Someone who works for Wattpad contacted me after looking at my website, suggesting I use it for promotion, that they were looking to bring on more romance writers, etc. Huh.
I thought I would share my experience with Wattpad.
After the correspondence above, I started writing a short (15k) romantic comedy. The sex was fade-to-black so I could rate it as PG-13. My intention was just to put it on Wattpad; I didn't plan to submit it elsewhere. After two drafts, I started putting it up in December, proofreading each chapter before posting. I did not have much other activity on Wattpad (participating in clubs, reading other people's work) and got very few reads.
But the woman I had corresponded with from Wattpad got my story on the featured list for Feb. 12, and my reads, votes, and comments increased dramatically. The story now has >130k reads. Now, each read is for each viewing of a given section, and my story has 10 chapters plus an author's note, so keep that and mind
I can check the reads for a chapter individually too; each chapter has a minimum of 7k reads.
According to the demographic info, the majority of the people who've read the story are female. About 1/3 are ages 13-18, 1/3 are 18+, and for 1/3 this info is private. From the comments, it is clear that most of the posters are quite young too, as several asked me what grade I'm in and what grade the main character was in.
It has been a positive experience in that I've actually gotten lots of people reading my writing, and I've received lots of positive comments.
But. I hoped this would be a useful promotion tool, and people would buy my two books that are published with a romance e-pub, one of which is similar in tone to the story I posted in Wattpad, except with sex. I mentioned these books in the author's note.
However, as a promotion tool, it has been a complete disappointment. My sales are just as low as they always are. There is a slight increase in traffic to my website, but that's it.
I also started putting up another story on Wattpad, posting a new chapter 2x a week. (I did 1x a week for the first one.) It's a story that I had submitted to a few publishers and failed to sell, despite getting one very nice personalized rejection. The word count is 15k, which is too short for many publishers, so it wasn't like I had lots of options. So I put it on Wattpad.
Unfortunately, the large number of readers who read my first story don't seem to be reading my second story. Even though my first story is no longer on the first page of the featured list, it still gets way more reads per day than the second story, and few of those people seem to be taking a look at what else I've written.
Anyway. Just thought I would share my experience. Note that these stories are not YA, but contemporary (adult) romance. I will continue to post the second story and see how it goes. See my signature for links to my Wattpad stories.