Wattpad Books will release six young-adult titles of between 80,000 and 100,000 words in length by the end of 2019.Ansell, who is 23 and works a day job as a copywriter, signed up for Wattpad to read stories when she was 15 years old. “I didn’t have a lot of money to buy actual books, so I was searching for a place where I could read online,” she says. Today, Ansell’s Wattpad page has 135,000 followers, and her digital Wattpad bookhas been optioned for television.
Wattpad’s database contains 565 million story uploads, not all of which will become major acquisitions. Gardner says that for many, being optioned is not the goal. “A lot of our users have joined Wattpad because it’s self-expression for them, in the same way that people use Instagram without being monetarily incentivized to do so. And a lot of people are able to build careers on that as well,” she says.
It is incontestable that the internet can be a cruel place for marginalized people. According to a representative from Wattpad, the company has a zero-tolerance approach to harassment or bullying, which fosters an environment where experimentation and imperfection are forgiven, even encouraged. While other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been reluctant to take an actionable stance on hate speech, Wattpad’s policy is to delete any such comments without hesitation.
“The cynic in me wants to say that there is an element of exploitation in making money from the user-generated content of teenagers,” says Emily Keeler, a Toronto-based editor with Coach House Books.