DareToZlatan

How are you guys?

Goddess_Seraphi

Can't seem to find my message here, it's gone, but I got your replies. It's understandable to be skeptical, and the real reason is because it's almost pointless to advertise the way most people do it. People on this site go about advertising the wrong way. It's better to advertise yourself as a good person who will help people and be friendly instead of advertising your work, because if you just advertise your work saying "hey read this" it makes the person you're advertising to feel like a number, not someone you value. The reason most advertising books don't work is because people just go to comment on them to get their book read, but they don't look for books to read. It's a good idea, in the wrong format. Because the books WILL be seen by app audience, but readers generally won't read through all the comments just to find something.
          
          My advertising book is different. Instead of just letting people spam away with advertisements, I encourage people to post them for a chance to win a full-page advertisement in the book itself. That way, if people see the book, they get to actually read through single advertisements on each chapter instead of going through tons of ads in the comments. It's a contest, of course, I only pick one winner a week, but since not many people have been entering I've been rolling over all contestants to the next week. Like I said, you can feel free to enter again, please just read the first two chapters to understand how it works.
          
          To be honest though, if you want people to read your work, just read other people's work and comment on it. Help them out, make friends, and that's how you'll get ahead. My story OathBlade has almost 200,000 reads right now, and not a single one was gotten from asking others to read. It all came from patience and hard work to make the book good. There's no fast-track to getting reads, but if you make friends and help others, you're more likely to get help on more than just the one book you're advertising.

DareToZlatan

@April_Parr And the whole sexual situations...well...probably comes from teen writers :)
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DareToZlatan

@April_Parr I get your drift. And those fanfiction stories are so annoying.
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Goddess_Seraphi

@DareToZlatan Yeah the site promotes stuff that looks "popular" but not always stuff that's good. And popular is determined by what gets the most reads. Unfortunately, that's usually clichéd fanfictions and "bad boy" stories. I'm definitely not against fan fiction, since that's how I started writing years ago and fell in love with it, but most of the stories I see are really creepy. Like putting real people in sexual situations, turning their supposedly "favorite people" (generally guys from boybands) into rapists and abusers. It's a little disturbing, especially since the site doesn't really crack down on it unless it crosses some line. And the site itself is just the place writers themselves go, the reading base (which is about 90% of Wattpad's total number of users) all use the app, and that has no access to the forums. So the share your story threads are just about useless.
            
            I try to explain to people when they advertise in the forums why that doesn't work and they get so upset, saying "well it would work if they'd let us". All I can say is "Really? Because there's at least one guaranteed thread you can share your story in, and if that doesn't work, what does making a thousand of them in the forums do for you?" Once I managed to get featured after a year of work on OathBlade I started getting people just leaving random 'please read my story' comments in the comments section, which is just...honestly, beyond rude. I worked without many breaks to get that story where it is, so it's hurtful when people just come along to try and use me like a billboard. So I thought I'd give people a place where they COULD go and advertise, which has definitely caused the private messages and ads on my book to stop for the most part.
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