Wattpad

Authors who want to self publish their work online have a number of options worth exploring now – all of which cost nothing, and that, as far as I’m concerned, is the only option. Rule number one of indy authoring – or indeed any kind of authoring – is you must never ever pay anyone to publish your work. Rule number two is, if you can’t find anyone to publish it, it’s okay to give it away.

So far I’ve “published” work on Lulu.com, Smashwords and Feedbooks. Of the three, I think Feedbooks still stands out in terms of the sheer exposure it grants your work. It’s amazing to me that I can load a story on Feedbooks in the evening, and by morning it’s been downloaded fifty times. This is by no means unusual and has happened consistently with each of the, thus far, nineteen stories I’ve uploaded. All right, this download rate will decline over time as your story sinks deeper into the ever growing pile of indy material, but even after a couple of years, I’m still achieving between five and ten downloads per day for an average work.

The important factor here, I believe is to go for a service that makes your work available on hand-helds – either a portable e-reader like the Kindle, or on a multitasking device like the iPhone, or an Android. People fondle these devices. They’ve only to be still for a minute – say sitting in a cafe, or even standing in the chip-shop queue and out comes the ‘phone. So if the self publishing platform you’re considering has an “app” for getting at stuff either wirelessly or via 3G, it’s worth a look.

Feedbooks then (embedded in the Stanza app), is my gold standard, the one I consistently recommend, and the benchmark against which I measure anything else I come across. Which brings me to Wattpad. I know Wattpad’s been around for a while now, and maybe I’m a bit slow but I’ve only recently looked into it. Out of interest, and by way of experiment, I put my story “The Man Who Could Not Forget” on there this evening. The signup process was painless – just username, e-mail, then pick your password. The interface was clean and slick and easy to use. It appears to be ad- supported, and that was a bit annoying, but we’ll see how it goes – they have to make their money somehow or there’d be no service for us freeloaders to enjoy, I suppose. From signup to “world-wide publication”? About ten minutes. Very impressive.

I’ll check my downloads in the morning and report back here.

(it was ten, not bad!)

(it was still ten three days later, which isn’t quite so good)