User Power
Value/Post Ratio
455%
- May 1, 2011
- 7,639
- 34,758
- Dependent entirely on Amazon's goofy whims for your income, or
- Build an independent platform of fans who love your work, who will support your work, and not suddenly vanish because Mega Globo Corp decides your books aren't their thing.
My point is that there's income with Amazon and there's no income with Wattpad. Wattpad is IMO yet another example of a site that preys on people's vanity. You have 10,000 views of your story on Wattpad or 5,000 fans there. Who cares? You aren't getting a dime for it and your relationship with the fans is like talking through glass (with Wattpad being the gatekeeper).
Nothing wrong with it if you're doing it for fun, but if you want to build a self-publishing business, I'm of the view that only two things matter: real-world money or newsletter subscribers.
Platforms that give you vague promises of "recognition" or "influence" are usually a waste of time. Influence doesn't pay your bills in this industry. Here are some examples based on my experience:
- Facebook fans (had well over 10,000 of them or maybe even 20,000, don't remember and want to forget how much time and money I wasted on it - no real effect on book sales),
- YouTube subscribers (have over 25,000 of them, no real effect on book sales),
- Quora views (had over 250,000 views, no effect on book sales).
- Udemy students enrolled for my free course (have well over 30,000 of them, no effect on book sales)
Having said that, this is just my personal opinion and I'm not saying that my approach is the only one that works. There are examples of people who succeeded the other way. I personally consider it a waste of time and energy to do stuff for free, particularly as an author. People largely don't value free books or anything else they get for free. I myself as a reader never respect free stuff as much as the books I pay for.
As for using the platforms to build a fan base, if you can't easily get people to join your newsletter (which is the only true independent means of building a fan base), you're building a sand castle. Wattpad isn't anything different from Amazon when it comes to the lack of control - they own your fan base, not you. As I said, if they let authors send people to their newsletters, it might be a cool marketing tool. If not, it's a win-lose kind of a thing (obviously with Wattpad winning and you losing).
In my view, when choosing between a closed platform (you can't even access any story unless you sign up, so you can't even easily share a story you enjoyed with a friend who doesn't use Wattpad) that doesn't pay you for your content or an open platform that does that everybody uses, I go with the latter.