The Gameplan with Wattpad

My Wattpad is hecka bare and I want to change that…then I get distracted and it doesn’t happen. When I first started Wattpad, I was just going to randomly throw stories up there. Now that several are trying to get published in lit journals, most of my works are le missin’! This leads to a bare Wattpad.

What I will most likely do is just post stories that I simply can’t send to publishers for one reason or another. For example, Mika’s Robot is a vignette that is a tad choppy in its storytelling, wouldn’t sell so it’s going up on Wattpad. Reflectors has a sexual assault so that’s going up on Wattpad.

I think part of why I’m just not doing the thing is because I don’t feel like doing the work that comes with putting it out on Patreon first in one format (I’m heavily leaning towards .pdf) and the other straight from Microsoft Word. Then you have the fact that I’m forever worried that I’m going to miss some more grammar mistakes and misspellings. (I gave Watershed another look through, it isn’t overdone with problems, but I have found a notable few that made me go “how did I miss that in the 6394874 times I have freakin’ reviewed it!”) However, these two stories are gunna be posted. I think this might be a good idea.

The reason why I can’t just post a story to Wattpad and then take it down (without making big revisions) is that there’s a little thing called “First Electronic Publishing Rights”. The publisher wants to make sure they’re the first and only to break the story so that is something savory they want. If you don’t have it, they don’t want it, end of story.

Now, I wanna talk about the accessibility of literary magazines. I know that a lot of younger people and non-lit industry folks don’t read them. They cost money to look at, it can be filled with pretentious stories that can be unfulfilling, things like that. Then you have the blatant “lit mags are not diverse” thing. I still wonder to myself if putting my work in a lit mag, or even the hands of a publisher, is a good thing because less of the everyperson will see it. My goal crowd are mainly Black folks who like fantasy and sci-fi and not some aged White person with a silver ponytail, a potbelly and a personal story about how they remember the day Kennedy was shot and the first episode of Star Trek. Like, not at all. But that’s what literary speculative fiction is filled with, it seems. It’s annoying at the least and discouraging at the most. And this is just race, I haven’t even gotten started on queer and gender representation, which is just as bad.

So some works are going to be posted on Wattpad but it is currently looking pretty few and far in between.