![]() ![]() Margaret Atwood has said she believes that Wattpad “opens the doors and enlarges the view in places where the doors are closed and the view is restricted”. Although, according to Lau, it’s the number one app in the Philippines.ĭespite Wattpad’s vast impact, it remains largely unknown or under-rated. And then we started to see things accelerate by the third year.” It continues to grow to this day with most users residing in the UK, the US and Canada. The second year we started to see more and more users. “After a year we had perhaps 1,000 users, I can’t remember the exact amount, it was very low. “The initial growth in the first year was depressing,” admits Lau. Alongside my own friends, 25 million others also read and write on the website, collectively having uploaded 40m stories and spending a total of 41bn minutes on the website. As a social platform, Wattpad grew through word of mouth between teenagers – it’s now a craze in several countries around the world. Nonetheless, my story has attracted around 12,000 views, 262 likes and a stream of comments to date all of which offered me motivation and the giddy happiness to keep on going. ![]() So I began writing and uploading my own stories, choosing to (the originality will blow your mind, I’m sure of it) centre my narrative on a werewolf romance. And as most readers know, stories have an uncanny ability to spark one’s own creativity and inspiration. So much so that I abandoned “real” fiction for a while, relishing instead the heaps of clichés that populated practically every story I read. My online “library” was soon full of romance and the paranormal.’ Photograph: Laura Pannack Photograph: Laura Pannack/Observerīoy was it exhilarating. I downloaded the app on to my iPod Touch – you can also get it on iPhone and iPad – and when I saw I could read stories offline it began a reading marathon as I commuted between work-experience jobs. In my case, introduced to it by friends, I slowly became addicted, clicking and double-clicking my way through until my online “library” was full of romance and the paranormal, often finishing 40-chapter stories in a day. I believe the younger generation are at such an age where they are more perceptive to new ideas and new concepts, and that’s why it started taking off.” We wanted to create a place for people to share their writing and that’s actually pretty generic. Once we discovered we were working on a similar idea we decided to start a company.” However, Lau didn’t expect the initial growth to be among young female users. “Ivan (Yuen, co-founder of Wattpad) was one step ahead of me and in addition to a mobile reading app he also created a website which allowed people to share their writing on mobile devices. It started as “a mobile reading app,” says Allen Lau, Wattpad’s co-founder and CEO. Wattpad is a global sensation in young adult literature. What my gushing friend was trying to say was: “When will you upload on to Wattpad next?” If you’ve not heard of Wattpad, you don’t know a girl in her early teens. ![]() ![]() No, I do not have a publishing deal and no, I have no real experience in creative writing apart from a few amateur attempts at creating my own novel, a journey I began at the age of 11. “Y ou have to upload your next chapter, Hazal, I want to know what happens next,” a close friend gushed to me one morning during registration. ![]()
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