Spine breaker Awards 2020/2021 [Complete]

Wattpad tips 1: General

1. Wattpad tips: General (the obvious things) Update regularly, don't abandon your story, reply to comments, interact with readers, have a nice cover, descriptions, etc. usage of tags. 

Now that the judging has officially started we will also start posting writing tips for your future chapters! So we will start with some tips for writing on Wattpad, this will be the first of a series. Before we start we will put a little disclaimer we are not experts on Wattpad this is through our personal experience on Wattpad and information we have gathered from other people who have written these kinds of tips. From everything, we have gathered 10 golden tips for writing on Wattpad for you guys. Let's get it!
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1. Get yourself a beautiful cover!
If you scroll through Wattpad all you see is a picture of the cover, title, views, votes, and a short part of the description. But honestly, we all look at the covers first. If your cover looks cheap and unedited people will assume your story will also look like that and will scroll right past it. There are tons of free editing apps and software there is even an online website where you can create awesome covers! The pixel size of Wattpad covers is 521*800. Honestly, we are not that great with editing but Jeonjungkookfan0808 has used the apps phonto and picsart and we both highly recommend the website pixlr.com. We have only used the x version but there you basically do everything online, you don't have to download anything or sign up you can just use it and even saves your content for later use. There are premium functions but a lot of times you can watch a short ad and still get access. But if you're like us and are just horrible at it there is another way. There are tons of people on Wattpad who do love to make covers and are awesome at it too and love to make cover covers for other people. You can just search for graphics shops on Wattpad and we bet you will find a lot of people who are willing to make a cover for you! It doesn't cost anything! Maybe a follow, vote, or something but that's it. 

2. Have an actual description!
We see way too many books on Wattpad which do not have a description! One sentence a simple quote just doesn't cut it. You should consider the description like the backside of a book, a short description to draw the reader in to actually read your story. It needs to describe what people can expect from reading your story, what the genre of your story is, and make them curious to read on, but don't spoiler the story!  There are literally millions of stories on Wattpad if we see an interesting cover but the story doesn't have a description we will skip past it, there are thousands of books out there that do have a description and we actually know what we are getting into before even reading a chapter.  

3. Tags, Tags, Tags!
And we don't mean tagging people but using the tag portion of your book in the story description. A lot of times people have things for particular fanfiction stories, like how I, Jeonjungkookfan0808, am a huge sucker for soulmate stories. I will just search for soulmate on Wattpad or even look through the soulmate tag on Wattpad and see what is trending. If you don't use the tags portion people will not find your story it's as simple as that. It's very important to use tags that are related to your story, for example, if your writing a Jimin romantic vampire story you could use these tags: Jimin, BTS, Romance, Vampire, Fantasy, Fanfiction, etc. this means your story will be in the results when people are looking for a vampire story!  Don't use too many ''useless tags'' tags that aren't used by anyone, use tags that are popular. Search for a vampire on Wattpad and what comes up and what they have used to get inspired. In addition, if you're writing a Jimin ff don't include all the other members in your tag portion but use it for tags that are actually related to the story. It's annoying when you're looking for a good Namjoon ff but Jungkook keeps haunting you because he is the most popular on Wattpad.

4. Update your story
Update regularly and frequently, everyone who had fanfiction themselves knows the frustration of finding an awesome story only to realize it hasn't been finished and last updated months ago! So don't abandon your story and leave your readers hanging! When you do not update frequently readers don't remember your story and won't keep updated with it anymore. we have noticed most people read your story within 3 days of updating after that the new readers get less and less and after a week most will have forgotten your story (it's very sad but that's just how it is.) Also do not double update, even though once in a while it's not that bad but sometimes we see people posting more than 10 chapters within one day! Writing ahead is completely fine we would even recommend it but don't publish them all at once, not everyone has the time to read everything at once and your story will get less promotion, this has to do with the way Wattpad's algorithm works (This will be further explained in the next chapter in this series about the Wattpad algorithm.). 

5. Proofread, and use and spelling check!
One of our biggest pet peeves in reading fanfiction is grammatical errors especially the ones that are easily fixed. If a story has too many mistakes we won't read it. If you're not sure how to write a word, look it up. There is really awesome website called google that knows everything. After you have written a chapter don't immediately publish but let it simmer for while and come back to it later, you will notice that you will find some grammatical mistakes that you overlooked earlier. Proofreading is really important and don't skip it. Another piece of advice is to use a spelling and grammar checker, Wattpad doesn't have an automatic function for it like Microsoft word or other programs, but there are options. For example I (Jeonjungkookfan0808) use the program Grammarly, it's a completely free program that works on multiple websites. It's an online writing assistant that also works on Wattpad, you can download it on your phone or computer and it will underline spelling and grammatical mistakes with a red line and suggests a correction. 

6. Plot your story
This sounds logical but can be very tricky. We have seen a lot of stories with countless plot holes from some minor changes from someone wearing black one moment and the next white to people who completely change the plot as the story goes without it making any sense. It's important to know at the beginning of the story where you want to go with the story and don't change the plot halfway in. Writing without plotting can get an author in a difficult situation and write themselves into a corner. The author comes up with a far-fetched illogical theory to solve the problem. This completely ruins the story and is disappointing for the readers, they expect to find out how the impossible happened but are left hanging and completely confused. for example, I (Jeonjungkookfan0808) used to love a ff about forbidden romance but when the author learned that soulmate stories were doing really well on Wattpad she threw in the soulmate AU without changing anything in the earlier chapter, it completely came out of nothing and it was very apparent it wasn't planned. This completely threw me off as a reader and left me utterly confused.

7. Do research
This is a bit similar to the previous story but next to be aware of plot holes you also need to be aware of misinformation. Research the topic your writing if for example, you're writing a ff where Seokjin is a doctor in the hospital and yn is a patient with heart disease do research on the topic and make sure the information in the story is accurate. Readers will love the effort and it makes the story much more realistic. Also do not just assume stuff about certain things you are not very familiar with since the assumption could be wrong and some people may take it in a bad way, especially if it is a sensitive topic.

8. Reply to comments

This also is logical but some authors don't seem to this which is unfortunate. When an author replies to the reader's comment the reader feels special and heard and is more likely to stick around for updates while you write the story. Speak directly to the reader and make them feel heard and they will feel more connected to the story and will continue to read the story. 

9. Reply to other's comments, but don't ask for it

This is a less logical thing and something I hadn't thought of but we have seen it work! If you read stories with a similar plot like yours and leave comments there people might notice that you're reading the same kind of stories as them and look on your profile to see what else you've read and might just check out the book that you are writing. Just don't leave comments directly promoting your own story (for example: If you like this story you will like the story that I have written check it out on my profile!) This is disrespectful for the author and they usually don't appreciate it. Another thing that you shouldn't do is that if you're reading a story and see a comment from an author you like don't comment that you love their story on someone else's story it's disrespectful and makes the author who has left the comment feel awkward. 

10. Little tricks 
To end these writing tips I'm (Jeonjungkookfan0808) here to give a few tricks I learned while using Wattpad. Starting with one that took me way to long to learn is that shift+enter does not leave a white line between sentences. The second, is that there are basically two Wattpad apps. I have multiple accounts and it's a pain in the ass to keep switching between accounts therefore I downloaded the Wattpad beta version it's basically the same as the normal one but they test the new updates there and therefore it has a more bugs. Otherwise, it works perfectly the same and it allows me to have two wattpad accounts on one phone and thus also get notifications from both.