Honestly, Wattpad. You need to get your act together if you want to be exclusive, or have people take you seriously. Most of your “Paid Stories” are pretty much older stories that got popular which you’ve just decided to shove behind a paywall for some reason. But let me tell you something. Half of your alienated reader base (and I’m pretty sure more of them) barely read those stories when they weren’t behind a paywall. To paraphrase a motivational poster I saw somewhere once: “What’s popular isn’t always right.”
If you want to regain the trust and respect of your userbase, you need to either:
A) Have some exclusive, never posted before stories under a paywall from selected authors. Come on. That’ll get people excited and want to buy the stories, for the intrigue at least. It would be just like buying a brand new polished story. Come on, don’t play it safe. People would respect that so much more. It would be so much more fun as well.
B) Fix the quality of said Paid Stories. Seriously. Some of them aren’t even marked complete! Some of them haven’t been edited either. You expect us to pay real money for them? Excuse me…
C) Scrap the Paid Stories program altogether. From what I’ve seen, a lot of authors on the Program have dropped out of it because they’re not getting enough money and support for it, and because of people not buying/reading the paywalled stories.
D) Fix the pricing of the coins. For goodness sake… the average book is like $7.99, right? No one really wants to pay more than that. And none of those are special editions. Be fair, Wattpad. All the stories should be like 50 coins, at most. The word count shouldn’t be the only indicator of price…
E) Make it easier for your target demographic to get the coins. Logically speaking, most teenagers aren’t going to be able to afford the coins, especially the ones in developing countries. So, making those coins easier to gain would help them so much, and they’d be able to benefit from it, and so would the authors and Wattpad itself. Like, you know? Duh. Access= Profit in this case. Tapas is even easier to get ink from…
And the stories that do get bought? Who’s honestly buying them? Your pet dog? Your Grandma? Nah, I bet they have the common sense not to…
TheChurroverse 