I must admit, I hadn’t heard of Wattpad until yesterday, when I read an article on the National Post website about the Toronto-based company that’s supposed to save reading, or something along those lines.  As I read on, I must admit I was intrigued.  Hey, they’ve won over Margaret Atwood, so they must be doing something right, eh?

Dubbed the YouTube of writing, Wattpad allows authors to get plenty of online exposure–Atwood’s poems have been read 54,000 times on the site, though that’s nothing compared to Brittany Geragotelis, who earned a six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster after amassing some 13-million reads online.  And as per the Post,  at least one GTA-based writer has received 580,000 reads for a teen novel posted on Wattpad.  Do books even sell that many copies anymore?

With a Wattpad acount, people can share their written works of fiction or poetry (or I suppose they could put up an essay on existentialism, if they really wanted), though it seems to be geared towards a younger audience, with categories such as “Vampire,” “Werewolf” and “Teen Fiction.”  There is, however, no Music category, which means that I must stand alone.  See, I started writing a novel in college about a rebellious teenaged metal-head who joins a high-school hair metal band on a dare–but I never got past Chapter Six.  Re-reading the first two chapters many years later made me laugh at times, cringe on at least one occasion, and come to the realization that a few of the fake band-names I invented were just too cheesy to be believable.

But in any case, I decided to stick those first two chapters up there after some light edits.  I can upload the rest of what I’ve written if there’s any interest, I suppose.  Maybe if I get up to 580,000 reads, I’ll even start writing fiction again.  In the meantime, feel free to peruse my Wattpad profile…