So as a fiction writer (one of my multitudes), I am acutely aware of traditional publishing’s major shortcomings. It’s slow, doesn’t pay enough for the extensive effort, and elitist. That’s been thoroughly cataloged since the internet (and especially Twitter) has been A Thing.
Which is great. Traditional narrative publishing is a dusty-ass institution that’s been even worse than newspapers at adapting to the promise of electronic distribution and payment systems, so the more folks call it out and press for change, the more alternate paths can assert their usefulness and find unique ways of reaching their best audiences.
HOWEVER. On the writers’ side, this has started an unfortunate trend of getting people’s hopes of fame and fortune up with no intentions whatsoever of fulfilling any of that.
Which brings me to WattPad. I saw an ad for it on my Facebook feed and clicked it because after a billion years of this I’m still a goddamn sucker for any sort of vague way to get my stuff out there, and it looked like it might fit that bill (or pay like one and a half of mine).
But I’m also suspicious as hell about sites like this, so I did some digging to answer my title question: Is WattPad a scam, or nah?
Mela
Melanie the Constant Reader is never a scam! Subscribe below!
The tl;dnr of it is, it depends on what you want to get out of it.
If you’re looking for an online writing community to connect with people and get real-time feedback, WattPad seems to fit that bill pretty well:
WattPad is a website that lets you post your writing into electronic book format, complete with cover art if you want to either make and upload your own or buy something from the cover art forum. Then you get followers to read, like, and comment on your books, while you do the same for them. It’s a sort of writing social media structure.
Its usage is free if you don’t mind watching ads after you read something. If you do, there’s a Premium version for $5/month or $59.99/year that lets you skip those. WattPad’s using your eyeballs for money, but hey, at least there’s a non-absurd way to get past that while keeping the site running.
One big complaint about WattPad is how terrible, fan fiction-y, and romantically obsessed the offerings are. How it’s taken over by teenage girls and their weird slash fics and bad grammar and formulaic plots and such. I honestly think this is a great thing. Young people, and especially girls, need places to explore and vent their confusing emotions, and a creative outlet like this is like the best-case scenario for that. Plus, they get to socialize with and celebrate others who share their same interests. And do you know how much shit you have to write and wade through before you’re any good at writing, ever, at all? SO MUCH. In high school, my old writing.com account was the only place I felt like I could be the real me, and I have a deep-rooted appreciation for its wide range of acceptance, even though I haven’t opened it in at least a decade and have never much been into the more let’s say intense genres myself. There’s no wrong way to be a writer, except if you talk about it without ever putting any words down. </end rant> Hang on not quite: LET THE KIDS WRITE THEIR STORIEZ. </okay for real now>
So! Now that we’ve gone over the good stuff, it’s time for the bad. Because there are definitely some scam-tastic parts to WattPad. Most of them come into focus when, surprise surprise, the site starts promising money to its writing users.
There have been several iterations of WattPad paying authors (while keeping the company flush, natch), with varying degrees of success. I’ll go into detail about each one below, but they all depend on getting seen, chosen, and highlighted on the site. With “80+ million” worldwide claimed users (4 million as authors) and 665 million stories uploaded so far (their Studios site has a neat ticker thingy), that’s a lot of noise to cut through with your own barbaric yawp.
And a computer is running the slush pile. WattPad uses a proprietary AI that measures stuff like story complexity, originality, readability, and etc. to choose who gets its prizes and who gets to go into its paid programs. I’ll give ’em credit, reading and comparing so much raw fiction is a super interesting way to develop machine learning, especially with something so subjective. It’s pretty sweet, robot-wise. And a human employee of WattPad does personally read what the AI picks as a final layer of quality control. But. But, but, but, the AI is not there yet and won’t be for a while, if ever, and if that’s WattPad’s first step to picking good stories from their platform, they’re letting a lot slip through the cracks. And user Sara Creasy blogged about her experience buying the Story Insights Report (which she calls “a way for WattPad to get money from authors” since its reader-paid efforts haven’t gone over super well); spoiler alert, it’s great at statistical analysis of her work, not so great on how well it’s connected together and comes out as an artistic whole. Since WattPad does not publish exactly how its choosy AI works, this was an insightful close second, especially as it’s being sold to WattPad authors as a way to learn how to adjust their writing to get it noticed more.
First came fan-funding, where an author would set a financial goal and get readers to donate like on GoFundMe. If the goal was met in thirty days, the author would get the money less a 5% overall fee and $0.30 per transaction fee that WattPad would keep itself. Right now it’s still got a page on the WattPad site, but it’s pretty dead.
Then you had WattPad’s Futures program. Basically, WattPad would let certain authors get a cut of the ad revenue their stories produced each quarter in exchange for letting ads run after each of their chapters. If your stories generated $100 or more, you’d get paid at the end of the quarter. If not, they’d roll over to the next. Simple! Except it wasn’t. Many authors who participated got pathetically low checks or none at all, with the excuse that their 100k+ views weren’t generating enough per pay period. They called bullshit in places like this Twitter thread, and after about a year Futures shut down.
Now WattPad has created a space for exclusively paid content - so the vast majority of the stories on the site remain free to read, but certain “carefully curated” (every time I hear that phrase I just … just … this) stories require in-site coins that cost real money to unlock. (You will still see ads, though, unless you shell out for a Premium reader membership, which as far as I could tell doesn’t give any money to the writers.)
Also, WattPad is doing what so many blogging companies/bloggers do that I find confusing yet hilarious, in that they are teaming up and making their own traditional media like publishing physical books and pitching movies and TV shows based on their authors’ content. (I realize Netflix deals might not be THE most traditional sort of media, but they do create TV shows to make money.) WattPad takes the standard 15% fee from the writer, and there have been some success stories like that lady whose Harry Styles fan fiction got the full treatment.
But I want to emphasize: these are all programs writers are chosen for. Authors on WattPad don’t have any more autonomy or realistic chance of getting big money or the spotlight than they would by submitting their books through traditional means. Plus, WattPad is making authors money by circling back around to the exact systems it proclaims to sidestep. It’s not really very new at all, when you get down to the heart of it.
So final verdict on WattPad: You may get legions of internet fans, thoughtful insight from your target audience (which is hopefully young and female AF), and an accepting writing community. All of those are well and truly noble goals.
But you won’t get rich or famous. Sorry. I wanted it to be true, too.
Bonus: I fell into this rabbit hole of Jane Conquest and her YouTubed story of how WattPad screwed her over. I’m linking the second video in her series because it’s the one where she has a bunch of receipts from workers inside WattPad and WattPad’s volunteer unpaid moderator program, and her own story is compelling as a narrative of what can go wrong with sites like this. (It’s also how I found that Twitter thread.) I’m not using her as a direct source, though, because she’s clearly got a reason to be angry at the company (and I got distracted at how good she can do winged eyeliner). Just note that I did find a lot of research that corroborates what she says about the author experience, but I didn’t take on the moderator stuff because I’ve never been a member and she spent five years there getting known on the site like only an online teenager can. She also has a “subscribe to PewdiePie” sign in the background which, ugh, fine, whatever. *old writer shakes cane at sky*