Why Wattpad Reviews Fail

On Authorial Branding (or, Reviewers Are Not Your Marketing Consultants)

It is common knowledge on Wattpad that writing well is insufficient to cultivate an audience and receive accolades; entire books exist on the site dedicated to teaching people how to craft their covers, tags, and blurb to entice readers, wholly independent of a book's contents. By nature, this is an inexact science, or else every new book would be catapulted to the top of the site with enough savvy. Everyone active on Wattpad claims to have their own tried-and-true wisdom for climbing these rankings, which is typically drawn from a list of about ten or twenty pieces of advice; after all, there are only so many factors one can reasonably tweak on the site without either being an elite hacker or Faust himself. The issue comes when these marketing hot tips work themselves into reviews.

A review by definition is meant to evaluate the quality of a work. Sometimes this may be in a certain social context—Pride and Prejudice would have meant something different to one of Austen's contemporaries than a modern reader—but regardless, any critical evaluation is firmly rooted in the work itself. Anything outside of this enters the realm of the speculative, especially when talking about marketing—it's rare that the people offering advice for fixing another's poor marketing strategy are themselves successful at practicing what they teach. Given this, what drives everybody's obsession with telling others how to play Wattpad at its own game? Reviewers are conscripted to give an opinion on a piece of writing, not help create a personal brand.

The reasons why reviewing a work solely based on a hypothetical popular conception have been detailed in previous essays and will not be repeated. Given the inexact nature of this science (one might have better luck consulting an Ouija board or chicken entrails), advice given under the paradigm of making a work more marketable is liable to fail outside of obvious cases. This is not to say that telling someone not to name their protagonist Jeffrey Dahmer shouldn't be encouraged—but don't tell someone to pander to random people or make sweeping changes to their work solely for a promised boost in their rankings. Save that for Instagram influencers.