Why I stopped reading books on Wattpad

While I was in Secondary/high school, I enjoyed reading books on Wattpad. It was my most used app at the time. I would spend a ridiculous amount of time on the app. I could spend an entire day on my bed reading books on Wattpad. The best part about it was that the books were free. It doesn’t get better than that to a 15/16-year-old “unemployed” high school student.

I learned a lot from the books I read. To an extent, it cured my curiosity about a lot of things at the time. Even though the books were not an accurate representation of the real world and did not give me enough information.

Getting into college, my consumption of Wattpad books dropped drastically. I was trying to figure out so many things about university/college life, that I barely had time to read for pleasure. I missed reading a bit, simply because I knew that I had learned a lot from reading and I wanted to get back into the habit. To be honest, my major reason for reading, was to improve my writing.

Now, given that I had been away from Wattpad for a while, I had a different idea of what a good book should feel like. I had higher standards and more expectations of the books I consumed. I felt that some of the books on Wattpad were:

1. Poorly researched: I remember reading a book by a Black American. The book was supposed to be about an African American family. The author had not made enough research to know what names were Nigerian and the tribes that the names came from. There were so many things about the book that contrasted the reality of any African of which I can’t go into details. This set me off and I didn’t bother to continue reading the book. This is funny given that the book was one of the best performing books on Wattpad at the time.

2. Poor abilities to carry the reading along: I can’t give critics on this subject matter given that I am not a writer myself. But I am a sucker for good books and I enjoy reading good writing even better. Being a university student, I was older and I guess you could say that my taste in books had changed and many of the Wattpad books that I read wasn’t matching my newly acquired taste.

3. I got easily distracted while reading on my phone: Unlike my days as a secondary/ High school student, where I didn’t have easy access to the internet, my university days were different. I had easy access to reliable wifi services both at home and on my school campus. This allowed me to become easily distracted by the urge to always log on to different social media platforms. Unfortunately, this reduced my attention span. As a result, reading on my phone became less attractive to me. I would prefer to read on an e-book tablet or get a physical copy of a book rather than reading from my phone. That way, I would be able to better focus on the book and read faster.

It's been over 4 years since I last enjoyed reading a book on Wattpad and from what I’ve heard, not a lot has changed. Not to discredit the app, I believe that there are a lot of incredible books written by talented writers on there. Some of which have stuck with me and I would always appreciate the writers for their amazing work. I just believe that I have come to a point where I enjoy a different kind of writing that is not necessarily popular on Wattpad.