Hey! I was brand new to Wattpad too just as everything started to crumble. I agree that Tapas seems like a really supportive community. Hopefully this will be a better start for both of us!
My success was only modest on either platform, but Wattpad’s nuking the forums, which was the only place to find exposure there was basically why I finally tried Tapas.
I’ve learned a lot on Wattpad and made good friends, but it is too difficult to do anything there without the forums.
I still have 4 stories tied into Watty since I already entered, but I will try to write the next story for Tapas specifically.
14 days later
Schedule uploading, and your chapters show up on Fresh list, giving you access to the direct access to the readers. Tapas has the forum that is directly connected to the publishing end.
Basically, for comparison, I started my story on Wattpad on July 24th, went out of my way with read for reads, and got 1.4K reads, almost none of them organic.
And once the forum got deleted, most of my stories dropped to zero reads, except the ones my friends read. Because the forum was where the small accounts could find what few reads they could get on Wattpad.
Last week, I had one story added on Wattpad to a reading list of the major ambassador account with 500K subs (Romance!) and someone with 10K followers recommended it on Twitter—I got 7 reads on that story after that. Seven.
Here, I started on August 4th, and I have 62 subs, 2.1K reads, easily breaking the 50 reads per day minimum I couldn’t achieve on Wattpad in 3 years of extreme forum, clubs, reads and Twitter activity. The only time I saw myself cresting it was on one book that got featured in 2019 while it was on WP’s reading list.
Basically, to be read on Wattpad you need to be a social media star, do serious read for reads to the tune of a few hours a day or be noticed by headquarters among the literally 200 million books (I think that’s an outdated number) they have.
And, save for Being social media star, nothing gives you the growing organic reads there with the current broken algorithm. People simply don’t see you.
On the downside, IF you made it on Wattpad to the tune of over 100K reads, they will likely keep accumulating long after you finish the book. Here, I am told, once the book is done, the reads dry up.
Tapas interface stripping your formatting is bad. Not being able rearrange the order of chapters is also bad. Not having in-line comments is both good and bad.
TL;DR if you are social media darling, you will make it anywhere. If you have a YA, OwnVoice Diversity book that you think will get HQ on Wattpad to give you Watty, Paid deal or publication, Wattpad is worth trying. If you are a small author without social media hopes, tapas will help your work to be read for just posting by at least a few people, while you will get zero on Wattpad
Interesting!
I'm also from Wattpad, and this is my first time in Tapas. I shifted because the wattpad forums are now gone.
I just wanna know if you have an opinion of posting the same story here and on wattpad? Is that a bad thing? Because that's what I was about to do.
It depends on how high your hopes are for Watty 2020 or HQ's attention for Stars/Paid. If you want to see if you have a chance at Watty, you will need to wait until they announce the results and you didn't win. Posting on Tapas disqualifies your book from Watty, and gives you a big disadvantage for Stars/Paid, since Wattpad wants exclusivity.
What i did, I discontinued my book on Wattpd (didn't delete it) and posted links to Tapas in the last chapter. I didn't think the book would be able to win a Watty next year, because it is a romance, and I gave up all hope to become a Star/be invited into Paid a bit earlier this year. I still have 4 book entered into Watty, but I don't expect to win it, so... I kindda cleared my desk before starting on Tapas.
I do regret moving of Wattpad because it used to support a slightly wider variety of genres than Tapas, but right now nothing gets read there.
I'm also from Wattpad. I actually made the move before the forums shutdown and I'm glad i did i because im getting a good response here vs being on wattpad forums! BL is what I mostly write so I gained a lot of viewers on this platform.
Plenty in there for me to digest I think ...
I've just deleted everything I'd posted on Wattpad, because it really seems like a useless effort at this point. I'm lucky that I'd only been there for a month in total, so I didn't get in too deep. However, I think that even with the forums gone, people who had been there longer might still do okay, since they'll have made personal connections with people and gotten involved in engaging with certain stories.
I remember how active you were on the Wattpad forums! Read for reads were pretty much the only way to get anything for a story that didn't get extremely lucky, and it also wasn't for the fact that you might gain new readers that way. The entire read for read system honestly grossed me out, where everyone is hinting "please give me lots of stars" and "please continue reading this" but it was against the rules to outwardly say so, so everyone just clicked and vaguely commented as they skimmed each other's chapters. It felt like a postmodern game of chicken.
And the truth that stories simply get no reads outside of read for reads and other promotion... is really aggravating to accept. There was zero discoverability on the site because the tagging algorithms were broken, and continue to be broken it appears. From all the hustle you did, the fact your stories did not ever break out is the biggest evidence of how bad Wattpad was, in my opinion.
It's not like Tapas is a BIG site--for novels, Royal Road and Webnovel.com still outpace it significantly--but stories actually have a chance on here whereas there was just no feasible way to succeed besides accidents and awards.
Ooohhh well, i just started writing a few months ago so my story is far from finished. I have no hope for the wattys hahahaha.
Thank you so much for your insight. It gives me a lot to think about <3
Cripes, I'd never even heard of Webnovel as another option though, having just checked it out, its genre options are hilariously narrow ... esp. for female readers it seems. So that's Mystery writers like me stuffed but, being 2020, naturally they will have polled all female readers and confirmed these are the only things they're interested in ... right? 
Webnovel/Qidan is a Chinese-owned company that follows gender segregation very closely and also has some ridiculously shady business practices. It's not recommended for any authors. But sadly it's the second-biggest web fiction site behind Wattpad and ahead of Royal Road. (According to Alexa, webnovel is rank #12,000ish while Royal Road is 19,000ish. Interestingly, Tapas.io is still only #22,000ish when it's got webcomics too...)
Whoa - what is wrong with these people?? While undoubtedly there are several contributing factors, with attitudes like this it's little wonder we've witnessed such a devaluing of creative content over recent years. Sad
Well, it would be eligible next year, but if you’re not after Watty at all, then no worries.
I am still active on Wattpad, though not to the same degree. I have books I follow there and a club I am in. I do like having a community; I need the immersion and conversation with the other writers to write.
I almost never read what doesn’t look appealing for r4r, but the problem was that in the last few months the algorithm broke to the point when r4r wasn’t enough to circulate the books. Before, doing a bunch of them and getting reading lists add-ons improved the book’s visibility.
Now the attitude on Wattpad is, ‘we are an archive, find your readers on social media, we can’t help you unless we scouted your next YA Masterpiece and invited you into Stars/Paid’
Royal Road has the best interface, but the rating system and extremely narrow range of what they would read there makes it harder to succeed there. If I could write the stuff they love there, I would.
But I am a more bookish writer and I love stronger women & more intellectual men characters than they prefer