Writer’s Digest has announced that it will publish The Writer’s Guide to Wattpad in July 2018. To some of us, this seems like a late development—Wattpad has passed its 10th anniversary and is easily the largest writing-and-reading platform of its kind in the world, with more than:
- 60 million active users monthly
- 15.5 billion minutes spent monthly on the platform
- 400 million uploads shared on the platform
- 50 languages supported in stories and writer-reader interaction
As boggling as those figures are, many authors and publishers have been slow to grasp the audience-development potential of the Toronto-based company, despite its recent deals with such traditional companies as Hachette Romans in Paris and its expansion of services into chat apps and the recently released Raccoon video app.
Ben Sobieck is the book’s editor, and he has a special understanding of the arsenal Wattpad can bring to promotion: he’s both digital product manager for FW Media, the parent company of Writer’s Digest, and a Wattpad Star—one of the writers designated by Wattpad to generate promotional content about companies’ products for the Wattpad readership. These can be lucrative assignments, “opportunities the gravity of Wattpad pulls into its orbit,” Sobieck says.
“I joined Wattpad as a skeptic in 2015,” he tells The Hot Sheet. “Today, most of my fiction is published exclusively on the site.” Sobieck has 1.3 million reads, and one of his novels won a 2016 Watty Award. As a Wattpad Star, he’s worked with sponsored campaigns, most notably with FOX television for The Exorcist.
Sobieck will edit targeted chapters by fellow Wattpad Stars, the best known of which may be author Anna Todd, who has gone on to sign two multi-book contracts with Simon & Schuster based on her Wattpad work. Sobieck will write the broader, strategy-based chapters of the book himself.
Bottom line: Remember that Wattpad is heavily weighted toward Millennials. All boats may not float there. But Sobieck is right when he tells us, “If you can get a volume of readers to care about what you write, you’ve got yourself a writing career.” The number of readers active on the platform monthly has just passed the size of the population of Italy. “It’s the on-ramp for a career,” as Sobieck puts it.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
