Welcome To Our New IWSG Administrator, The IWSG Newsletter & The World Of Wattpad

Today we have two exciting announcements!

We welcome Chrys Fey to the admin team! PLUS we have a newsletter! Chrys has been working hard behind the scenes to get the newsletter up and running.

 

The Insecure Writer's Support Group Newsletter will feature articles by industry experts, IWSG members, and administrators. There will also be a dozen links to helpful articles for writers in each edition, as well as a special Member Spotlight. Even if you're not a member of the blogging group, you'll greatly benefit from these FREE monthly newsletters.

The first issue goes out on February 24th.

Sign up link - : http://eepurl.com/bM8oHL

Those who are part of the IWSG monthly blogging are already signed up.

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Also welcome two bloggers, Misha Gericke and Rachel Morgan, who are here to share their Wattpad experiences.

Misha’s Experience

I actually joined Wattpad in 2013, but only really took the time to figure out what to do with it a year later. I basically decided to try it out after hearing a talk about it on NALitChat and have been doing my thing there ever since.

I like Wattpad, but it might not be everyone’s thing. The biggest issue, I think, is that it’s a free platform, but more than that, it’s a free platform with millions of stories competing with yours. So it seems that the two things put together leads to people not realizing the site’s potential.

At the same time, it’s really hard for me to explain how to succeed at Wattpad. The first thing you need to do is commit to a strategy, but that strategy depends on what you want. Some people only want to get some exposure for their story. Others want critiques. Others want a combination of the two.

There is, however, one piece of advice you’ll need to know regardless of what you want: Be social. And by that, I mean more than going around and following people. (In fact, it seems to be distinctly useless to follow people unless you want to read updates about them.) So if you want people to know about you? Go read and comment on their stories. Or be active on the club forums. Or join a book club. Or offer critiques. Or…. You know, figure out what you can do to offer some members of the community something they want.

Which means that (other than writing a damn good story) you’re going to have to put in a lot of work. I believe that the effort is worth it, but, again, it depends on what you want from the platform.

Bio: Misha Gericke lives in the Western Cape, South Africa, where she’s busy working on her next shiny idea. If you’d like to get in touch, you can visit her blog (sylmion.blogspot.com), tweet her (@MishaMFB) or check her out on Wattpad (MishaMFB)

 Rachel’s Experience

Some time in the first half of 2013, I joined Wattpad and uploaded the first five chapters of The Faerie Guardian (Creepy Hollow #1) in the hopes of enticing new readers to check out the full book and the rest of my YA fantasy series. Then, having plenty of other social media platforms to keep up with, I forgot all about Wattpad!

 A number of months (and minimal reads, votes and comments) later in January 2014, Wattpad asked me if I’d be interested in having The Faerie Guardian put onto their Featured Stories list. This would give it far more exposure to many more readers on the Wattpad site. The catch? I would have to upload the complete story and leave it on Wattpad for at least six months. At that point The Faerie Guardian ebook was not free, so I assumed this feature would lead to decreased sales of this particular book. I decided it might be worth it though, if the increased exposure could result in more readers purchasing the remaining books in the series.

 Once the feature began, the reads and votes for the book shot up, and comments filled my inbox. I replied to as many as I could, and suddenly Wattpad became so much fun! Getting to see readers’ in-the-moment reactions to one’s story isn’t an experience we authors often get, and I loved this reader-author interaction.

 It’s now been almost two years since that Wattpad feature, and The Faerie Guardian has over 1.4 million reads and 35,000 votes on the Wattpad site. There’s no way of knowing how many of those reads have led to sales, but I consider the exposure to thousands of readers completely worth it.

 A FEW NOTES:

 - The Wattpad community doesn’t seem to overlap much with the customers who browse Amazon, iBooks and other retailers. Despite making my book freely available on Wattpad, there was no decline in sales of this book.

- Contact Wattpad and ask if they'd be willing to put your book onto the Featured Stories list for a period of time.

 - DO interact with readers who leave comments on your books (unless they’re negative and unhelpful!).

 - YA fiction works well, since many Wattpad readers are teens.

 - Be prepared for the (very few) readers who get upset when they reach the end of your book and find that it’s part of a series and they have to pay to read the rest of it.

Bio: Rachel Morgan is a South African author who spent a large portion of her childhood living in a fantasy land of her own making. She is the author of the bestselling Creepy Hollow series, and the lighthearted contemporary romance Trouble series. You can find her online at her blog, http://rachel-morgan.com/ or you can tweet her @AuthorRMorgan.

Are you on Wattpad? Do you have some Wattpad advice to share with our members? Signing up for our newsletter? Wouldn't you like to be a featured member in the Member Spotlight section of the newsletter?