How serial success with Wattpad lights the way to publishing deals

Another day, another vampire novel deal for a Wattpad star. This time, Macmillan has snapped up UK writer Nikkei Kelly’s Stylcar Saga trilogy about a teenage immortal caught up in a battle between vampires and angels.

Kelly put the first of the three books, Lailah, on Wattpad in 2012 and has got 1,600,000 reads with over 20,000 votes and nearly 4,000 comments – the sort of engagement that traditional publishers crave and that attracted Macmillan’s attention.

Abigail Gibbs, another young British writer with a vampire novel, was signed by HarperCollins last year after she serialized her novel, The Dark Heroine: Dinner With The Vampire, on Wattpad and saw an astonishing nine million reads.

Established authors are also keen on Wattpad. Internationally feted writer Margaret Attwood is a keen proponent of Wattpad. She has written essays for the site and currently has a serial on Wattpad, The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, co-written with British author Naomi Alderman.

Ruthie Knox, a best-selling romance writer, who has also written under her real name of Robin York, published her latest book, Truly, on Wattpad over a two-month period at the end of last year and then took it down when the serialization was complete. The book is being published by Random House’s Loveswept imprint in Autumn this year.

The Wattpad serialization of Truly got a total of over 4,600,000 reads, nearly 97,000 votes and almost 5,000 comments. That’s a massive fan base to have in place with two more books to come in the trilogy (Madly, Completely) and a good backlist of titles.

Wattpad powers ahead