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

Do you have a good product?

This is going to be an interesting update for me because I am genuinely looking forward to the responses I receive from this post. Some of them will be positive of course, but far more than the positive responses, I am most looking forward to the negative reactions.

Anyway, here's the story.

I have a long commute to work, and if you're like me and most people, you're going to tune out mass media. That means tuning out anything on the radio (I spend maybe fifteen to twenty minutes TOPS getting acquainted with current events, and most of it I get from a select few websites or from Flipboard.

Speaking of which, out of curiosity, where do the majority of you consume content? I would imagine that most people on Wattpad would be pretty tech savvy. After all, it does take a certain level of sophistication to be able to read books from a mobile device. 

Anyway, I digress.

The whole point of this post was that I was particularly inspired by a presentation Seth Godin made at Inbound 2013. I found it on Youtube yesterday, and I've been listening to it non-stop. I'm on my fourth listen and I'm still finding stuff to learn from. Nevertheless, his speech is incredibly inspirational, and I still have goosebumps listening to it. 

This chapter is completely and totally inspired by Seth Godin's work. I take ZERO credit for this. This is all Seth Godin.

For those of you interested, I have included the full presentation in the media section of this chapter.

Seth Godin is a marketer's marketer.  Not only is he amazingly prescient about how things work in the digital age, but he presents his findings in such a compelling manner that you can't  help but agree with him. Rather than tell everyone, "This is how you should be doing it", he tells you the why's. He helps you reach the same conclusion he has. 

On your own.

Anyway, one of the things I agree with Seth on, and I've actually gone on record as saying this, is that the middleman/gatekeeper has been removed. In other words, in the past if you wanted someone to read your book, or listen to your song, or see you dance, you had to spend years, honing your craft, polishing it to a razor-sharp sheen, and understanding how the industry worked. The process was long, arduous and there was little guarantee of success, even after you had met all the criteria and achieved mass distribution.

Understand this ladies and gentlemen: what we have today, our parents could only dream of having. If our parents wanted to write a book, not only did they have to write it, but they had to find someone who believed enough in their book to want to show it to other people. In other words, a publisher.

Us? We just go right out and DO IT.

And this is where I am going to put my flame retardant suit on, because this post, is bound to get some hate.

What are you talking about Mike?

Just this. For the longest time, we have all been conditioned to think that the way to success was to get a good college education, work hard, rise up the ranks, do well, and then save up for retirement.

It's a good formula right? Sure. But what about in the 12th century? Or the 16th century? Do you think the people during that age were thinking, "God, if only I graduated from college and got good grades, things might be a little different?"

No. I can assure you that could not have been further from the truth.

Matter of fact. What did people do during those times? That's simple. 

Everyone had a product.

The farmer had his produce, the blacksmith had his steel, and the artisan had his art, the winemaker his wine. In other words, NO ONE had a JOB.