Cracking the Wattpad Code: Insider Secrets the Pros don't want you to know!

Tiny tweaks that yield BIG Results

Hey everyone, this is a pretty important chapter! As you all know, I'm constantly tweaking my works here on Wattpad, and I've noticed that if you're patient enough, you'll begin to see large benefits in your results by making a few, simple, tiny tweaks and seeing how they affect your books' success.

In Marketing, we call this A-B testing something. Is Email Subject Line #1 better than Email Subject Line #2 for example? Is Offer A better than Offer B?

Well, I've noticed a few things that's made quite a dramatic difference in the success of some of my books as well as my follows.

1) Your book's title matters for getting reads. BY A LOT.

So play around with it. Change it for a few days and see if you get an uptick in reads. When I first started out on Wattpad, my first book Kuro had 10 measly reads when I first posted it. The Book's original title was "Kuro: Eternal Darkness Chronicles". A week into Wattpad, I decided to change it to "Kuro: A Land in Eternal Night". That was when I started getting a large amount of reads. Two weeks after that, I logged 1,500 reads over one weekend! Not bad for a brand new book from an unknown author on Wattpad. Now not everyone is gonna get that kind of success (I got lucky too), but can you see how the impact of such a tiny change matters?

Keep tweaking your book's title and see if you get an uptick in reads. I'll re-iterate that the best titles that work on Wattpad are the ones that make it obvious what the book is all about. Now, this is dfferent from traditional literature where you come up with awesome names like "Through the Looking Glass" or "The Grapes of Wrath". As crazy as it sounds, these don't work well on Wattpad, so if you're a traditional author, it's worth knowing this distinction.

Not convinced? Just look at the Hot List! "Summoner", "Death is my BFF" (LOL!), "Silent Heroes: Wildcat", "Psych Investigation Episodes" are a few examples, and are all terrific names. I don't even have to read these books' descriptions to know what they are about, and they instantly convey to their target audience that "I'm what you want to read next because I'm totally about what you're interested in"!

For Kuro: A Land in Eternal Night for instance, my story title instantly conveys two things. 1) My book is about a land in eternal night. and 2) Wow, I guess that's kind of original isn't it? How many books are there about a world where night never ends? That's why the tweak worked so well for me in comparison to original title, "Eternal Darkness Chronicles", which really doesn't say anything about what the book is about and is confusing.

2) Your story's description matters in a MAJOR way.

This one I've gotten SERIOUS wins from!

I experimented a lot with this for my book Death Angel, and I'm still kicking myself for not doing it earlier. During the earlier chapters, Death Angel did well. On day 1 it was ranked #30 or something like that, which I was really happy about, but then it sort of plateaued for a few weeks, where I was really struggling to stay in the rankings (hovering in the 30s). This was during the earlier chapters.

The solution? Changing the story description to highlight the parts of the book that I knew the target audience would love.

Before this, the story description was about my protagonist dying and meeting Death, and then something vague about a mystery.

I re-focused the description to only a few key topics:

Female Protagonist, Death, Romance, Vampires, Demons, Love Triangle, Death Angel.

The result? The new change practically screams, "Read Me Next" to perhaps 90% of Wattpad's audience. This change resulted in Death Angel more or less being on the front page of the Hot List permanently (as long as I updated regularly), leading it to a high of #2 in both Paranormal and Mystery Thriller.