What’s it like on Wattpad? Part 3

I’ve been talking about my experience so far after a couple of months sharing my books on Wattpad.

Wattpad allows you to tag your stories so interested readers can find them. It was through the tag system I first realized there’s a sub-genre of general and YA fiction revolving around siblings. In most cases, the protagonist is a girl in her early-to-mid teens, the siblings are mostly older, mostly boys, and the stories are first-person accounts.

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What’s it like on Wattpad? Part 2

In my last post I talked about my reasons for using Wattpad, and how my first two books are doing since I started uploading them, chapter by chapter, about 6 weeks ago.

I wanted to share a few thoughts about how this method of sharing my books differs on a more personal level with the two sci-fi books I had published a few years ago.

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What’s it like on Wattpad?

In late December I started uploading chapters of Little Sister Song to Wattpad. That story is now complete on the site, and I’ve almost finished uploading Out of Tune (book 2) as well. I thought I’d talk a bit about my reasons for using Wattpad to distribute these books, and my experience so far.

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Read Little Sister Song on Wattpad

Little Sister Song

UPDATE: Little Sister Song is now available for purchase on Amazon.

Just a heads-up that Little Sister Song, book 1 of the Wynter Wild series, is now uploaded and complete on Wattpad, a free book platform where books can be serialized. In the future I’ll be releasing the first few books of the Wynter Wild series as free Kindles (and other ebooks).

I changed the cover for Wattpad and discovered that adding a figure to the image correlated to an increase in “reads”.  Click the cover for a direct link. (You do need to sign up, or log in with your Facebook or Google account.)

Getting instant feedback on a story, chapter by chapter, in the form of votes and comments, is certainly a different experience for me. Better still is the chance to interact with readers in real time, as well as to check out the other books they’re reading in order to discover new fiction for myself.

I’m in the process of uploading book 2, Out of Tune, and updating every day.

Pure emotion songs

I know, I know, you disagree! Maybe with all five. But don’t blame me. These are Indio’s “pure emotion” songs, meaning, according to him, they bypass the cerebral cortex and drive directly into the brainstem. The list is guitar-heavy because he’s guitar-heavy.

These songs aren’t my “songlist” for writing to—I prefer instrumental music for that. Indio is the middle child, a musician and songwriter who also expresses himself through art.

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Personality Typing for Made-Up People

I became fascinated by personality typing years ago. I see personality typing as a model of actual humans, meaning it’s a structure we’ve imposed on the messy natural world in order to understand it, rather than a real thing. For this reason, I think it probably works better on fictional characterization than actual humans.

In the past I’ve typed characters at the start of the writing process. Whether or not you have a large cast, it helps to keep personalities distinct. You probably already have broad characters in mind at that point. Reading through personality types to find ones that “match” can help hone the characters.

A few systems to try (I’ve provided a link for each, but there’s loads more info available by Googling, including zodiac signs if you’re looking for more arbitrary ideas):

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How do you feel? Writing Emotion

Overusing the ol’ hammering heart? I write that way too. But recently I took a deeper dive into writing emotion via your characters’ thoughts and reactions, rather than via bodily sensations. The Emotion Thesaurus is a wonderful resource and a good starting point, but too much hand-trembling, knee-shaking, and trickling beads of sweat can become exhausting to read.

There are several ways to approach the writing of emotions and I tend to be minimalist. Too minimalist! I’m still learning.

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You’re writing about WHAT?

There’s so much pressure today on writing for the market, writing for your ideal reader, writing for a genre so the publisher feels secure in how to market the book and the bookseller knows where to shelve it.

All this is important but let’s not lose sight of why most of us write in the first place. I think writers write for much the same reason as readers read. A reader picks up a book, and sticks with it, in order to escape to that world for a while. A writer writes in order to create that world.

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