How's It Going: NaNoWriMo and Wattpad

Instead of sprinting toward 50,000 words this year for NaNoWriMo, I challenged myself to edit and upload chapters of my YA, mystery, adventure novel The Strange Case onto Wattpad throughout the month. I’ve been familiar with Wattpad for some time and I like how it allows writers to interact directly with their readers. I also like how it motivates folks to continue pushing forward with projects and gives them a platform to share their work.

However, while it was motivating, I think it would be much easier to already have completed editing the novel before uploading the chapters because I would’ve been able to post on a more consistent schedule and not have readers waiting for varying lengths of time for the next chapter. As you can see in the picture above, work, holidays, and life happens, which can lead to dry spells. 

Of course, to clarify, over the last thirty days I’ve only had about sixty reads/views, ten votes, and eight followers. Compared to other works on the platform this is very low, but hey, I’m proud of it!

An additional tool that I really like is Wattpad’s Story Insights. This tool is in its beta phase, but if you haven’t already, I would recommend checking into it. I know I geeked out while looking through it. The tool gives insights into these six categories: writing style, reading accessibility, reading time, sentence length, adverb use, and word repetition. The writing style, reading accessibility, sentence length, and word repetition gave me more insight into my narrative style and tendencies. If you’re trying to hone your craft I could see this being a tool to learn where you can improve.

Right now Wattpad breaks your writing down into five different styles. I was categorized as “literary” and although I don’t typically write literary fiction, I do have a more literary style, so I would say this eval is pretty accurate. 

And then, the reading accessibility and reading time gave me more insight into who is reading my work. Keeping these insights in mind, it’s interesting to go back to the Demographic tab under Stats and see how these compare. Plus, having a better idea of who your audience is, as well as your writing style is definitely helpful when querying agents or talking with publishers. 

What I’m still not completely clear on is what factors contribute to Wattpad’s rankings. Maybe I’m not looking in the right place, but I’m not sure exactly what factors contribute to how the rankings fluctuate from day to day. If you’re new to Wattpad, next to your story, you’ll see a little ribbon with a number and tag name next to it. This stats tells you where your story stands in comparison to other stories in this tag or genre. The best advice I found for ranking “high” is to (1) post consistently and (2) write a quality story. While I think what qualifies as “quality” is pretty subjective, I think the main thing to aim for is to tell a story that’s going to keep readers coming back for more.

Like most social media platforms, I’m going to assume that the higher a story ranks in a tag and/or the higher the engagement (e.g. views, votes, comments, etc.), the more likely Wattpad’s algorithm is going to make it visible to a wider demographic of readers. Of course, if you’re only on Wattpad for the ankings I would say that you might not be on the platform for the right reasons. I don’t think rankings are any indication of the quality of your work. I’ve been reading some great stories with lower rankings and found them to be just as awesome as the ones with higher rankings. 

What am I currently reading on Wattpad?

• Magika by Jaxon M. Tempest

My Top Takeaways

• If you can, finish your draft before you start uploading chapters or story sections to Wattpad.

• Post consistently and post on a schedule. I would also let people know how often you plan to post, this way if you do have a dedicated readership, they know when they can expect your next upload. 

• If someone gives feedback, asks you questions, etc. chat with them—it’s awesome! The Wattpad community is something that many people have commented on and it’s something that I’m curious about and hope to dive further into.

• If you have the ability to make a kickass cover, do it because let’s be honest: People gravitate toward books with cool covers! I’m not great with graphic design, so I used Canva to create my cover.