Why do people use display sites?

... if they could get their stuff pub'd with Random House,
or one of the other biggies, I'm sure many would do that instead.
;-)
Bottomline. Writing is difficult.
Wattpad is the best some can do.
And that is fine. Just completing a story others enjoy is
an accomplishment and something to feel good and proud about.
Of course there are other reasons as well for opting for wattpad and the like.

I suppose if the writing is good it could direct a reader to go looking for more work from an author. It could be used as a marketing tool of sorts...

I write way too adult for Wattpad, even my mainstream work. But I do post fan fiction on a couple of sites, just for fun. I've never made a secret of it, and fan readers can easily find my original stuff. I've even had a few sales that route. I'd never post original work for free.

It's not a new thing; the underlying assumption is that publishers/editors/agents will go looking for things to publish, and that they'll go to a display site.

This is not, alas, accurate in general. Most have all they can do to keep up with the flood of submissions.

You might read what Writer Beware and Old Hack have to say about Yet Another Display Site:

http://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/for-authors/writer-beware/services/#Manuscript

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2006/01/victoria-strauss-more-dubious-writers.html

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2012/02/publishers-desk-display-or-misplay.html

http://howpublishingreallyworks.com/?p=1174

I have posted work on places like fanfiction and erotica display sites. I am not delusional or a terrible writer. I sometimes just write for a small community like a fandom or fetish, and all I want to do is share that work with people who will appreciate it.

Experimentation.

Testing the waters for feedback when you don't have anyone you trust to be honest.

Fun.

The desire to have someone, somewhere read and hopefully enjoy a story you never intend to publish.

And, on occasion, the desire to create an audience and hopefully garner enough views and readers to make the book a stand out smash.

Etc, etc, etc...

veinglory said:

I have posted work on places like fanfiction and erotica display sites. I am not delusional or a terrible writer. I sometimes just write for a small community like a fandom or fetish, and all I want to do is share that work with people who will appreciate it.

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Those are almost more communities than display sites though. The goal is to share with readers, not publishers.

Display sites are great if your major goal is to avoid getting rejected.

How would it work if someone posted a story related to (but not directly from) another original story? Like, they don't keep copyright for posting, do they? This might sound like a stupid question, just a random thought of how someone could use the site to their advantage.

I'm not really familiar with display sites like Wattpad, but some people just want to have fun and put their stuff out there. I don't really anticipate or plan to make money off of my writing, so it's something I'd consider if I thought it was the best way to promote my stuff and have it read.

I post fanfic and erotica on free sites.

Medievalist said:

Those are almost more communities than display sites though. The goal is to share with readers, not publishers.

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They are all communities, some pretend to be something else as well, and some don't. Wattpad, Deviant art, Literotica etc. In my experience most people are not there because they expect to be "discovered". Sometimes people just do thing for fun. Even if they also write material for publication.

Holy cow, all the Harry Style fan fics. (I've been browsing out of curiosity) I also noticed that most of the covers are better than a lot of selfpubbed covers (but also many are unusable pics, some with celebrities and such that I'm sure they don't have permission for.)

DancingMaenid said:

I'm not really familiar with display sites like Wattpad, but some people just want to have fun and put their stuff out there.

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This.

Thinking about this question makes me a little nostalgic for my fan fiction days. It's nice to have people read your stuff, follow it, and like it. When you're not asking anyone to pay for your writing, it's a low pressure situation. I never felt stressed about fanfiction--it was purely something I did in my free time, exactly when I felt like it and never when I didn't.

Now I'm doing this whole "let's write a book and maybe hopefully people will someday want to pay for it" thing. It's rewarding, definitely, but I have now officially stressed about writing. It's a very different experience. I understand the appeal of the more low pressure approach that something like Wattpad can offer writers.

ETA: I know some people are much more serious about their fanfiction than I ever was--and that's good too. Just for me, this is what I would find appealing about something like Wattpad.

I've posted a few stories on Wattpad that I wrote just for fun, after I decided they were very unlikely to be published professionally. With the market for short fiction being what it is, there isn't much opening for stories that have only niche appeal. This way, at least I get to share my work with a few people who may appreciate it.

By the way, does anyone know what's up with how Wattpad counts page views? I used to think it gave a reasonably accurate count of how many people looked at your stories. But now I've been told the numbers are way off because of page visits by bots and spiders. Is there any way to find out what's really going on? I'd like to think that a few hundred real people have in fact read my stories.

gingerwoman said:

It's pretty irrelevant to me anyway since what I currently write is too explicit for such things...

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... in an ideal world that wouldn't make a difference.
Perhaps one day.

Kevin Nelson said:

By the way, does anyone know what's up with how Wattpad counts page views? I used to think it gave a reasonably accurate count of how many people looked at your stories. But now I've been told the numbers are way off because of page visits by bots and spiders. Is there any way to find out what's really going on? I'd like to think that a few hundred real people have in fact read my stories.

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No idea, but the 'reads' stat is incredibly misleading. Tens of millions of reads? Not a chance. They certainly count every view of every chapter every time, so you probably have to divide the overall stat by the number of chapters.

What I do is look at the numbers of comments (and votes, to a lesser extent) per chapter. Comment numbers aren't uniques - people may well comment more than once - but I figure if you divide them by three or four you get a baseline.

More generally: I would echo the comments about display sites above, with some exceptions.

No, publishers don't routinely trawl display sites. We have enough to be getting on with, and the quality on most of them is identical to slush (often lower.) Any website which is trying to 'revolutionise publishing' by 'ranking the slushpile' etc is going to be useless. If I ever want to read a novel that has about a 1% chance of being of any interest, there are ten under my desk in brown envelopes at any one time.

That's why display sites have been coming and going for so long that we have the phrase 'YADS'. They have all singularly failed to revolutionise publishing. For a long time the only one with any staying power was Authonomy, and that was because it had a formal link with HarperCollins, and thus people could feel there was a genuine chance their book might get read by someone other than another member.

Here's the thing, though: recently, you will have seen top-rated Wattpad authors get publishing deals with at least three of the Big Five. Wattpad is interesting to me and to others in that it's not really geared towards publishing. The demographic is overwhelmingly young, female, and distributed all over the world (especially the US, UK and Philippines.) It's teenagers, basically, and as such of interest primarily to people in children's books.

These aren't people hoping to get noticed - they're just telling each other stories. It's why Wattpad has a split between original fiction and fan-fiction (One Direction, primarily.) A publishing-focused site like Authonomy wouldn't host the latter, and a fanfic site wouldn't host the former.

The paradox is I wouldn't discount Wattpad as a path to publication, but only so long as you aren't actually trying to get published. The people who have been successful tend to have been focused on pleasing their peers on the site rather than building a portfolio of work to sell. It's also, of course, going to be almost exclusively YA/NA.

(All this applies to a lesser extent to Movellas - similar in a lot of ways, but on a smaller scale.)

Just for fun. That's all. Not everything in writing is about getting a trade publishing contract.

I posted a whole lot of stories on fanfiction.net. I wasn't trying to get published. I was doing it because I loved writing and wanted people to read my stories.

You know, there are people who don't write for money, and writers who do write for money, but occasionally just want to put something out for the heck of it.

Not everything is about getting a publishing deal. Sometimes, writing is just for the sheer joy of putting words on the page and having others enjoy them.

Fun, pleasure, gratification, sharing. There's a level of enjoyment when you get those likes and kudos and comments from people who liked your writing. It's right there and makes you feel good.

gingerwoman said:

Why do people post their work up on those places like wattpad? I don't get it.

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They do it for the same reason that people post fanfiction, or share work on their blogs - interaction, gratification, reaching new readers and sharing something they love and are proud of.

Not everyone who writes does it for the same reasons. Some people don't care about getting published or making money. Some people write for the pure love of it and just want to share it with other people.

Torgo said:

No idea, but the 'reads' stat is incredibly misleading. Tens of millions of reads? Not a chance. They certainly count every view of every chapter every time, so you probably have to divide the overall stat by the number of chapters.

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It's the same counting program used by a lot of fanfic sites.

1 story, 20 chapters.

^ with one reader, you get 20 views, however, if that one reader decides that they want to read it again, then you've got 40.

If 10 people decide they like the story enough to read twice, then you've got 400 views.

But, say you're reading a story and stop at chapter 17 because you have to go do something else. If you don't pick back up at 17, but start at 1 and page through to get back to your place, that's another 17 "reads."

If you page back from chapter 9 to chapter 5 to double check on something that's confusing, and then page back to 9 to keep reading, that's another 8 views.

To put it in perspective, I had fanfics rack up over 1,000,000 views in less than a month, but the site also tracked readers, not just views. That was a *seriously* inflated read count. 30 times, or more the number of views compared to the number of readers.

Most sites like that don't cache, so I'm not sure if the bot reads actually matter, but if they do, you'd have to add them to the total, too.

(The "average" (in quotes, not literal, just from experience) reader / comment baseline on major sites, with a well written fic is usually around 10 readers per unique comment.)

Torgo said:

No idea, but the 'reads' stat is incredibly misleading. Tens of millions of reads? Not a chance. They certainly count every view of every chapter every time, so you probably have to divide the overall stat by the number of chapters.

What I do is look at the numbers of comments (and votes, to a lesser extent) per chapter. Comment numbers aren't uniques - people may well comment more than once - but I figure if you divide them by three or four you get a baseline.

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Thanks for the answer...I guess it really is hard to say about this sort of thing. People can comment multiple times, people can read without commenting, spiders and bots can come in, etc. etc.

My stories appear to be in no danger of having millions of page views listed, though at the rate they're going they might reach a few thousand. I'll have to be content just knowing some people have read them.

These aren't people hoping to get noticed - they're just telling each other stories. It's why Wattpad has a split between original fiction and fan-fiction (One Direction, primarily.)

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You're not kidding. It seems like every tenth story there is Harry Styles fan-fic. Is "fan-fic" even the right word? When I saw all those stories, at first I thought Harry Styles was a character in some TV series or book series that I'd never heard of before. Then I found out he was a real person. Shouldn't there be a different word for that sort of "fan-fic"?