Wattpad brings you a guest post from Doug Brownlie, writer of the thriller “Consequences Unforeseen”:
‘I wonder how many of these guys, famous or not, have had 70,000 reads of their work these past 11 weeks?’
‘My goodness, I’ve just had a Wattpad Moment’….
This statement has become a common phrase in our household since my book first appeared on what is now our favorite website of all. My wife uses it when she get’s a flash of inspiration for a proposal or presentation she’s preparing. My daughter uses it when she comes home with a great grade for a social studies essay, an English essay, a book report or PowerPoint she’s done for science. We have a good laugh when one of us uses it.
I brought the catch phrase into existence (for us at any rate) when my cell phone would chirp as an email came in telling me I had another ‘like,’ another ‘fan’ or another comment. The two ladies teased me constantly, but the “Wattpad Moment” is here to stay!
These Wattpad moments have come to mean a lot to us over the weeks since September 5th when my book first appeared.
And it’s no wonder. When I posted the story back in September it was 17 chapters long and the number of people reading it in the first week quite frankly blew me away. Within two weeks it was close to 10,000 reads and comments and emails were coming at me from all over the world. One person Googled me, noticed that three chapters of the book were being sold on Amazon and bought the book. (The book was posted there to raise money for the Haitian earthquake relief fund).
The encouragement and support have been overwhelming, and the result so far is that Consequences Unforeseen is now 35 chapters or parts and has over 73,000 reads. I have also published the start of a vampire tale inspired by some good story boarding by my daughter, so the Wattpad experience had encouraged her to put her creative hat on as well.
For me there has not been a single negative experience these past fourteen weeks, and the positive lessons continue on and on:
On the statistics side it has been an interesting analytical game for us to play in terms of the number of reads for each chapter as well as the overall total. This is valuable to me as a writer (and indeed valuable to any writer) because it gives me a great insight into the minds of the readers. It would for example let me know if there was a single point or part which had a definitive negative impact in the trend. This is very important since I decided to serialize the work and not stick it all up at once.
Serializing on Wattpad
The decision to serialize was probably the best route for me as a writer. The first 17 chapters were complete and ‘ready to go” but I knew there were many more things that my main character Bill Douglas had done and even more he still had to do.
Waiting to publish the next 17 parts would have meant a fourteen week gap between first upload and the next 18 parts, and I believe that in this amount of time, people would have forgotten about Bill Douglas and all the momentum would have been lost. Now, uploading a new part every couple of days keeps me fresh as a writer and the audience asking ME for more, rather than me asking for more people to read the work.
I have discovered, for me at least, writing is all about confidence and the positive feedback and encouragement leaves me feeling that I MUST post a new part when I said I will or I will be letting the audience down.
The ‘task’ of writing has become a ‘joy’ and also become part of my daily planning activity where it used to be an ad hoc thing. This is a huge benefit to me and to the continuation of the book.
I have had the self publishing experience with the first three chapters available on Amazon, the ‘writer’s site’ experience on a couple of other sites, and this Wattpad experience where nobody expects anything from you in return for reading your work. This has been a tremendous benefit to me.
On Tuesday last week, my daughter needed a book for her English class at school and we went to Barnes and Noble to purchase it. No big deal you’d think. Am I right?
We’ve all been to B & N many times before. Again, am I right? Rhetorical questions I’m sure, but for me this time it wasn’t quite right.
The minute I walked in to the store on this occasion, I got the ‘chills’. I stopped a few paces into the book hall and tried to absorb the sheer magnitude of the lines and lines of bookshelves stretching into the distance. I wandered over to the start of the fiction section and glanced at the famous names right there on the first book case. I looked at the less famous authors’ works reaching all the way from one side of the room to the other.
The voice in my head said, ‘I wonder how many of these guys, famous or not, have had 70,000 reads of their work these past 11 weeks?’
A kind of despairing feeling hit me at that point because I considered what they had gone through to have their books sitting here untouched and unread for weeks at a time. Yes the famous ones might well have had big fat checks for their work, but still, there they were, their books just languishing on the shelf.
There is a staggering statistic released by the Association of American Publishers that 50% of all published works that are shipped to the bookstores are returned to the publishing company to be remaindered or destroyed. Further, of the 65,000 new titles published per year, only 8,000 are considered to have book store potential.
I realized right there and then that what Wattpad has given me and to all of us who are publishing work here, is a dynamic, ever increasing and GLOBAL audience that makes up its own mind.
Yes, I make zero money for this privilege, but I know that if I were writing for a living, to this point, I’d be broke. The excitement of writing for me is in creating a living and vibrant set of characters, and being able to continue the journey with them, and not having to decide on a clever ending to conclude something that does not need to end!
One final thing I’ve taken advantage of on Wattpad is the incredible number of really good books on here. I’ve enjoyed exchanging ideas and suggestions with other writers and in particular relished the thoughts and insights of others, writers and readers alike.
Never a day goes by without an encouraging word or a thoughtful, insightful comment. These things make the experience a real pleasure and encourage it to be an enduring one.
Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to read and enjoy my work. I will strive to make that trend continue.
My best,
Follow the star of “Consequences Unforeseen,” Bill Douglas, on Twitter!
Read “Consequences Unforeseen” on Wattpad!
She died too young, too soon and too beautiful: Love, death, retribution and unpredictable outcomes.
An adventure filled childhood leads a man down the path of a death dealer, an assassin willing to kill for a living. Yet when he experiences the loss of someone once very close to him, grief could shatter the glass foundation he’s built his life on.
It introduces an international assassin as he attends an emotional and personally shattering funeral of a long lost friend. Reflection and soul searching transports him and you to a time from his past. Critical events unfold and life changing consequences begin to emerge.
It is a thriller, a love story and it will take you places you have never been and show you things you have never seen.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.