Thought I’d give a quick update on the Wattpad experiment. As you might remember, I decided to put some stuff up on Wattpad, the free online reading community... thing. This is my page.

Now Wattpad isn’t the easiest thing to work out. It has a very “young” feel to it— lots of One Direction fan fiction. And some of the stuff with the most “reads” and “votes” seems not all that well-written, if I’m honest. And the inevitable system of followers and votes seems like yet another social network mountain to climb.

But on the other hand, there are some genuinely good writers on there, and you also have the potential to get instant feedback on your work and see whether something has the ability to capture the imagination of readers— or not.

I started out by posting up a short story set in the Aeropolis universe, called Airship Stowaway. I posted it up in 600-word chunks, at first a day at a time, but subsequently one part every week. So far there are 10 parts totalling 14 pages, and I have received 337 reads and two votes.

Compared with the thousands of reads and votes that some works receive this seems less than stunning. But I don’t know what the average or mean is. So to get some more data, I posted up the first few scenes from an old WIP that I started a few years ago and never finished. The thinking was that if it seemed popular, it would give me an incentive to finish it. And if it didn’t, well, that would be useful data too.

This story, King of Cards, currently has three parts up totalling seven pages, with 65 reads and no votes. However, it is ranked 442 on the Action list— which must have a lot fewer items on it than the Science Fiction and Teen Fiction lists, which is what Airship Stowaway is categorised as.

I’ve also posted up the first three chapters of Airship City. I will post up another three over the next three days, matching the preview chapters on this site. Although it’s only been up for a few days, it has already garnered 59 reads, almost as much as King of Cards on a similar page count.

I will continue to update Airship Stowaway until it is finished, and then take stock again. The posting deadlines do at least give me an incentive to keep on track, so that plus the instant feedback thing probably mean that I will continue to use Wattpad for new stories and experimental ideas to assess against the baseline I have now established.