author on any platform. Some people get lucky and land on a new platform early and are found organically. But most people have to work hard at it. Simply putting a story out there and hoping for the best isn't good enough on any platform unfortunately. That's true for Amazon, but it's just as true for any other platform like Royal Road or Wattpad.

It's easy to see why this is the case. Over 1 million books are published on Amazon each year. So it's clear that being found by readers is hard. If a platform had great discoverability, then all those authors would flock to that platform, destroying the discoverability.

Knowing this, what have you done to work on your discoverability?

Also, how is your read through? You said you're getting views. Are people sticking around and reading the new chapters as they come out? That says more about the quality of your work and how well it lands with the Wattpad audience (and that match is important) than anything else.

I have 2 resources for you that may (or may not) help. Though I should note that I haven't published on Wattpad or Royal Road. So I haven't tried them. And they could of course always be out of date. And what works for one person, doesn't work for the next. Etc.

There's this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/16mdl4s
And: What the F&%@ is a Meme Ad?: A Guide to WTF to do With Ads

Both are specific to Royal Road, but the underlying principles probably apply to Wattpad as well.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Knowing this, what have you done to work on your discoverability?

There's not been a whole lot I can do. I have no social media presence whatsoever(not even personal accounts) and attempts to gain a presence have gone as well as any of my other publishing endeavors(complete and total failure). I'm just not wire for social media. I've tried and I've tried and never gotten the slightest bit of traction. And, frankly, I simply haven't got the free time to spend with the kind of low-brain-celled engagement social media seems to run on.

So I tried web novels. Because I was told "People read, people comment, you reply to the comments, and engaging directly with your readers is how you grow a readership." Well, I've got all the time and energy in the world to talk to people about my writing! My research neglected to indicate that you need to get readers in the first place.

Hence where I am stuck.

So, knowing this, what have I done to work on discoverability?

Aside from several failed social media campaigns(shadow-banned on tiktok ftw!), I did create a tvtropes.org page for the book with over 100 tropes so far, with entries on all the corresponding pages. That "worked" for about 5 minutes. I got over 100 new views over a long weekend. And then it completely dropped off.

So that's part of why I started this thread. I am looking for suggestions that aren't "spend all day begging for likes on social media".


There is a huge problem within the wattpad communities with people doing this thing they call "read for read" where you read a chapter of someone's book and they in exchange read a chapter of yours. This creates views and false engagement, but does nothing to attract actual readers. You just get, as the name implies, a read for a read. If the goal is to grow an actual audience, this is a waste of time. So I have not done that.

Also, how is your read through? You said you're getting views. Are people sticking around and reading the new chapters as they come out? That says more about the quality of your work and how well it lands with the Wattpad audience (and that match is important) than anything else.

As far as I can tell all of the views I am getting are from bots. I get about 3 bot comments a week. Usually bots swearing up and down they can help me get more views so long as I send them my credit card number, social security number, and a notarized copy of my birth certificate. I also get 3 or 4 bot friend requests a week on discord courtesy of the wattpad writers discords I joined.

I disagree, however, that this says anything about the quality of my work, because real people are not looking at it. I am my own biggest critic, so if you have questions about the quality go ahead and read a few chapters and tell me its bad. The handful of real people I've gotten to look at it have had positive things to say. But I can't figure out how to get actual, real readers to look at the silly thing.

 

[pmmg]

Goldie's Keys to Success:
Persistence and Attitude!


You won't succeed unless you apply both to whatever it is you are doing. Including a social media presence. If you dont want to go down that road, you will have to find another.

Well, I've got all the time and energy in the world to talk to people about my writing!

This reads as, 'So long as its about me, I will engage.' How about just engaging and getting to know people as they are?

I'd love to talk about my writing all day, but actually, I rarely do. But I do engage with many people.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

This reads as, 'So long as its about me, I will engage.'

More like I can answer questions about my story, world, etc. In other words if I had a fanbase to engage with I could engage with said fanbase all day long. I just can't can't figure out how to get a fan base in the first place.

How about just engaging and getting to know people as they are?

As I explained I've never been able to make social media work. I tried literally for years. I read all the guides. I followed all the tips. I still never made any real friends outside people I knew IRL. I'm all for persistence but after a certain point its time to admit defeat.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I took a very quick look, and I spotted a bunch of problems.

The biggest by far is that the cover, the blurb, and the prologue don't match.

The cover doesn't fit a fantasy story for me, not an urban fantasy story (which the blurb suggests), nor an epic fantasy story (which seems to match the prologue). It's more a YA, non fantasy cover. Something like a teen girl taken from a city and made to live in a small mountain town.

The blurb and the prologue also don't match. The blurb is giving me urban fantasy vibes of a girl in a fantasy school chasing after secret societies. The Prologue on the other hand is for an epic fantasy story, with battle on a grand scale and the fate of the empire in the balance. Someone going into your prologue expecting an urban fantasy will stop after the first paragraph, and someone looking for epic fantasy will not open your work because of the blurb.

The blurb itself isn't great. Now, I don't know how much formatting options Wattpad gives, but for me it now looks like a big blob of text. It's not inviting to read. So if I'm browsing for my next read, then I'd probably skip over it already. It also doesn't hook me right off the bat. Now, I'm no urban fantasy expert, but "Scarlet is a girl more comfortable in magic libraries and museums than the mall or the sports field. " just doesn't do it for me. There's no tension there, no reason to read the next line. No conflict. It's giving us character backstory.

The next sentences are about becoming a scholar, maths, and the Antiquarian Society. Not exactly the most exciting topics either. Yes, some guy dies, but I don't care about him yet and it's not really clear why I should from the blurb.

And the end doesn't end on a high either "Follow the misadventures of a disaffected middle school student as she navigates the relatable pitfalls of teen-hood, set against the backdrop of occasionally having to slay a dragon." It's vague and doesn't achieve what I think you hope it achieves. The humor of teen stuff against casually slaying dragons doesn't work for me and doesn't follow from what came before it. There's also no hook that screams at me to read. It's too vague for that.

The prologue itself isn't bad. It just also isn't great. One thing I do wonder is if you intend for there to be footnotes (the first paragraph has a *, a +, and some weird + in it). I looked, but couldn't find any footnotes, which makes it just look weird and unedited.

Starting in the middle of a battle is always hard, even more so in a prologue. I don't know why I should care about these people or their fight, and I already know that I won't see these people again (otherwise it would be chapter 1). Which makes this a struggle. And the whole prologue doesn't draw me in. To makes this work, I would need to be a lot deeper in Emily's head, to really feel her emotions. Her despair and her dread and pain.

It also doesn't really achieve much in the way of showing us the world. I'm guessing the sword is important and will show up somewhere in the tale, but if the prologue's job was to explain the why of that, then it failed.

So, knowing this, what have I done to work on discoverability?

Aside from several failed social media campaigns(shadow-banned on tiktok ftw!), I did create a tvtropes.org page for the book with over 100 tropes so far, with entries on all the corresponding pages. That "worked" for about 5 minutes. I got over 100 new views over a long weekend. And then it completely dropped off.

So that's part of why I started this thread. I am looking for suggestions that aren't "spend all day begging for likes on social media".

First, I would fix the above. Your cover, blurb and first page all need to match and draw the reader in.

Once you have that, you will need to find a way to get readers. Word of mouth doesn't work until you have a broad enough following and works only if your writing is the best out there (which it isn't). Just think to yourself, when is the last time you recommended someone a book? That's what word of mouth it.

Which leaves you with few other options. Advertising is the big one. Paying to send people to your book.

Other options are social media. Paid newsletters. Writing your own newsletter. Giving out a free novel or short story to get people to subscribe to your newsletter and then sending them your newsletter. There are probably a couple of other options. But those are probably the main ones.