Wattpad gives writers a place online to tell their stories
Managers of the British boy band “One Direction” hired a writer to post a work of fan fiction — a serialized fantasy about the band members. Within a week, it had been viewed 100,000 times. And since that posting, 12,000 other pieces of “One Direction” fan fiction have been written by Wattpad users.
Lau says he doesn’t see Wattpad as a competitor to traditional publishing houses. Users retain copyrights to all works they upload, and Wattpad has no plans to print any content it generates. But a few Wattpad writers, he notes, have leveraged their success on the site to land book contracts.
(Imagezoo/GETTY IMAGES/IMAGEZOO)
(JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) - Canadian author Margaret Atwood.
Last year, the company raised $3.5 million from two investors, including Union Square Ventures, an early backer of Twitter, Etsy and FourSquare. Last month, it announced the new round of funding, led by Khosla Ventures of San Francisco. The cash infusion will be used to make improvements to the site and raise the company’s profile.
“We were really impressed with the type of traction they were able to get in a short period of time,” says Andrew Chung, a partner at Khosla. “In the same way YouTube was able to democratize the ability to create and broadcast videos on your own, this was the same kind of mechanism — to write and share stories with a broad range of readers.”
Amanda Pate, a 22-year-old student at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Texas, joined the site two years ago. She liked that Wattpad made it difficult to copy stories, eliminating much of the risk of plagiarism. She has always been a writer but found that having an audience made her take the endeavor much more seriously. Pate has completed two novels and is working on a third.
“I’m so busy with classes and finishing up my degree, but I have so many people who read my stories, and they’re always like: ‘When are you going to update? When are you going to post your next chapter?’ ” she says. “It actually kept me going, to be like, ‘Okay, I need to get on a writing schedule.’ And I think I’ve become a better writer since starting this, just because I’ve been writing so much.”
Pate also likes that it’s such a compassionate community. “They’re very kind and understanding and encouraging,” she says. “And I love it just because kids are writing -- to me that’s exciting.”
Naturally, when she graduates in December, Pate hopes to become an English teacher.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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