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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.
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So here’s what happened
Most of you by now know that I’ve unpublished Chapter 38 of my Wattpad story The Billionaire’s Price — less than 24 hours after I had published it.
I’ve tried to explain the reason why I did this, but for some reason very few people were able to grasp what I was trying to say. For one thing, almost everyone assumed it was haters that drove me to unpublish chapter 38. Here’s the thing: I never mentioned haters. I never said people were insulting me or my story. All I said was that people were misbehaving in the comments section. People were posting hateful, sexist, violent comments on Chapter 38.
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“Write when it rains” by Jessica Semaan
Write when it rains
Write when it shines
Write on a restaurant’s table mat after a boozy dinner
Write in your old book, that you know you will never read again -
A.C. / TBP FAQ #3 – Will you read my story?
Q. Will you read my story? A. Probably not. I don’t like unsolicited advertising (a.k.a. spam). Some authors don’t mind if you send them a message asking them to check out their stuff, but I do. When I get messages like this, I normally don’t bother replying. Q. Will you ask your readers to check out my story? A. Probably not. If I do endorse a story (I haven’t yet), it’s because I have read it and liked it a lot. There are some stories I like, and I will put them in a reading list which you’ll be able to see on my profile. I have a couple of stories on my one reading list so far, but I will add more.
Q. Will you read my story and give me honest feedback?
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A.C. / TBP FAQ #1
Q. Are you Filipino? A. Yes.
Q. When is the next update of The Billionaire’s Price? A. Usually about five days from the day the latest chapter was posted, give or take a few days.
Q. Can you update TBP every day please? A. While I would love to be able to do nothing but write, I have a job. I need to make time for fiction writing. Sometimes I skip parties and meeting my friends just so I can write. So, no, I can’t update the story every day.
Q. Why do you do this to me? (A.K.A. Why must you end the chapter with a cliffhanger?)
