Could Wattpad be the Greatest University of Writing Ever?

As well as being a showcase for indie books, could http://www.wattpad.com/ be the greatest University of Writing ever?

The site is designed to be a sort of YouTube for authors, a glorious, great, free bookstore in the sky, but it seems to me that it could be providing something else even more important than that.

Anyone can put their writings up there and anyone can read them. The books tend to go up one chapter at a time and some of them are read by millions – literally – mainly on phones and other mobile devices. Wandering around this campus in the clouds it is obvious that the majority of participants are young adults, with the odd greybeard amongst them. Millions of young people writing and reading; dispelling the fears of all those Jobs prophesising the death of the written word.

Readers leave comments, just like on YouTube, and the tone seems to be almost uniformly positive and encouraging, like a giant, friendly, creative writing group.

This is a campus filled with enthusiasts for the written word, potentially every English-speaking person in the world who wants to read stories and all those who want to write them, brought together in one place. How brilliant is that?

The books are divided into categories, with genres like romance, fantasy, historical fiction and science fiction receive the most attention, just like in any earthly bookstore. There are also some very useful texts on how to write, (the equivalent of lectures and seminarsif this analogy can be stretched a little further).

The Wattpad people single out the odd book to be “featured”, which is a bit like having your book put on the front table at Waterstones, but apart from that everyone seems to be equal, distinguished only by the number of readers their work has attracted.

Could this be a rather cheery glimpse into the future of books and reading?

Falling out of Love with Physical Books

Last month in my allotted space on the "Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? blog ( authorselectric.blogspot.com ) I bared my soul regarding difficulties in my relationship with my desktop. This month I had to confess to the even more traumatising discovery that I might have fallen out of love with an even more long-standing soul-mate.

When I was first introduced to my pretty young iPad a year ago I imagined that it would merely widen my horizons, offer me more options and some lively entertainment. I stumbled into the relationship like some wide-eyed old fool who fails to realise he has been targeted as potential sugar-daddy material, never thinking it would make me question my relationship with the printed books who had been part of my life ever since I first met Paddington Bear. But suddenly I find myself irritated by features of my old love that I once found endearing or was totally blind to. I am impatient with physical shortcomings that I would once never even have noticed.

This realisation dawned when a book I needed for research purposes was not available as an e-book. So, the first annoyance came from having to wait a whole day for Amazon to get a physical copy to me. Imagine! A whole day! Most of that time, I tried to tell myself, was actually night, but already the seeds of discontent had been sown.

The book arrived and I carried it off to one of my favourite reading places, only to find that we now do not have bright enough lighting for anything which doesn’t have a back-lit screen, (a result of energy-friendly light bulbs and aging eyes). There was no facility for increasing the size of the print to compensate, which my obliging little iPad would have been happy to provide for me. When I did eventually find enough light I discovered that the print ran too close to the edge of the pages for me to be able to keep the book open without either contorting my fingers uncomfortably or cracking the spine back in a way that would once have seemed like sacrilege. With one spiteful jerk I snapped its fragile spine, immediately feeling like I’d kicked a kitten.

This book is perfectly well published by a highly respected house and in the past I would have accepted all these annoying little features without a second thought – just as I once accepted that a television needed to be “warmed up” and that Radio Luxembourg’s signal would fade whenever my favourite song came on. I have been seduced away from a long-standing and faithful love and I think I may just have to get over it and move on. When I was first permitted to use ink rather than pencil at school I had to dip the nib in an inkwell every few words, (an inkwell which was invariably clogged with old blotting paper which then stuck to the nib and …. I digress). I felt no guilt about the abandoned pencil, nor did I later feel guilt when I was allowed to move on to a fat, shiny, garishly coloured floozy of a fountain pen which held a decent supply of ink, (we were never allowed to use biros, that would have been taking technology too far), so I think I must now try to muster the same pragmatic approach to this latest betrayal of an old friend.

photo of author by Louis Leeson