I’m one of those wattpad authors who are (as you might’ve realized) painfully unpopular- like on severe levels. I can write – not speaking out of self-evaluation here – and why I have been told so is due to the uniqueness of my stories…the originality.

I would everyday rather read anything else from those excruciatingly repetitive stories – the good ones – just because they are good and not cliched, popular or not.

One thing I don’t do though is to condescend on the tireless efforts of the people who write cliches and are popular either by calling their work ‘undeserving’ or by bitching about why mine isn’t ahead of theirs in read or vote count. Why? Just as you kept mentioning- they work and promote a million times harder than I do.

And again, like you said, it’s not entirely my fault- I’m 20, hence, an ‘adult’, and I’m in college reading one of the most time-consuming courses you can imagine (contact me if you wish to know what course it is, or not).

So, all these factors (and a few more) contribute to my regrettable unpopularity.

Anywho, nice article Sally. It’s very enlightening.

Gotta post a thank you to you here. Given your horde of fans, I wasn’t sure if you’d see a PM.

This thread you started, inspired my essay “The MFA Effect”—which I posted on my blog and included as a stand alone on Wattpad. The content editors over there rather liked it, and told me they were “passing it around the office”.

Basically, that essay got me noticed, and led to my story “The Unnatural” getting featured (which, btw, is now ranked #9 on historical fiction). So I thought I’d give a shout out to you.

I’ve been kicking around your blog post here for about a week now. Just like you took what we were discussing and applied it to another problem, I’ve done the same thing and posted it on my blog.

I think a lot of people here might like to see the result. By combining some of my thoughts on another subject, with this discussion, I think we have a bigger problem than I realized before: http://thevirilview.com/

If posting my link annoys you, please message me on Wattpad. I’ll be happy to take it down.

Now, I DO think there is an issue with more high brow works not getting enough reads, but I’m not sure I blame the system for that. Good writing deserves visibility, but I think a lot of writers don’t realize how important promotion is in getting their work out there. Many writers are introverts, so the inherently social nature of promotion on Wattpad is beyond them.

And same here! I never thought about writing seriously until I joined Wattpad, learned a few things, and got a whole lot of support from (way younger than me) readers.