Wattpad and publishing

This week I got a lovely review on Wattpad for ‘I’ll be Home for Christmas’.

[Thank god, I mean 10,400 reads and only two reviews… don’t get me started on Wattpad.]

But in any case, this is what they said.

And this confused me.

It’s not my story. It’s fanfiction. This is as published as it will get. The characters belong to Stephenie Meyer while the story - beyond the canon of the books - is mine.

Did they not know they were reading fanfiction? It’s clearly marked as such. The cast is listed as the people who played the characters in the movies, with some extra additions of my own.

Do they not understand that fanfiction cannot be published when the original work is within copyright? Not without pulling the names and changing everything. I write too close to canon to do this. And I feel it’s wrong, in any case. [I’m looking at you 50 shades]

I don’t know what they were thinking and I didn’t ask. I just reminded them it was fanfiction and thanked them for taking the time to review.

I can always write my own original stories. Assuming I can finally get around to getting them published. Still got no idea why that is more of an issue for my original stuff than it is for my fanfic.

Sighs…

Wattpad

I haven’t been in Wattpad for a while so it was a pleasant surprise to log in and see that ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ had passed 6k reads. Nice… and it had amassed 452 gold stars. Woot woot.

Well done, Josh.

The next most popular? It’s my Paul one shot ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’… of course it is.

Links: wattpad

New Wattpad stats

I loaded up a few stories on Wattpad a while ago and just recently they have updated their story statistics. In case you haven’t used Wattpad, it is designed to be read on phones and mobile devices. So, each chapter loads in a number of smaller parts and the stats record if readers read all the parts of each chapter, or if they skip ahead.

It looks like this for “I’ll be home for Christmas’.

It looks pretty good. Most readers read all of each part. The story kept their attention.

I will admit to scratching my head at the huge dip for chapter/part 1 but then I understood; if people start a new story and they don’t like it for whatever reason, they stop reading. I was trying to work out if they had read it before somewhere else. So I guess that is a record of how many people gave up.

At part 9 you can see 20% of readers didn’t finish that section.

This is kind of neat for writers. I can go to that section and try to work out why I lost readers. I have to guess; they aren’t telling me. For nearly 3,000 reads the story has 127 stars and 8 comments (4 of which are me replying). Wattpad stars are the equivalent of Ao3 kudos or Facebook likes.

Now I can’t see what they don’t like about ch9; it is Bella meeting up with the pack after her absence of five years. And there are some later chapters that they didn’t read all of as well, but if one really dips then perhaps it is worth rewriting it?

The stats also tell me which parts got stars and on what dates they were given, and it also reveals the demographics of my readers.

Oddly, the numbers don’t show unless you hover over it but the lavender half is age range 13-18, the green quarter 18-25 and the brown private.

In gender, half is female and half private.

I do love stats and I think this is all useful. It will even tell me when I got new readers as it knows when people reread. So if I do a promotion, I can tell if it worked. I only have 14 followers here and I have been very lax at posting anything, (I’m not writing fanfic at the moment) but I also haven’t been reading and commenting on other people’s stories either. And that is the way to be a real participating member of a community.

So if you are reading, take the time to review; writers need to know what you liked and what you didn’t.

My other half

I wrote a super creepy short horror story some years ago. It was from a picture prompt. I sent it out to a few places and entered it in a competition, but nothing really happened with it.

I always liked it. So this week I messed around with Derek’s #covermaker and posted it on #Wattpad. And it looks awesome.

The link is here:

And yes, I know, it could be extended… imagine… skin-walker assassins. Oh, now…

Wattpad versus Ao3 final post

Whoops. I forgot to post the final figures for my month of keeping an eye on my stats for various fanfiction posting sites. Click on the image to enlarge it.

So it goes in this order:

1.     Fanfiction.net 320 hits,

2.     Ao3 82 hits,

3.     Wattpad 28 hits, and

4.     Fictionpad 15

But not many reviews… anywhere… sigh.

Keeping an eye on stats does show one thing, Ao3 is very different to fanfic. There seem to be a lot less Paul/Bella stories there and an unexpected one of mine has leapt to the top of the hit table. Techno Bella - where Quil slips Bella a mickey and she is all over Paul. 

And Wattpad has found one of my creepy short stories, Home.

I think it works that if you comment on a story, your comment is sent to all your followers. More like twitter than fanfic, if that makes sense.

Plus I wrote a small Teenwolf fic called Even more complicated that is smacking everything else in the hits race at Ao3.

Given what that show did to her this week; maybe everyone just wanted to read a happy Allison fic?

Wattpad update.

My muse has been rather squished for the last few days. Dealing with some real life stuff that was draining and emotional and my poor muse just got … flattened. I haven’t written anything for days and it is killing me.

So I went back and scraped through some of my original stuff from a couple of years ago. I can’t post it at fanfic or on Ao3 as it is original work and it predates this blog so it was never posted here. I have been fooling around and uploading the stories onto my Wattpad account. They are all short stories basically.

And I am learning as I go. Nothing like throwing myself in and dog-paddling like mad before I drown.

Wattpad is very basic. All html - at least I think it is. Half my bio has links and half doesn't and I don’t know why. Sigh.

I paste in text and it retains formatting so that’s good… I think.

I have muddled about with covers and worked out how to do them in photobucket but they are pretty basic and I swear that site has it in for me. No no don’t resize it; damn you. It looks horrible now! Reload and start again.

Covers in Wattpad are book sized; a vertical rectangle of 256x400. Good for books, bad for any other kind of banner size. I think fanfic is trying to use that shape, too. But that means that none of my current banners can be reused unless I get them resized.

You can add links to an image but it kind of shows up down on the right hand side like the image below under a heading of ‘media’ and I think the only way you can use more than one image is to make a collage of them yourself before you add the link in. I think… You can add videos, though. Which means you could probably put a song into your chapter if you used a video link to it. Hmmm… or maybe those cute book trailers that I don’t even know how to begin making. Possibilities there.

I am surfing YouTube watching videos made by teens to try and work it out.

Such is my life.

Grins.

Oooh. I have one Wattpad follower! Yay *hugs solitary follower*

Wattpad vs ao3 update

An update of my earlier post.

Fictionpad is very quiet. I made a point of following back everyone who followed me but I am not getting many hits at all. But it is very Twilight heavy and twilight Edward/Bella heavy. The top 40 stories are ALL Ed/Bella. Sigh…

I will try harder to review other stories. I don’t read much fanfic anymore, I just don’t have the time and I suppose it might look a little one sided if I am posting and expecting reviews and not giving them myself. But it does have ‘likes’ and it takes no effort to click that button.

The stats are unusual. I can’t see my stats for a story unless I go to my main page and when you have 70 stories that is a lot of scrolling to even find a particular story on the main page. The stats are not viewable within the story to me but oddly, other viewers can see my stats if I have elected not to hide them. And more easily than I can as the poster. Huh?

And I open my stories in full page mode but other people’s open in an app style small format called ‘popup viewer’. I am using the same interface so I am not sure why it is different for me as a viewer. And it is different for different authors, too and I can’t see where to change it on their stories. I’m confused.

Wattpad stats on the other hand are not very informative. I get that they are in the beta stage but they have three axes and no date. So you can’t tell how your stats have changed over time. Surely any meaningful stats table needs a time/date axis?

So all I get is a giant blue rectangle that gets bigger according to the number of hits. hmmm

Ao3 I have spent days loading up some of my one shots. Yeah, I know right, some… I am up to 33 stories so far. I haven’t even tried to load any multi-chapter stories. Curse you fanfic for stopping auto uploads! Seriously it is all the tag entering that takes the time.

I write a lot of rare pairings so the tags are not searchable for some of my pairings but it seem to be those stories that are garnering the greater number of hits. Interesting.

Fanfiction.net. Comparing ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’ on each format, it looks like this after a week.

And it seems that fanfic is still my best forum. I do have more of a presence on there so that might be understandable but this story is still pulling 10-15 hits a day and it has been posted for two years. 

Wattpad versus Ao3

Joanna Penn from the creativepenn declares that Wattpad is a good and useful tool for authors and a great place to find readers. I saw one of her YouTube vids about using the site and decided to sign up.

I have seen mentions of it on the news. Most famously for a sixteen year old girl who wrote a One Direction fanfic being offered a three book deal by a major publishing house because of her statistics. Yes, really.

I have been a member of An archive of our own (ao3) for a little while but have only been reading, when I got the time, and leaving reviews for a few of my favourite authors who are not at fanfiction any more. My post page was empty.

So, as an experiment, I posted ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’ on both sites at the same time. It is my most popular one-shot on fanfiction and has the ridiculous number of 122 reviews and 12,830 hits. They both allow uploads of banners and it has a nice banner that don’tcallmeleelee made for it a little while ago.

Let’s see what Wattpad and Ao3 do with it!

Here are the links for my page on each site: Wattpad 

and A03.

My username at wattpad is mtramg; you can load original works on the site and that is the point of the exercise, so I hope no-one accuses me of plagiarising my own works of fanfiction. Bwahaha.

Most annoyingly, fanfiction is blocking pings from external sites, so you used to be able to copy existing works over with one click… but no more! Dammit. It will take me 78 days to load them all if I do a story per day. AND chapter stories have to be loaded chapter by chapter. Sigh…