Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Phone fiction spells the end of the professional novelist

Wattpad’s user-generated commercial fiction more than matches traditional publishing and is delivered direct to the smartphone – who needs to pay writers?

Maggie Q Shailene Woodley
Ready to download … much fan fiction on WattPad is equal to big name novel franchises such as Divergent, which was adapted into film, pictured. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/AP
For a few years in the mid 2000s, I was the young librarian who got sent to schools to convince kids they really did want to read books. The truth of my experience was that the kids needed no convincing. There’s an odd belief in some parts of the book world that young people have to be made to read, or made to read “good” books. If you want a really telling piece of evidence to counter this strange notion, look no further than Wattpad.

With more than 35 million users and over 100,000 stories published each day, Wattpad is staggeringly active community of readers and writers, the vast majority of whom are young adults. When I was working for libraries to engage young people with books, the idea of a website where kids could post and read stories for and by their peer group came up again and again. Wattpad is that vision made real, with the support of nearly $70m (£46m) in venture capital funding.
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