I wrote here not long ago about Wattpad.com, a site where authors can post their books chapter by chapter. The Bookseller reported recently on one success story involving that site:
“Abigail Gibbs, 17, began publishing her novel The Dark Heroine: Dinner with a Vampire when she was 15 on the online writer’s platform, Wattpad.
Now HarperFiction commissioning editor Amy McCulloch and Erika Tsang from HarperCollins in the US have pre-empted world English language rights for the novel and its sequel. The rights were acquired for a significant six-figure sum from Scott Mendel at Mendel Media Group LLC.
On Wattpad, the novel has been read more than 17 million times, as readers follow the story of 18-year-old Londoner Violet Lee, who is kidnapped by the charismatic heir to the vampire throne, Kaspar Varn.
It was released as an e-book on September 13th (2012), followed by a paperback edition on October 25th.”
Seventeen million is quite a number, but if you go to Wattpad you’ll find plenty of books that have been accessed several million times. The books tend to focus on romance and many of them have a teen audience in mind, but other categories are represented as well. If you want to try out your fiction to see whether it gathers followers (and comments), Wattpad is a good, free way to do so.
(Do you want more tips on writing and marketing what you write? Get my book, Your Writing Coach, published by Nichoals Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers.)