Why I left Wattpad for Substack

Taking control of my writing platform

My first, tentative Substack newsletter was sent in May 2021. After poking a toe in the water, I committed to multiple newsletters per month in September 2021 and haven’t looked back since.

What was initially a Mailchimp replacement has since become the central hub for all of my creative output. This was not planned, yet here we are.

Rewind a bit further, to 2015, and things were very different. I was starting my first experiment in serial fiction, publishing a new chapter every week on the Wattpad platform. For six years Wattpad remained the main outlet for my writing. I’ve come to realise that my move from Wattpad to Substack is as much about paradigm shifts in the wider internet as it is about my particular situation.

Wattpad transformed my writing

Before going any further, let’s be clear: Wattpad has been very good to me, it changed my life in unexpected and positive ways, and I wouldn’t be writing here now if it wasn’t for the years on Wattpad.

I published three books with Wattpad as the main destination: A Day of Faces, The Mechanical Crown and No Adults Allowed.

My profile on Wattpad

For context, here are some numbers:

• A Day of Faces has 189,000 reads and won a Watty Award in 2016

• The Mechanical Crown has 95,000 reads

• No Adults Allowed has 57,000 reads

• Combined, those three books have received 5,700 comments from readers

• I have 2.4K followers (this does not seem to translate into actual readers)

All of that was from a standing start, as a new writer nobody had heard of. In my time there I’ve had books featured, became a Wattpad Star and two of the books were invited into the ‘Paid’ program (more on that later).

More to the point, none of those books would exist if I hadn’t started using Wattpad. It was specifically writing and publishing online that made something click in my brain and kept me coming back to the keyboard.

In those early days there was a vibrant writing community in the Wattpad forums (which no longer exist), and I took part in fun ‘Block Parties’ and collaborative events.

If you’re not familiar, Wattpad is essentially this:

• Conceptually a bit like YouTube for words (but YouTube circa 2012)

• Free to use, for writers and readers (although some books are now paywalled)

• Algorithmically-driven, like YouTube and other social platforms

• Heavy on YA, romance and paranormal versions of the two (think: Twilight)

• Full of fan fiction (back in the day, especially Harry Styles fan fiction 🤷‍♀️)

• Owned by Webtoon, the online comics provider with a similar-ish demographic

For six years I shared my work on Wattpad, promoting it across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Discord and so on. I cross-posted to the likes of Royal Road, Inkitt and Tapas, to try to find more readers. I dabbled with Patreon and Ko-Fi, but never convinced my Wattpad readers to support me there. I had a website and blog, and sent out sporadic Mailchimp newsletters.

The writing was going well, but the ‘author business’ end felt like it had hit a dead end. The indie publishing ebook scene looked far more enticing and rewarding, but weekly serials were (and are) my thing. I needed a different approach.

Growing tired of the content treadmill

Gradually, my priorities shifted. My interests changed.

Also, the internet was evolving, although I’ve only become conscious of this in retrospect.

It used to be vital to ‘build your author platform’. That’s what everyone banged on about for the 2010s. Which usually meant trying to get a lot of Twitter followers, or build a Facebook page. It was all about content (but that content was never your actual books). The cleverer people recommended building a mailing list, which seemed a bit old fashioned - but they were actually ahead of the game.

Increasingly, the social media author presence has become an ephemeral thing. It’s become apparent that social platforms, especially the big two of Twitter and Facebook, are too volatile to build upon. Rather than being a promise of ‘democratisation’ and independence, they’ve become shackles and addictions.

We became aware of the algorithms and how they are not our friends. What seemed like a magic spell for finding new readers slowly shifted into an unpredictable time bomb. Engagement on social media gradually dropped, with the platforms all desperate to lock people into their ad-driven ecosystems. They didn’t want you sending people off to other places, such as Wattpad. At the same time, it became evident that their corrosive systems were impacting on politics and the fabric of society itself.

Then there’s Wattpad itself. An algorithmically-powered, vast library of content. Great for readers! Difficult for me as a writer. With each new book, I got the sense that I wasn’t really building ‘a readership’. Each book felt like starting from scratch. I became acutely aware that I didn’t own my community of readers. I couldn’t take them with me to another platform, and had no way of contacting them outside of Wattpad’s limited systems. It wasn’t my audience; it was Wattpad’s audience.

Building that ‘author platform’ is still important, it just doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to.

Despite being conceptually similar to YouTube, Wattpad has never had a normal monetisation option. The paid stories program is invite-only, and somewhat obscure. Even as a reader, you have to buy ‘coins’, with which you can then unlock chapters. It’s convoluted and weird.

Wattpad designed these new covers for the ‘paid’ editions. Let’s just say that I’ll be going in a different direction for future ebook and paperback releases.

Two of my books were invited into the paid program in 2022, which should have been a big deal. It’s what I’d always hoped for and had been aiming towards in my time on the platform. My contract restricts me from being able to discuss specifics, but let’s just say I’m unlikely to continue with the program once the year’s exclusivity ends this summer.

There have been other changes: the forums went away. The Stars program was largely shut down, or at least morphed into something very different and less engaging. The Wattpad Discord servers, official and unofficial, were sprawling and confusing. There was a bizarre attempt at one point to get ‘Star’ writers to commit to regular posting on Wattpad, without payment or revenue share. The justification was that it would ‘motivate’ writers to be productive, but it felt uncomfortably one-sided.

That was the point I stopped using Wattpad, other than as a basic, time-delayed cross-posting venue for my Substack chapters.

The internet has changed

While all of that was happening, I was simultaneously exploring what Substack could do. Initially I’d thought it’d be a simpler alternative to Mailchimp. It didn’t take long to realise it could be more.

I shut down the blog on my website at some point in late-2021. Nobody read it, because nobody goes to a randomer’s blog to read stuff in the 2020s. The only post that had any traction was a scathing review of the movie Taken that I’d published in 2013, which hilariously still angers the movie’s weirdly aggressive fans.

Around 2016 I more-or-less stopped using Facebook. Towards the end of 2022 I finally quit my Twitter addiction. I’m very grateful to Elon Musk for making that process suddenly so quick and painless.

A glimpse of my old profile on the social media site ‘Twitter’, which was popular between 2006 and 2022. It was used obsessively by journalists, which gave the platform a perceived importance that was, in fact, entirely illusory.

It’s 2023 and I’m all-in on Substack. That might not be the case forever, but that’s OK, because I own my subscriber list and all of my content. There’s no awkward contracts, and no lock-in. This is what building an author platform really looks like.

Notes launched early 2023 and it’s been transformative again: superficially similar to Twitter in its UI but otherwise very different. It’s the best writing group I’ve ever been part of.

The social media scramble of the 2010s seems like a collective mania. Like we all went mad for a decade and a half.

Qualitative not quantitative

It’s taken me a while to properly vocalise it, but I’ve realised that all of these shifts represent a bigger cultural and structural change online.

Here on Substack, I’m probably never going to hit those massive readers numbers that I found on Wattpad. But that’s fine. It’s not about THE BIGGEST NUMBERS anymore. It’s about high quality interactions. Deeper and more rewarding conversations with readers and writers.

Since I've been here I've taken part in (free!) growth incubator programmes organised by Substack themselves, I've found support in the

Fictionistas

community, I've met countless amazing and generous writers. I've also built a much bigger mailing list and readserhip than I've ever had - and it's an asset that I own.

It's hard work and there's more responsibility on me to treat my subscribers properly. But it all feels like time well spent: not something I can say about those countless hours spent on Twitter trying to ‘build a platform’. Substack seem to be trying to build a business by supporting writers, in a way that I’ve not really seen before. Hopefully they won’t be bought and destroyed by a rich American weirdo.

None of this is Wattpad's fault. They just represent a different generation, and an old fashioned understanding of how creative people want to use the Internet in the 2020s. It's an outdated business model based on ads, platform control and attention economies.

The model has changed. It's going to be harder for corporations in the years to come. But I think it's going to be great for people.

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