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Have a Snack, sell your ebooks
Let’s face it, we Philippines-based creators have always had difficulty selling our products online because so many of our potential customers simply don’t have or don’t want to use credit cards. I’ve gotten a few emails from my readers telling me they couldn’t buy my ebooks, a thing that confused me a lot of the time because I thought it meant Amazon or Gumroad or whatever platform they’re trying to buy from wasn’t accepting their credit cards. It turns out, they meant they literally couldn’t buy my books. Because they didn’t have credit cards.
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I will answer your questions about online serial fiction writing and publishing
On March 29 (11am to 11pm Manila Time), I’ll be holding a Question & Answer session on Facebook on the topic of Writing and Publishing Serialized Fiction. It will be hosted/moderated by my friend and author Mina V. Esguerra. Attendees may ask relevant questions, and even share their experiences during the discussion. Please note that I write only in English, so this forum will be conducted in English and may only be applicable to writers in that language. Writers and authors of all genres are welcome.
Preliminary Questions (and the Answers)
- Q. What is serial fiction? A. Serial fiction is stories (novels, novellas) that are published one chapter at a time on platforms like Radish and Wattpad. Successful authors of serialized fiction may have thousands, even millions of followers. Some of them have gone on to get book deals from publishers and self-publish their work on Amazon and other markets.
- Q.Why would anyone want to ask you questions about online serial fiction writing and publishing? A. Because it’s what I do! I publish serialized fiction for both Wattpad and Radish with considerable success. My first novel The Billionaire’s Price racked up 22 million reads on Wattpad (before I unpublished it so I could sell it on Amazon and iTunes and a bunch of other online book retailers) and it hit the no. 1 spot in the Romance hotlist several times in a period of five months. My ongoing serialized novel The Billionaire’s Lie has gotten over 111,000 reads on Wattpad since it debuted last month. It’s also published on Radish, where it’s currently the third most-read story on the app. Oh, and my Wattpad account has over 177,000 followers.
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How to get people to read your story on Wattpad
People ask me how I’d gotten all those reads for my story The Billionaire’s Price. These are usually new writers who ask me this, or writers who have had their works up for some time but haven’t gotten as many readers as they would like. It’s quite frustrating, I know, spilling your guts out in a story and posting it online for everyone to see only to get a handful of reads after several months.
TBP has racked up 18.5 million reads as of this writing. There was a time when it didn’t have even a million reads. There was a time when it didn’t have a thousand reads, or even a hundred. When I started posting TBP, I didn’t have any followers on Wattpad because I was new and TBP was my first story.
This is what most new writers have to deal with in the beginning. So don’t be discouraged! There are steps you can take to find your audience, it’s not all dependent on luck. Everyone could use some luck, of course, but if you rely entirely on luck, you probably won’t get anywhere.
First, I will tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t go around Wattpad posting links to my story on people’s account pages. I didn’t message random Wattpad users with links to my story, begging them to read it. (I’m not sure spamming Wattpad users and begging them to read your story works, but let me tell you this: if some random person spams me with a link to their story, I ignore it.) I didn’t even have a Twitter or Facebook page in the beginning, so I wasn’t able to promote my story in either of those platforms.
