I just "deleted" a bunch of my fanfiction!
For a while now I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with Wattpad as a website. I don’t like the overly commercial aspect of the website and the way all of it revolves around algorithms and advertising. And slowly, but surely, they have removed all the aspects of the website I liked and added things I hated (like the unskip-able video-ads or their attitude towards AI/data-scraping-policies) and I thought long and hard about what to do here. Because Wattpad is more or less making money through my writing and I don’t want that. At the same time I am a strong believer of never deleting my fanfiction, because I know that even if a story is poorly written and full of errors, there might still be one person that enjoyed it even a tiny bit and I think it is worth it to leave my story up just for that one person to be able to re-read it.
But because I have (for years now) been cross-posting my stories on Ao3, I’ve decided to un-publish my fanfiction from wattpad and leave a link to Ao3 in the description of every single fanfiction, so people can still read them. That is also why I decided to manually un-publish all the chapters of my stories instead of the entire fanfiction, so that the story isn’t deleted from anybody’s reading list or library and then lost to the abyss. I also decided to “just” un-publish the chapters instead of deleting them, so that I won’t delete all the lovely comments I have received over the years. If the story is un-published I can still see the comments. Because I truly appreciate them.
I have been thinking about this for a while, trying to figure out what is the best compromise between what I want to do with my fanfiction and what is fair to all you amazing readers.
So none of my stories are gonna leave the internet forever.
[I do still have a few stories up that aren’t posted to Ao3, so I will have to figure out what to do with those.]
