Today is World Literacy Day, which at Wattpad, holds a very special place in our hearts. Access to quality education is something so easily taken for granted in parts of the world where it’s readily available, which is why we’re raising awareness for Pencils of Promise, an organization founded by Adam Braun, with a mission to provide quality education and literacy to children in the developing world.

To support this mission and celebrate World Literacy Day simultaneously, Wattpad is featuring Braun’s complete memoir “The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person can Create Extraordinary Change” for free on September 8th and 9th, delivering his message to Wattpad’s more than 40 million users.

During his travels around the world, Adam Braun became acutely aware of the of the lack of access to proper education. When a small boy in India asked him for a pencil, a figurative light bulb went off and he realized the profound impact that writing utensils, and other school supplies, can have on children – and the doors of possibility they can open.

Today, Pencils of Promise continues to help raise awareness for the 250 million children worldwide who, through no choice or fault of their own, lack basic reading and writing skills. In doing so, it’s established itself as a leader among innovative global non-profits working towards sustainable social change. And at Wattpad, we couldn’t be more excited about helping spread their message.

How can you help spread the literacy love? Throughout World Literacy Day (September 8th- Today!) every time you use the #whereiread hashtag you’ll unlock a $1 donation to help educate children globally.

And feel free to check out Adam Braun’s complete memoir “The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person can Create Extraordinary Change” on Wattpad today and tomorrow, to learn more about a cause worth its weight in pencils.

At Wattpad, we believe that everyone has a story to tell. For our 2015 Wattpad Scholarship program, we asked students to tell us their own true stories, drawing on something that has impacted their life and helped shape who they have become.

Of the 500 submissions we received from students throughout the U.S. and Canada, we have selected five winners and are thrilled to award each with a $1500 scholarship. Read all of our winners and honorable mentions here.

For Wattpad, this scholarship program is an example of how the power of a story can be used to create opportunity, and further support students in their educational aspirations. We are truly inspired by the number of impressive entries we received.

We are pleased to share our 2015 Wattpad Scholarship Recipients, with links to their Wattpad profiles, and a compilation of the stories that won them their well-deserved scholarships. Congrats again to the winners and thanks to everyone who participated for your inspiring entries!

• Headache Hamartia by izzysaphira 
• The Backseat Performer by smoakly 
• four by laughterandjynx 
• The Hearts of Men by JoeyFurfari 
• Springs by BubblyPenguin

It was difficult to select just five winning submissions. Here are some honorable mentions that we know you’ll enjoy equally as much:

• Two Feet Away by Chaotic 
• A Book By Its Cover by ShabTuSubah 
• Perseverance by arshaddesai 
• These Horcruxes by Infatuated 

Survey reveals majority of US teens spent the summer reading. Actual books.

We live in an era with short forms and acronyms for everything, emojis to substitute a host of complex emotions, and countless additional forms of distraction built into a single, handheld device.

So, it’s not entirely crazy to fear the worst: That books and longform reading have been rendered obsolete for teens, a demographic born into a world where there is just so much competing for their attention at any given moment.

And yet, amidst these collectively growing fears and beliefs, a recent survey suggests otherwise.

According to the survey of more than 1,500 US teens aged 13-18, a whopping seventy percent said they read most during the summer. The summer! That time of anti- school when they don’t even have to read because nobody’s making them!

On top of this, the survey revealed that three-quarters of teens planned to read more than five books over the summer, with more than half committing upwards of two hours a day to reading. And when it comes to summer travel, eighty-seven percent confirmed that it’s important to have books that are accessible directly from a mobile phone.

Thirty-six percent of teens even admitted they’d cancel plans to finish a great story.

How many adults can say the same?

Books: 1
Long-held perceptions about teens and reading: 0

When it comes to pop culture, three out of four said they’d prefer to read a book about their favorite celebrities over watching a video. This is especially interesting considering the widely held belief that best way to reach young people is through video.

This survey confirms that many teens are actively choosing to engage with content, rather than passively absorb it. This is huge, because it means teens still enjoy reading. And with longform content woven into their connected, mobile lifestyles, it’s more accessible than ever before.

But all this points to a greater truth, as well, one that most humans inherently know – that great stories will always be a part of who we are, regardless of the way they are consumed.

Wattpad is proud to announce Wattpad Stars, an accelerator for top writers. The program helps writers take their skills to the next level, and provides brands and publishers with an opportunity to tap into Wattpad’s roster of talented digital influencers.

Wattpad Stars are commissioned by top brands to write stories that entertain and engage audiences and some even see their work in print or as screen adaptations. They also receive marketing and support from Wattpad to increase their presence and advance their careers.

A few notable writers whose writing careers have skyrocketed thanks to Wattpad include:  

• Anna Todd: Anna turned her love for Harry Styles into one of the biggest social media phenomenon’s of 2014. She wrote the story After on Wattpad and it soon became one of the most talked about stories on the Internet. After receiving one billion reads on Wattpad, the company helped her land a six figure publishing deal and film deal with Paramount
• Rebecca Sky: Commissioned to write for the Athenos campaign and featured in the New York Times
• Apryl Baker: Commissioned by Universal Pictures to write for the Ouija and Unfriended film promotions
• Edward Mullen: Commissioned by USA Network and A&E to write for the launch of the television series DIG and The Returned

Wattpad writers who’ve built their online presence, with a knack for creating fun, serial stories, now have direct route to the Wattpad team to jumpstart their careers. We recognize the hard work of these Wattpad Stars and want to help them connect with new opportunities to take their writing to the next level.
For more information on the program, visit https://www.wattpad.com/writers/wattpad-stars/

We’re extremely excited to announce our collaboration with Skillshare for a free online writing class, led by one of our very own Wattpad Stars, Rebecca Sky.

The class, Writing for Online Engagement: Fiction in a Digital World, will provide an in depth look at online writing with frameworks, techniques, and strategies to engage an online audience and build community around stories.

Wattpad Stars are masters of storytelling and have become authorities and influencers in the world of online writing and engagement. This partnership is an opportunity for those interested in writing for a digital age to learn from an expert.

So, what exactly is Skillshare? It’s a vibrant learning community that provides access to online classes taught by creators around the world.

To register for this class, go here

In September 2014, something unprecedented happened in the Philippines, one of our most highly engaged countries. Wattpad partnered with the Kapatid Network to make some of the most popular Filipino Wattpad stories into a primetime mini-series airing on TV5 right after The Amazing Race Philippines. This comes after popular stories from our platform had already leapt onto the big screen and become blockbuster hits. This is exciting for us, because it represents an intersection between traditional forms of entertainment media like television and books merging with a non-traditional media platform like Wattpad.

Now over a year later, the Philippines continues to be an interesting market. With a population of just over 100 million people, 44 million of whom are online, an astonishing 32 million people have mobile phones with internet connectivity. It is a country of connected people who are influenced by American culture and absolutely love being social online. This is a big reason why they embraced Wattpad with open arms and why two of their forward-thinking mobile carriers Globe + SMART decided to use Wattpad to bundle offers to their mobile subscribers. New subscribers would receive their phone plans and not have to pay for data when they used Wattpad; a major advantage for millennials who were already loving the app. In the Philippines alone, over 100 of their traditionally published books first originated on Wattpad.

And it’s highly evident that this is where things are going. Not just in the Philippines, but globally. There is a hunger for shows by real people, stories by real people and even marketing by real people. Nobody wants a manufactured experience anymore. And millennials especially trust content from friends over brands and demand authenticity.

Increasingly, we are working with huge entertainment brands in the United States who are starting to recognize the upside of working with Wattpad to launch blockbuster movies by inviting participation from our enthusiastic community. Just a few years ago this type of thing would have never happened, and now brands are having meaningful interactions where the fans get to become active participants and help shape the success of marketing campaigns by co-creating content with their favourite brands.
Wattpad is at the forefront of some exciting developments in the entertainment world. Our content is appearing outside of our website on the big screen, television, and online. Wattpad has proven to be globally relevant from a cultural perspective and we are just beginning to touch the surface of where we will go in the entertainment space. We are already licensing top writers and popular content to develop shows and webisodes. We are at the intersection of this cultural shift in the way we advertise and merge the ever-changing online world with the slower paced and sometimes traditional offline world.

Wattpad has teamed up with The Global Education Platform, an initiative of the Global Business Coalition for Education, to launch YourStoryIndia, a digital writing contest for India. The contest’s purpose is to engage and empower India’s youth and encourage them to share their unique stories on Wattpad to help drive literacy and provide access to culturally relevant, local stories. The Global Education Platform selected Wattpad as their partner for the pilot phase of the project because both organizations share the same vision that foresees billions of people increasing literacy via mobile phones.

The partnership was born out of the basic premise that the best way to get young people to read is through sharing content that youth find engaging and relevant to their own experiences. Through YourStoryIndia, the partners aim to facilitate the creation of youth-generated, culturally relevant stories and appeal to marginalized young people who will be able to read this content for free on feature phones.

This shared vision extends to other partners including HP, Twitter India, Times of India, and Idea Cellular. In addition, Global Youth Ambassadors from A World At School have supported the launch through technical support and promotion, while STIR Education and Teach for India’s teachers are encouraging their students to participate in the contest.

YourStoryIndia will run between October 1st 2015 and March 31st 2016 and is open to people 13 years of age and older. Stories can be written in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese.

Candice Faktor, head of business at Wattpad said, “We are delighted to be working with the Global Business Coalition for Education’s Global Education Platform to encourage youth in India to share their voices and unique stories. India is a rapidly growing market for Wattpad and we can’t wait to see this market continue to grow.”

For more info on this program, visit the YourStoryIndia profile on Wattpad.

In literature, a serial is a printed format in which a single larger body of work (often a work of narrative fiction) is published in sequential installments. It isn’t a new concept. Many believe serialization was made popular by Charles Dickens starting with The Pickwick Papers in 1836 and later Dombey and Son, which began serialization on October 1st 1846. Although serialized content existed prior to that, it was Dickens who commanded a large audience for the form and truly popularized it.

180 years later we are still seeing an appetite for it. On Wattpad many of our creators choose to serialize their stories, releasing one or two chapters per week to their audience of social readers. This works well because it makes the stories more digestible (you can read 2000 words or less in line, in transit or waiting at a doctor’s office). This makes reading something that can fit into most people’s busy modern lives. But the interesting thing about serialization on Wattpad is that it is often a major driver for collaboration. Pushing out a chapter at a time allows for a level of audience engagement that you simply can’t get otherwise. This format is what allows the author to take in reader feedback chapter by chapter, consider alternative viewpoints, and even change the story on the fly based on what resonates with the audience. This is an incredibly powerful tool for authors to have at their disposal.

Reading is something that we are continually redefining. Serialized content works for both the audience and the author, because it provides a pause and an opportunity to engage and create conversation, which ultimately forms deeper and more meaningful human interactions.

Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) becomes the first international non-profit to join the global Wattpad community. Through the official Doctors Without Borders profile on Wattpad, the organization will share powerful stories from aid workers in the field, as well as first-hand accounts from patients. The stories will provide an intimate look into the lives of the medical workers who deliver humanitarian aid around the world, and the people who benefit from their care.

“We are excited to work with Wattpad on this new project. Sharing the amazing first-hand stories of our fieldworkers and patients will allow us to reach a more diverse, younger audience – readers who may be less familiar with the humanitarian issues Doctors Without Borders deals with on a daily basis,” said Stephen Cornish, executive director of Doctors Without Borders Canada

Nonprofits have always relied on the power of storytelling to reach supporters. With the rise of digital channels, they now have more ways than ever to share their stories with a massive, global audience. Wattpad provides an opportunity to reach over 40 million people around the world and create direct and meaningful connections through original content.

“Every day, Doctors Without Borders makes a profound impact on the lives of millions of people. We’re honored to help them share their stories with a broad audience and raise awareness of the important work they do around the world,” said Allen Lau, Wattpad CEO and cofounder.

This post is brought to you by Wattpad Co-Founder and CEO Allen Lau.

Community is at the heart of Wattpad. It’s the environment and atmosphere that welcomes you as you start socializing. Numerous tech companies think they’re building online communities. In reality, most are building software and waiting for an engaged network to appear magically.

In 2006, when Ivan and I built Wattpad, we became our first community managers. We knew every Wattpadder personally and discovered that hosting a community is a lot like hosting guests at your home.

At an event, as more and more people start to attend, it gets harder and harder to engage in every conversation. As the crowd grows, keeping things civil depends on the environment and atmosphere you’ve established from the beginning. It’s hard to change that atmosphere as more people arrive, this is the problem many networks face once they’ve reached maturity.

So how does one balance fast growth with community management? There is no simple answer to this, but I’ll share with you some insights I’ve gained over the years.

Know what makes a good community manager

Good community managers never feel bored with users and understand trust takes years to build and seconds to break. Good community managers are online social butterflies who build audiences and motivate volunteers.

Good community managers can make hard decisions. They see the dark side of the Internet daily, but know that they have the power to make the Internet better one user at a time. Without them it is impossible to build a positive and supportive atmosphere.

Hiring a great candidate can make or break your blossoming community. After all, they’ll represent the voice of the community within the company and vice-versa.

Interact with your users

At Wattpad, community training is mandatory for all new hires. This gives them a chance to experience the product in the same way users do. When personal connections occur naturally through user interactions, what most view as a chore becomes fun.

I spend time and energy to read stories, post comments, and thank new followers. Sometimes, great moments stem from small acts. For example, after I wrote this on my blog:

Wattpad turns 7 today.  Calling the last 7 years as life changing is an understatement. Not only for Ivan and me but also for millions of people around the world.

I received this note:

This message showed up in 250,000 Wattpad news feeds. That’s how things go viral! Showing some love makes everyone feel good. Just check out the comments on Your Story to see what I mean.

Empower your community

Our community is empowered and connected to our team. They are our co hosts, interacting with as many guests as possible and reporting suspicious behavior as it arises, like any good house guest.

Through programs like Wattpad Ambassadors, passionate Wattpadder’s help us manage the day-to-day happenings. They come from around the world, and from all walks of life. As Wattpad grows, this team of passionate volunteers refers us to new, like-minded users – some of whom now work with us full-time.

Make user obsession a company-wide value

Creating this amazingly positive space is a team effort at Wattpad. Every department in this company plays a part in ensuring that the Wattpad experience is unique. It’s reflected in features we’ve built to protect our users, the work of Wattpad ambassadors, and the positivity and support we see daily. At Wattpad user-obsession is a core value.

We have the power to build a more positive Internet if we put love into our product and work diligently to support a positive atmosphere in our online communities. Have you ever come across a space so full of positive energy that you had to join in? It’s something rare to find, especially online.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, let’s talk positive communities – comment below or message me on Wattpad @Allenlau

This post is brought to you by Wattpad Co-Founders Allen Lau & Ivan Yuen.

Today, Wattpad turns nine. Around this time of year, Ivan and I always get a bit nostalgic as notifications pour in from people around the world wishing Wattpad a happy birthday. These notes remind us of the impact we’ve made since Wattpad launched in 2006.

When we launched, we were told that we were disrupting the publishing industry, but Ivan and I knew it was bigger than that. Wattpad goes beyond text, it’s entertainment where everyone participates,  and where stories reflect the interests and experiences of the world.

To celebrate our ninth year, we’re counting the memories we’ve shared along the way.

One idea started in 2002, before smartphones and social networks. An idea that, in the future, people would reach for their mobile devices to read books and stories.

Two co-founders. Ivan and I connected in 2006 and realized we were both independently working on similar projects. Together, we knew that our idea of interactive stories optimized for mobile devices could change the world.

Three early years building Wattpad proved to be some of the most challenging years of our entire careers, but ultimately laid the foundation for our future success.

Four people dedicated themselves to Wattpad in 2010. After we raised $600,000 in funding later that year, we doubled the team. Today, Wattpad employs over 120 people, and we’re hiring :-)

Five scholarship recipients were selected this year on Wattpad. They shared inspiring stories about the things that have impacted and shaped their lives. The opportunity to award scholarships and support their educational journeys was a great moment for us.

The Six is Toronto, the city where we build Wattpad.  For us, the choice to build here has been one of the best decisions of our careers. Like October’s Very Own, Drake, we’re putting Toronto on the map and we couldn’t be more proud.

Seven plus 2000 gives you the year we made the decision to put Wattpad on the backburner. We had families that we needed to feed, and decided to get creative.  A switch in our focus was required to pull in enough to get by. It was a tough decision, but we always knew we’d come back to Wattpad.

Eight months into 2011, we reached a milestone: one million people on Wattpad. The momentum continued to build and, later that year, we went on to raise our Series A funding round to push Wattpad even further.

Nine literary classics are mentioned in the viral hit After. Anna Todd is one of our Wattpad Stars, and, in her story, she references classic novels. Thanks to Anna, and other Wattpad writers like her, young people all over the world are reading classic stories on their mobile phones. That’s the power of social stories.

With the help of 40 million Wattpadders around the world, we’ve significantly changed how the world discovers and shares stories in under a decade. Together we’ve created new behaviors and expectations for what the reader-writer dynamic should look like. As our team grows and community expands, we’ll continue to look for ways to reinvent storytelling to make it more immersive, inclusive, and impactful.

Happy birthday Wattpad! Here’s to another year of stories we love!

This post is brought to you by Wattpad Head of Business Candice Faktor.

The marketing landscape is more complex than ever before and millennials make for a discerning audience with high expectations. What used to work in the old days of marketing doesn’t work anymore, and what used to be okay and acceptable even five years ago – isn’t anymore. This leaves many marketers feeling uneasy and uncertain about where to take their next steps, especially when trying to reach a millennial audience.

At Wattpad we are entrenched in millennial pop-culture. We know what they think about, what they care about, and how they like to engage with brands. Millennials’ make up the majority of our overall audience of more than 40 million monthly active people. Because of this, we employ a “think like our community” state of mind when it comes to native advertising. We work closely with brand partners to keep their content relevant for our community and also native to the experience of using Wattpad. This requires a delicate balance.

When marketing to millennials, there are several things to keep in mind if you want to have an impact and be successful. Here are five ways you can get millennials to notice your brand:

Think about co-creation

Content moves fast and your window of opportunity is small. To take advantage of amplification, loosen your grip a little and open your mind. Millennials love to be included and involved. Why not allow them to participate in the creation of your campaign by crowdsourcing creative thinking. This will result in your co-creators becoming advocates who feel like you are in tune with their needs. Meaningful brand connections are created through cooperation and collaboration.

Make it entertaining

Sorry to break it to you, but your sales jargon just isn’t interesting to millennials. What is interesting is the story that can be created around your brand (notice we didn’t say about your brand). People tune out ads so frequently that you have to think about content in terms of entertainment. Brand affinity is a natural byproduct of an engaged and entertained audience. And millennials are loyal too with 62% of them saying they are more likely to become a customer if a brand engages with them online.

Authenticity is where it’s at

This could warrant an entire 1000 word blog post on its own. Millennials have superior built-in BS detectors. If they feel that something is disingenuous, they won’t engage. This is kind of exciting though because it makes us better marketers and forces companies to think about their authenticity in an unprecedented way. Millennials truly value honesty and transparency. If you mess up, say so and own it. They’ll respect you in the morning. They want to know that there are humans behind a brand and that there is a pulse there.

Offer something of value

Some brands wildly misinterpret what they believe is valuable to their audience. In order to offer true value, you have to ask yourself: ‘what do millennials care about?’ And ‘how can my brand align with that in a meaningful way’? Sometimes just doing something out of the ordinary or unexpected is enough and offers a moment of surprise and delight. Think about value in terms of human connection and emotion. Ask yourself will this resonate? And if yes, why? You have to know these things going in. Entertainment has value. Frame your approach around what is entertaining to your target audience, not what is entertaining to you.

Intimate and personal is magic

This is the hard part. How can you make each individual person feel unique and special while getting the results that you need in a big way? Well here’s the beauty. Your one-to-one actions have a greater impact, far beyond just that one person. When you take the time to be kind and deliver unexpected happiness on a small scale, the result can become larger than the act by creating a ripple network effect. Millennials share – often and readily. And if you manage to win them over with an act of kindness, they are happy to share their experience with the world, and you might just have yourself a loyal customer for life.

We are very thoughtful about how we work with brands at Wattpad. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to do it right, in a way that doesn’t feel foreign to our community. And so far it seems to be working. Our audience has engaged with over 60 million minutes of branded content on our platform in just over 12 months.

Today, Wattpad starts the roll out of one of our biggest product updates ever: multimedia in stories.

Multimedia is one of the most requested features by the community, and initial response to the new feature has been overwhelming.

Storytellers will now be able to add images and videos into a Wattpad story.

With the new feature,  storytellers can insert animated .GIFs, images,  Vimeo, and YouTube videos to add visual elements to their stories.  The goal of this project is to make Wattpad a home for new forms of storytelling. With the multimedia feature, the global community can create and share comics, cookbooks, travel diaries, fashion blogs, and more.

Wattpad wants to deliver the best possible experience and evolve the story so it can be used for many different types of storytelling. Over 175 million original story uploads are already shared on Wattpad, we expect to see even more stories shared as a result of today’s launch.

Starting today, Wattpad will open up the new feature to a small group of writers. The new feature will be available to all Wattpadders by mid-January 2016.

Wattpad is where millions of people come to find the stories they love. We can’t wait to see how the creative community of 40 million people use multimedia to tell stories in new and unique ways.

Today we announce the winners of The Wattys, our annual writing contest. The Wattys recognizes the most-loved stories from the millions available on Wattpad. Winners were selected from around the world and shared stories in more than a dozen categories.

Our vision for The Wattys has always been to become the world’s largest online writing contest. Today, we reached that goal with a record-breaking 75,000 entries from over 180 different countries.

This year marks the first time we’ve opened up The Wattys contest internationally, and the results have been incredible. Almost half of this year’s entries were submitted in a language other than English. We saw over five times the number of entries compared to last year’s contest (check out the 2014 Wattys winners here).

“Each year with The Wattys, we celebrate our community and recognize the stories that have captured the hearts of millions of people around the world,” said Allen Lau, Wattpad CEO and co-founder. “We launched The Wattys in 2010 as a small writing contest. Today, it has grown into the  world’s largest online writing contest,  and it brings the entire Wattpad community together in celebration.”

Many thanks to everyone that submitted this year. Join us in congratulating the winners. You can read their stories here.

Wattpad has built quite a following with horror fans this year by hosting prominent horror campaigns with well-known entertainment franchises. Our community loves a good story and horror-junkies live for the adrenaline rush of a good fright.

Earlier this year we worked with Warner Bros. to support the launch of feature horror film The Gallows. We invited the directors of The Gallows to create two exclusive and serialized stories on Wattpad.

The stories rolled out in the weeks leading up to the launch of the film. As the stories built momentum, conversations began surging on the Gallows official profile and helped raise tremendous awareness and excitement for the film.

During this campaign we also worked with well-known Wattpad horror influencer Zoe Aarsen to create a commissioned story for The Gallows, called Initiation, which has received over 47K reads to date.

The campaign was an exciting intersection of brand, creators, and audience. The community loved the exclusive access to content written by The Gallows directors and continued to engage on Wattpad throughout the campaign period about both the film and the stories.

For a glimpse into this unique campaign download the case study here.

It’s been an incredible year for Wattpad.

In 2015, millions of people around the world turned to Wattpad to find original entertainment about the things they love.

This year, milestones and pop culture moments that trended the world over were explored through fiction, like LBGT rights and, yes, even Kim Kardashian.

In today’s TL;DR era, Wattpad’s new form of entertainment that lets people participate and interact with each other through stories, has captivated millennials to the tune of 13 billion minutes a month. This year, leading CPG and entertainment brands recognized the power of social storytelling and used the platform to connect directly with consumers and fans with incredible results.

On Wattpad, people can play with and participate in stories created by their peers and by the brands they love. As a result, Wattpad stories have millions of reads, thousands of comments, and go viral on and off the platform.

Check out Wattpad’s Year in Review and discover why 2015 was such a big year!

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of a Windows App. Now, for the first time, Windows Phone owners have a dedicated Wattpad app to discover and read stories for free. With the release of the new Windows App, Wattpad extends its reach to Windows phone users around the world.

The new app gives people access to more than 175 million original story uploads in over 50 languages, the ability to read offline, and comment on stories as way to interact with the global community. It is available as a free download in the Windows Store today.  

“A dedicated Windows App is one of the most-requested features by the international Wattpad community,” said Wattpad’s Head of Product Tarun Sachdeva. “With the new Windows App, more people can use their phones to discover original entertainment about the things they love.”

“I am excited that with Windows 10, Wattpad was able to reach more users and deliver a great experience across devices for their community,” said Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president, Developer Platform Evangelism group, Microsoft.

This initial release of the new app includes the ability to discover and read stories, as well as interact with others in the community. It will continue to be updated to deliver the best of Wattpad functionality to Windows users such as the ability to share their own writing with millions of people around the world.

Download the new Windows 10 App here.

This post is brought to you by Wattpad Co-Founder and CEO Allen Lau.

Wattpad CEO and Co-Founder, Allen Lau, is the newest contributor to the most widely used website by entrepreneurs and leaders in business worldwide, Entrepreneur. You can read his first piece on the power of competitive pricing below, or on Entrepreneur online, here.

3 Ways Offering Something for Free Can Actually Make You Lots of Money

I’ve always viewed zero as a special number. You can add as many zeros as you want in a sequence, and the end result is still zero. You can multiply any number by zero and you get zero. If you divide a number by zero, you get a spirited debate among mathematicians.

The concept of zero has marveled mathematicians and philosophers alike, but businesses can also take something away from its unique properties. That’s because something magical happens when a price falls to zero — all of a sudden, demand rises to infinity.

For software companies and startups that offer their services over the Internet, zero or “free” should be a central consideration in your business model. It was for me when I founded Wattpad, and it continues to be one of the core reasons we remain so successful today. Here are a few things to zero in on when examining this model.

1. Rapid user adoption

When Microsoft announced in August that its new edition of Windows 10 had hit 75 million downloads in its first month, many people reacted with surprise. After all, it took Microsoft six months to hit 100 million downloads for its previous release of Windows 8.

What was so different this time? What made this launch so special? The answer lies in the number zero.

By offering Windows 10 for free, Microsoft was able to capitalize on a wider audience of users and seed early interest for its operating system with developers. Similarly, when businesses offer something for free, they can speed up customer acquisition and build a user base much more rapidly.

Remember that there are many factors that prevent people from adopting a product or service — price being one of them. By offering something for free, you completely eliminate a common question consumers have when deciding to try a new product — “Should I pay for this?”

2. Organic growth

Besides eliminating friction, eliminating price also removes barriers to adoption based on socio-economic grounds, which in turn sets the stage for organic growth. My company, Wattpad, is a prime example of this.

When we first launched, our goal was to connect the billions of people who seek entertainment and escape through stories. In many parts of the world, access to reading material is limited, so we wanted to create an environment where people could connect, read and write stories, regardless of their background. Offering services for free was central in achieving this.

As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous and smartphone technology decreases in cost, the environment for Wattpad to flourish grows, because we offer our services at price point that compels people to download. We now have over 40 million users visiting our site every month and more than 150 million stories available in over 50 languages.

Even more impressive than this, our users — because they come from such diverse backgrounds — have been able to find their unique voice and enact change on our platform. Take for example Wattpad user Tahlie Purvis, a 16-year-old from Canada who is mobilizing writers to depict characters with imperfect body types. The movement, called#FreeYourBody, would not have been possible if our platform weren’t openly available to young adults to download. Because we’re free, we have a much broader user base that can organically shape the direction of our business.

3. Other ways to generate revenue

Offering services for free , of course, doesn’t make sense for every business, but for those operating in software or on the Internet, “free” is a very real consideration that should be made. After all, there are as many as 60,000 apps added to Apple’s App Store every month. Price point could very well be the key differentiator between you and a competitor.

That said, it’s crucial for startups to consider ways they can generate revenue if they do choose to offer services for free. One option is advertising.

Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba is known for not charging a transaction or listing fee for their marketplace items and handles billions in transactions. How do they make money? The answer is that revenue comes from Taobao, their consumer-facing shopping website, and 100 percent of it comes from native ads.

Another option startups can consider is the upgrade path, where a business attracts users with free baseline services but offer advanced access or additional perks for a price. This option is popular among music streaming sites, like Pandora or Spotify. Even YouTube recently unveiled a new paid service (YouTube Red) which would give users an ad-free experience and exclusive access to new content. Interestingly, each of these services provides a free option to attract new users, and let’s not forget that YouTube’s recent offering comes years after reaching a defensible scale.

Whatever method you choose to make money, make sure that it doesn’t alienate customers. While offering free services can certainly draw people in, inundating them with pop-ups or requests for upgraded service can keep them from returning to your site.

So to sum up — offering free services allows startups to differentiate themselves from competitors, rapidly build a user base and create a community that can grow organically. In a world where raising revenue often dictates every decision, sometimes “thinking zero” can actually lead businesses to make millions.

http://www.entrepreneur.com: Copyright [2015] by Entrepreneur Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Wattpad is pleased to welcome Suzanne Spence as our new head of global brand partnerships. In this role, Suzanne will develop innovative partnerships with top brands through our Brand Stories offering. She joins as Wattpad’s first New York-based hire.

Suzanne is an experienced sales and advertising strategist and has helped organizations achieve over $1 billion in revenue. At Wattpad, Suzanne will grow the roster of leading brands who use the platform to reach a millennial audience through entertainment, not transactional advertising.

Before joining the Wattpad team, Suzanne lead Google’s global mobile app monetization strategy with a focus on the Asia Pacific market. During her time with Google, Suzanne developed a broad range of skills in sales and global product strategy. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Princeton University.

Currently, brands like General Electric, Universal Pictures, Unilever, and Mondelez use Wattpad Brand Stories to quickly reach an audience of millions with entertaining content that drives lifts in brand awareness and affinity. With Suzanne as part of the team, we expect to see many more brands join the platform and connect directly with 40 million fans around the world.

For more information on Wattpad Brand Stories, check out http://business.wattpad.com or this feature in Adweek.

If you’re an indie author you know all too well the work that’s required to create, edit, market and sell your work. Chances are you have a good system for how to promote yourself, but if you’re like most, you’re always looking for opportunities to reach a wider audience.

That’s where Wattpad comes in. We have a global audience and are a dream for serious indie authors who are looking for exposure, feedback and validation. Not only that, but Wattpad can also help provide you with a platform in which to promote your books.

Why you should write on Wattpad:

1. You can reach a global audience of millions of readers
There’s nothing worse than writing a great book and then struggling to find readers. Other social networks aren’t wired for long-form reading like Wattpad. Our community of over 40 million people are hungry for great stories and spend 13 billion minutes per month on Wattpad. On Wattpad, readers make up 90% of our community. This means that for every one writer there are ten readers. This is great news for you!

2. Your work in progress is warmly welcomed
On Wattpad you don’t have to have a finished manuscript to post and share your work. And in fact, it’s better if you don’t. Serialization is what works best on Wattpad. Think of your work like a television show, with a new episode airing every week. The audience loves to be there beside you as your story unfolds.  Releasing your work one chapter at a time provides you with continual enthusiastic feedback  as you work on finishing your book alongside a growing audience who is there with you for the ride.

3. You can write or edit your work on the go, whenever inspiration strikes
Wattpad is designed for mobile with 90% of the community logging in from their mobile phones; both readers and writers. One of the most advantageous benefits of using Wattpad is that you can read, write, or edit your work from wherever you are – even offline. You don’t have to be tethered to your computer. You can be sitting in a doctor’s office, on a train, or standing in a line while you read, edit and refine your work, or write a new chapter.

4. You retain rights to your work always and forever
On Wattpad, you retain all rights to your work and are protected by copyright law in areas such as distribution, performance and creation of your work. When you post your story on Wattpad, we automatically insert into the file the date of publish on that story for you. We take copyright very seriously and always want our authors to feel protected. Our goal is to support writers and enable author success.

5. You can use Wattpad for free, forever
You will never be charged a fee to use Wattpad. Our commitment now and forever is that Wattpad will always be free to use. This is one of many reasons why we are able to attract such a large user base. Access to free content is what makes the community so desireable, but authors have also found that this access has helped promote book sales too! Win-win for authors and audiences.

6. You can make money and build your career
Writers who invest in the Wattpad community and build a decent following are invited to apply to our Wattpad Stars program. This program provides opportunities to writers to write fun branded content and get paid to do it. Our Wattpad Stars receive many paid opportunities and continue to build their audiences while attracting the interest of publishers, brands, the media, or agents who regularly peruse our site. Additionally, we provide Wattpad Stars with exciting non-paid perks like speaking opportunities at conferences and media interviews. Sharing your latest crowdfunding campaign or linking to sites where fans can buy your book is easy on Wattpad.

7. You will receive enthusiastic feedback from readers
Wattpad is an extremely positive community. When you post your work on Wattpad you will find that the audience is genuinely interested, helpful, and emotive about your work. You will receive enthusiastic feedback and comments that can be insightful to the development of your work. You will find that your fellow writers are very supportive of your career and when you are just getting started Wattpad ambassadors are always available to provide you with help when you need it.

8. You will be inspired by the great work of others
On Wattpad 24 hours worth of reading material is posted every minute of the day. So there is never a shortage of great stories to read. By regularly perusing the hot and featured lists, you will see what is gaining traction on Wattpad and what most people enjoy. The Wattys (Wattpad’s annual digital writing contest) is also a great place to browse for crowd favourites if you’re looking for new stories to read or research. Trending stories on Wattpad can provide tons of inspiration for you as you build your audience and credibility.

9. You can get discovered by agents and publishers
You don’t have to be a Wattpad Star to get noticed by publishers and agents. In fact Harlequin hosts their super popular So You Think You Can Write annual romance contest on Wattpad and provides valuable feedback to romance authors and a 2-book publishing deal to the grand prize winner. There are many contests hosted on Wattpad that provide high visibility opportunities for talented writers to become noticed and discover new readers who appreciate your work.  

10. You can access audience analytics
We know that our writers are numbers-obsessed, so we launched audience analytics to help authors see their stats in an interesting way. You can identify which country your readers are from what time of day you get the most comments, which chapters get the most votes, comments and more! Having this level of insight into who your readers are will help you better understand them and have a meaningful relationship that makes you a better author all around.

If you are interested in joining Wattpad, growing your audience, or becoming a Wattpad Star, head over to our writers site to learn more.