“You have to upload your next chapter, Hazal, I want to know what happens next,” a close friend gushed to me one morning during registration. No, I do not have a publishing deal and no, I have no real experience in creative writing apart from a few amateur attempts at creating my own novel, a journey I began at the age of 11.
What my gushing friend was trying to say was: “When will you upload on to Wattpad next?” If you’ve not heard of Wattpad, you don’t know a girl in her early teens. Wattpad is a global sensation in young adult literature. And I fell for it hard.
It started as “a mobile reading app,” says Allen Lau, Wattpad’s co-founder and CEO. “Ivan (Yuen, co-founder of Wattpad) was one step ahead of me and in addition to a mobile reading app he also created a website which allowed people to share their writing on mobile devices. Once we discovered we were working on a similar idea we decided to start a company.” However, Lau didn’t expect the initial growth to be among young female users. “It wasn’t really our intention. We wanted to create a place for people to share their writing and that’s actually pretty generic. I believe the younger generation are at such an age where they are more perceptive to new ideas and new concepts, and that’s why it started taking off.”
In my case, introduced to it by friends, I slowly became addicted, clicking and double-clicking my way through until my online “library” was full of romance and the paranormal, often finishing 40-chapter stories in a day. I downloaded the app on to my iPod Touch – you can also get it on iPhone and iPad – and when I saw I could read stories offline it began a reading marathon as I commuted between work-experience jobs.
Boy was it exhilarating. So much so that I abandoned “real” fiction for a while, relishing instead the heaps of clichés that populated practically every story I read. And as most readers know, stories have an uncanny ability to spark one’s own creativity and inspiration. So I began writing and uploading my own stories, choosing to (the originality will blow your mind, I’m sure of it) centre my narrative on a werewolf romance.
Nonetheless, my story has attracted around 12,000 views, 262 likes and a stream of comments to date all of which offered me motivation and the giddy happiness to keep on going. As a social platform, Wattpad grew through word of mouth between teenagers – it’s now a craze in several countries around the world. Alongside my own friends, 25 million others also read and write on the website, collectively having uploaded 40m stories and spending a total of 41bn minutes on the website.
“The initial growth in the first year was depressing,” admits Lau. “After a year we had perhaps 1,000 users, I can’t remember the exact amount, it was very low. The second year we started to see more and more users. And then we started to see things accelerate by the third year.” It continues to grow to this day with most users residing in the UK, the US and Canada. Although, according to Lau, it’s the number one app in the Philippines.
Despite Wattpad’s vast impact, it remains largely unknown or under-rated. Margaret Atwood has said she believes that Wattpad “opens the doors and enlarges the view in places where the doors are closed and the view is restricted”. In an interview with the Guardian, she noted that “once again people are giving me strange looks” because of her association with the app, when she “should be endorsing Literature, capital L” instead.
Wattpad’s power to catapult teenage girls into the world of publishing has been extraordinary: some users have received publishing deals with the likes of Harper Collins and Random House. Eighteen-year-old Beth Reekles garnered a three-book deal with Random House US after her story, The Kissing Booth, hit 19m reads on the website. Since then Reekles has been cited as one of Time magazine’s most influential teens. The fact that she reached Random House’s radar, currently studies physics at Exeter University and is considered an American teenage sensation is stunning and inspiring to thousands of girls like me who dream of publishing a book someday – or just excelling in whatever they choose to do.
“Publishers are increasingly aware of Wattpad and novellas and fan fiction and they are certainly keeping an eye on it,” says Charlotte Eyre, children’s editor at The Bookseller. “Publishers want the best books and if they find great writing talent on Wattpad, why not? They are very aware that teenagers read and write [on the website] and also that teenagers aren’t big readers of eBooks. I think it’s fantastic and more publishers should do it.” Eyre also notes that yearly collaborations between publishers, such as Wattpad and its competitor Hot Key, are common, something I’m more than ready to try my luck at.
For me, another perk of the site is discovering sides to your friends you never knew existed. This was the case with one of my very close friends. We hadn’t spoken much about boys with each other before. In fact, the actual possibility that either of us could have a crush on someone real was somewhat strange. But, reading her story on Wattpad, it dawned on me that she liked a boy we both knew. It couldn’t be entirely coincidental that her love interest had the exact same characteristics and features as that boy. The realisation left me feeling amused, if a little cheeky.
I have two sisters. They are 14 and 12 and before they were into Wattpad, it was all about One Direction. Their rather frightening obsession resulted in a friend suggesting to my 14-year-old sister Heral, that she read fan fiction about the boy band. She had never read novels before, but after that you could not separate her from her iPod Touch with a pair of pliers. Often it’s 4am and 12-year-old Hislen is begging for her to switch off the lamp, but no, she needs to read.
Eventually, Hislen began to portray similar symptoms. Unexpected things began to happen. Heral would come home, telling our mum all about her new English teacher and his stream of praise for her. This was shocking; she had always been the opposite of me, hating English. To see the transformation in her grades was amazing – and something I fully credit to Wattpad. If this app hadn’t provided her with the only type of story she could love and feel passionate about, my sister’s improvement in English may not have happened.
Of course, while the app provided me with entertainment, excitement and joy for a good year or so, my time as both reader and writer has ended. I could not carry on. The spelling, grammar and poor plotting began to irk me and the need to read more riveting and thought-provoking literature took over. Right now, I’m on The Great Gatsby. When I was asked to write this article, I imagined my story lying forgotten, gathering dust and cobwebs, and logged into my account for the first time in ages. To my surprise I saw that readers were still continuing to like, read and comment on my story – some only hours or days before. I have to tell you, a feeling of warmth spread through me.
Hazal, who is 17, is part of the Social Mobility Foundation’s aspiring professionals programme
