Our Book Club topic today was Wattpad and FanFiction.net and what a lively discussion it was! The majority of club members all accessed these two websites on a regular basis and the room was divided on what site was better. A member of our team has contributed to one of these sites and spoke about how amazing it is to receive positive feedback from readers.
In looking at these two sites they are clearly very different, with FanFiction as the name implies, dedicated to celebrating published stories that the reader feels a connection with. So much so they may create a new story, or they may introduce new characters into the story or they may rewrite the ending. In looking at a current list in FanFiction.net the ten most popular novels are
and the number of times these stories have been written about are next to the title and these are BIG numbers!
Wattpad is quite different. As David Streitfeld in a recent article for the New York Times writes
Wattpad is a leader in this new storytelling environment, with more than two million writers producing 100,000 pieces of material a day for 20 million readers on an intricate international social network … This makes Wattpad a powerful force in the publishing world and he goes on to say,
This is writing reimagined for a mobile world, where attention is fragmentary.
He speaks of the trend to serialise stories, perfect for those of us who have a few spare minutes to spare whilst waiting for a bus or waiting for the lights to change, just enough time to read a new chapter from our favourite author and much like what used to happen in the 1840’s with the writer Charles Dickens who often had his novels serialised. Below is a screenshot from Wattpad with some quite amazing statistics. With Wattpad you can get live story updates from your favourite writers and read them anywhere, anytime.
