I’m still clinging onto Wattpad by my fingertips, hoping that at some point my stories take off, and I end up the Wattpad equivalent of Zoella.

As I’m losing the popularity competition on the site, this post won’t tell you how to succeed on Wattpad. But here’s what I get from my Wattpad experiences…

Discipline. My devoted readership (thank you Caron Allan) do read my chapters, so that makes me write regularly.

Plotting. Life’s a lot easier when you plot properly. I use bullet points and I write them by hand as I believe the physicality of it makes your brain work differently. You decide what you want to happen in a chapter and bullet how the action will take place. Then, all you need to do is flesh the bullets out, which is the easy bit.

Re-evaluation. The book I’ve written that’s the most popular on Wattpad is also the one I like the least. Two Slices of Carrot Cake would need serious work to make it half-way decent. But there you go. The Wattpad audience doesn’t agree with me.

Write to market. The second most popular book I have on Wattpad is also teen fiction. That makes sense as 85 percent of users are millennials or Generation Z. Middle age angst (the stuff I specialise in) doesn’t interest them.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed on Wattpad. There are millions of stories on the platform (more than 32.2 m), but stats put the 65 million audience at 76 percent content users, rather than generators—i.e. readers, rather than writers. And the bulk of them are reading on their smart phones, which is why you should write chapters that aren’t long and use short sentences and paragraphs.

There’s a saying that failure isn’t the opposite of success, merely a step on the way. I’ll stick with Wattpad and my select loyal followers. Who knows what might happen?

If you’d like to read any of my works on Wattpad, here’s the link.