#My library wattpad update

#My library wattpad update

Given that A Day of Faces is a 60-chapter book, if someone is reading through it over the course of a week, I’ll be getting a frequent, regular update for each chapter as they vote for it (this happens a lot, which is, of course, lovely). If someone votes for, comments on or adds my book to a list, I get a notification. Therefore if other writers update their books, I get a notification. Whether you’re a Wattpad writer, a reader or a bit of both, everything goes into that one feed. For one, they’re inconsistent, sometimes failing to include notifications for things such as comments on one of my chapters. The larger problem is the opposite end of the spectrum: information overload. Wattpad’s notifications are a complete mess. Wattpad is actively holding back its writers and itself but not giving us access to this information. It’s the combination of skill and data which has let YouTube grow superstars, and given them the keys to their own success. It’s the cornerstone of how independent online creators build their own platform. Knowing how your books are being read isn’t just about making yourself feel good (or bad). You’ve then got more minor but nevertheless perplexing situations, such as the geo data which is displayed as a pretty map but with no accompanying list-based breakdown, forcing you to mouse over the entire world to figure out how your readership breaks down. Given how it ought to be relatively trivial to implement a date range interface, the lack thereof does make me worry. If Wattpad has been jettisoning user book data for the last 5+ years it’d be a travesty.

A bare bones dashboard but with the ability to wrangle the information manually is fine – but no, all those numbers are kept behind lock and key somewhere on Wattpad’s servers.Īnd, god, I hope the data is stored somewhere.

I can’t even see what happened last month.Įven worse is that you can’t even export the raw data, perhaps in CSV form, to perform your own analysis. I’d love to know how A Day of Faces grew to have 116,000 reads but it’s impossible to go back far enough. This makes it impossible to assess how your book’s readership has grown and fluctuated over time. There’s no way to view data from further back than the most recent 30 days.

Implement proper analyticsįor a platform which is all about publishing user content, it’s crazy that Wattpad’s analytics are so primitive. It aspires to be YouTube for words, yet is failing to even replicate that platform’s basic features.I love Wattpad, so hopefully this insight will prove useful to the engineers over there… 1. Wattpad even ended up on the International Literature Showcase last year.īut it ain’t perfect. Writing had become something I did at work in my capacity as a copywriter, while my dreams of being a novelist flapped about in the winds of nostalgia.Ī couple of years after publishing on Wattpad I had a novel called A Day of Faces, 116,000 reads, a Watty 2016 award and a lot more confidence. In April I’m talking about my experience as part of the Publishing Day School at Writers’ Centre Norwich.

I’d always claimed to want to be a writer, and had always been writing bits and pieces here and there, but I’d never published anything or even really finished a project. I love Wattpad, because Wattpad turned me into a writer.