Ben Wiseman
A year ago, a 24-year-old college student named Anna Todd stumbled on a trove of feverish fan fiction about the boy band One Direction. It had been posted to Wattpad, a Toronto-based website and app that lets anyone write a story and comment on the stories of others. Entranced, Todd began concocting her own tale, a torrid romance between a sweet-hearted ingenue and a brooding version of One Direction singer Harry Styles. She typed the first 600 words into Wattpad and hit Publish.
Soon comments began to flood in—mostly cheery praise, excitedly urging her on. Todd began tapping out 3,000 words a day, largely on her Samsung Galaxy smartphone, whenever she got a moment free.
“I have written parts of chapters at the grocery store,” she tells me, laughing. “Even in traffic! If I'm stopped, of course.” Her fans became even more avid, offering editorial suggestions and creating Photoshopped illustrations of plot points. Within a year, Todd had written three books totaling more than 1 million words—a trilogy she called After.
It's one of Wattpad's biggest hits. Collectively, Todd's stories have been read more than 800 million times, and visitors have left more than 3 million comments—sufficient attention that Simon & Schuster is publishing After in print this fall.
Wattpad's success may presage a shift in how fiction is written—and read—by the under-25 crowd that the site primarily serves. The first lesson? Serialization is a powerful way to get readers hooked. It's an old trick, of course: 19th-century novels, including many of Charles Dickens', were often serialized, and the suspense drove fans nearly mad. (“Is Little Nell dead?” New Yorkers hollered from the docks at boats arriving from the UK with the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop.) Wattpad readers subscribe to their favorite stories, getting an alert the instant a new chapter goes live—a sort of literary “status update.”
This addictive approach to publishing drives a stunning amount of reading: 30 minutes a day for the average user, according to Wattpad CEO Allen Lau. And nearly 85 percent of it happens on mobile devices. The chapter-by-chapter approach also encourages authors to write on the go. They compose fully half of Wattpad's stories—200,000 new chapters a day—on smartphones or tablets.
But it's the alchemical relationship between readers and authors that really propels Wattpad. Fiction is often romanticized as a solitary craft—the authors secluded in their aeries, away from worldly distraction—but Todd, like many Wattpad writers, says she couldn't have produced nearly so much without the daily encouragement, scrutiny, and (frankly) pressure from readers hungering to know where the story would go. In that sense Wattpad narratives are perhaps closer to other forms of serial writing—TV or comic books—than to modern literary novels.
Is this good for “literary” fiction? Maybe, maybe not: Wattpad-style authoring may only work with genres like fan fiction, romance, and sci-fi. And some critics say that Wattpad's generally chipper feedback doesn't push writers to improve. (Todd herself winces when she looks back at her early work. “I'm very excited to edit it,” she says dryly.)
But I'm a romantic about creativity. I like anything that encourages people to hit the keyboard—even the one in their pocket. The audience awaits.
