Wattpad

 

Wattpad is a free social forum for readers and writers. The site was created to “remove the barrier”* between authors and readers. It allows writers to post their stories fee free and connect with millions of readers. Did I mention the readers get all the material for free?

Wattpad allows writers to explore their craft. There’s no limit to how much a writer can post. Writers are not restricted by genre, content, or subject. It should be original. Wattpad has a strict policy on copyright, i.e. don’t steal other authors’ work. But fanfic, yeah, go nuts writing and posting fanfic.

Writers post their content in chunks (chapters). Wattpad recommends no more than 7000 words per section. You can add covers for the work. Be sure it’s original, non-copyrighted material. (See my post about Canva and Book Brush for creating covers.)

Readers can find stories by genre, target audience, and tags (like Twitter hashtags). They can read and star sections they enjoy. The target audience rating allows users to find age-appropriate stories. Authors can mark items Mature if they have mature content. Younger users cannot read those stories.

The site is for personal use only. You can’t sell your content from the site. If you want to sell your story, you need to remove it from Wattpad. There is a paid stories section where authors can get money for their writing. I’ll cover that in my “For Writers” post.

At the time of this post, Wattpad had approximately 656 million stories in over thirty languages.

Wattpad is a great option for testing stories and for writers without publishing goals. And wonderful for original reading.

 

* From the Wiki about Wattpad