Can fixing grammar get your story more readers?
Yes. But better than that, it will help you keep them chapter after chapter.
Am I the person to help you fix your grammar? Maybe.
I'm not an English professor, but I've probably written and corrected more sentences than most English professors. I do have a degree in English Literature, but that just means I've read some ancient books whose grammar, while mostly correct, isn't in a current style.
Writers don't have to follow the grammar rules that everyone else does. They can incorporate bad grammar into the dialogue of any character who regularly would use bad grammar, but they should know they're doing that on purpose.
You may say, "If a reader is lost in my story, they'll ignore grammar errors."
I say, "Being lost in a story means that NOTHING should interrupt its smooth flow, yet a grammar error does exactly that—it interrupts the beauty of your story while the reader tries to unscramble your intended meaning. Good-bye story."
The authority on grammar for English writers isn't me; it's The Chicago Manual of Style. When you submit your story for publication, every editor who sees it has access to a copy of the manual. That tome has every answer, with examples, to every grammar question you could ask, but it's a thousand pages long and hell to read—Section 5.30 comes before Section 5.201. Hmmmm.
My next chapters will deal with the most common actual grammar errors I've personally seen while reading stories like yours on Wattpad. Fix these mistakes, and you're 90% done proofreading. For the other 10%, you guessed it, visit The Chicago Manual of Style.
So, when will you be done proofreading? One pass through your story or three? My experience is that I've never read one of my own stories without changing something, tightening the wording, simplifying the sentence structure, or fixing the grammar. You'll be done proofreading when you can't stand to look at your chapter again. Then let someone else read your work. I guarantee they'll find something you missed, and the process will start all over again.
Funny story: On the back cover of Fire Trap, my New Adult mystery/thriller published on Amazon and Smashwords, I had mentioned "..a deadly fire at Genetrix, a startup company in California's Silicone Valley." Great, until a reader pointed out that it's Silicon Valley, not Breast Implant Valley. Fortunately, with just-in-time printing, there are only a few rare copies of my mystery sold with that extra 'e' misspelling of Silicon on their back covers.
Other tools: Although grammarly.com is a website that will do most of this proofreading work for you, the problem is that it's free. Free means you can't avoid paying for it. To use grammarly.com for free, you must agree to allow Grammarly to read and alter any webpage you visit. Now, why would they need to do that to help you with grammar? It's a technically great tool, but I uninstalled it.
Happy proofreading! (First tip. Don't use '!', ':', or ';'. Put your emphasis in your word choice not in the punctuation, and use simple rather than compound sentences.) Now, don't tell me I used those forbidden punctuation marks in this chapter myself. This is non-fiction and anything goes.
