90 Million Avid Readers Worldwide Want to Read Your Novel

Exclusive Tips and Insider Advice to Win the Watty Award for your Novel

Joining Wattpad and winning a Watty Award changed the course of my life as a novelist.

I’d love to see Wattpad feed your success. The Wattpad platform allows you to serialize novels for a hungry international audience of over 90 million readers. I discovered it when Margaret Atwood published a story there. If the platform was good enough for my idol, I thought, why not try it?

Contents

∘ Do You Suffer from Procrastination or Writers’ Block? ∘ Enough was Enough ∘ Win New Prizes ∘ No, They Didn’t Pay Me to Say Nice Things

Do You Suffer from Procrastination or Writers’ Block?

I love to write, don’t you? The pure stream-of-consciousness in-the-zone outpouring of ideas is exciting. It feels like each new idea will be the brilliant one that writes itself. Until the next shiny new idea comes along.

Making it in fiction involves writing stories or entire novels and then submitting them to editors or agents. It’s a long process, and even talented writers with great stories expect to face many rejections for each acceptance. Some writers post their ratio of hits to misses on their blogs as a badge of honor.

Do you know what that does to a less self-assured writer? Rejection sapped some of the joy out of writing. Every pro writer I knew had to go through countless rejections. It’s a fact of the writing life. But I let it discourage me. Not on a logical, calculated level, but at that subconscious level which is harder to fight.

Instead of continuing to write and submit short stories, which had brought me some early success, I switched to novels. They take much longer to write, so you can spend months in the starry-eyed composing phase, and push off submitting and rejection for another day.

Enough was Enough

After years of this, even I couldn’t deny the tricks my subconscious fears were playing on me. To fight imposter syndrome, and train myself to take public risks, I made a pledge. I would draft a new novel during the month of November and polish one chapter a week for posting on Wattpad. Simple accountability was all I craved. It didn’t hurt that my mother, who spent winters in Florida, would read the chapters. With love, sometimes an audience of one is all the motivation you need.

It was a delightful surprise when strangers read, commented, and bookmarked Feeding Frenzy. Without that encouragement, it would have been easy to let yet another abandoned novel drift into my filing cabinet. Wattpad helped me finish, and the encouraging community on Wattpad introduced me to many writers who clicked with my interests.

Win New Prizes

The Watty Awards happen every year. Once you have a complete novel posted to Wattpad, readers will vote, share, and comment, pushing your masterpiece to the top. The criteria change from year to year, but there is room for many categories and differing kinds of success.

• A Grand Prize Winner in each language with a cash prize of $5000.00 USD
• A Wattpad Studios prize will be awarded in each participating language
• 3 Wattpad WEBTOON Book Group prizes in English
• Plus more prizes specific to your language and genre

Judging closes in August. If you want to know more, visit Wattpad. No, that was not an affiliate link. Wattpad is free, with most readers avoiding the paid options. Why not check out the Watty Awards this year, so you can plan to conquer them next year? :)

No, They Didn’t Pay Me to Say Nice Things

Wattpad turned out to be a great experience for me, long before they chose to feature my novel, Feeding Frenzy: Curse of the Necromancer. Watching the reads (hits) and votes grow with every chapter encouraged me to finish and taught me to write for an audience. Wattpad is a young demographic and web writing favors cliffhangers. What an education in writing for a person with two literature degrees and a history of reading Marcel Proust!

After winning a Watty Award, I volunteered with Wattpad, reading stories and helping create the spreadsheets of data used to train their algorithms. It was eye-opening but too intricate to detail here. Let me know if you would like to read more about that experience in the comment section.

Most Wattpad users are readers, not writers, which makes it the ideal place for writers to attract fans.

On Wattpad, the community is self-policing and inclusive. Any person who flames or harasses people gets reported. A team of volunteers plus paid employees assess each case. That’s one reason Wattpad suits newer writers. Most of the comments are encouraging, and the international readership is young, open-minded, and enthusiastic about reading. You read that correctly. Most Wattpad users are readers, not writers, which makes it the ideal place for writers to attract fans.

Interested in the benefits of Wattpad and the Watty awards? Check out the Wattpad site. They have opened up more slots for monetization. Wattpad makes headlines when they broker deals with publishers and multimedia companies making a few talented Wattpad authors rich. But that’s not the main reason to try Wattpad. I joined for the artistic experiment, weekly accountability, and fan interaction and stayed for the contests, anthologies, and gatherings at Wattpad HQ.

If you are a writer, I hope you will join for your own reasons and write for a huge international audience of avid readers. Every genre is welcome from fan fiction to mainstream to short stories to non-fiction.

If you take anything from this article, I hope it will push you to experiment with your art and get your work into the world. Sometimes a little push, and the promise of a warm audience, is all you need.

To learn about Feeding Frenzy’s progress from Wattpad novel to published novel, and to get a free ebook, visit my author website, maajawentz.com.

If you enjoy reading stories like these and want to support me as a writer, consider signing up to become a Medium member. It’s $5 a month, giving you unlimited access to stories on Medium. If you sign up using my link, I’ll earn a small commission.