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.