Bel Watson is a 25-year-old Chilean author with over 30 titles and 100 million readers – but you won't find her on Amazon. She's on Wattpad, an online writing platform popular for fan-written fiction (fanfic).
More than half a million stories are uploaded daily to Wattpad; much of it "shipping" (fictional relationships between real people), or "imagines" (a second-person narrative genre that's huge in fanfic), starring celebrities or social-media stars.
The numbers are massive: 13bn minutes are spent reading on the platform every month. "According to Comscore, people are spending more minutes on Wattpad than on Candy Crush or Snapchat," says Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau, 47. Its readers are generally young and three-quarters are female, he adds.
Founded in Toronto in 2006, Wattpad became vastly popular as fans began reading – and writing – stories on their smartphones. In 2014, Anna Todd's series After – a One Direction fanfic – was picked up by Simon & Schuster and became a New York Times bestseller.
A billion Wattpad reads later, it has been optioned by Paramount for a film. "And most of the content was written on a mobile phone," says Lau. Wattpad is also expanding into story anthologies from its most popular authors while a TV series, Wattpad Presents, is showing in the Philippines.
This huge volume of fan-created content also provides insights into the pop-culture hive mind, illuminating that most nebulous of data points - what teens actually like. For example, Lau's team foresaw the rise of boyband 5 Seconds of Summer after an explosion of 5SOS stories.
As you can see, 5SOS have entered a period of volatility, whereas K-pop is on a steady upward trend. "It's a billboard for what's popular - and what's not," Lau says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
