Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? (The Beatles)

I stumbled upon Wattpad recently via a trend prediction. You know the deal - in this case '14 trends we should be thinking about'.

I'll come back to these trends in another post.

For now - wattpad. Apparently, it's one of the 14 trends I should be thinking about.

What is it? 

According to them: 

Wattpad is a place to discover and share stories - a social platform that connects people through words. It is a community that spans borders, interests, languages. With Wattpad, anyone can read or write on any device: phone, tablet, or computer.

Apparently an incredible four years worth of new reading material is posted by Wattpad authors every single day. And lots of those writers and readers are kids. 

Wattpad has 100 million stories to read. Whoa Nelly. What?? 

There are 40 million Wattpaders out there - writing, publishing, reading stories.

Don't know about you - but I find that staggering.

It sounded great. A place to get books. A place to publish - sounded like a version of medium.com (and I love medium.com). So I joined up and had a closer look! 

I started with a glance at 'classics' (some cool things there to read on a device) and then 'non-fiction' and that's when the doubts started. Seemed to be a lot of stuff by/for teenage girls - anorexia, depression stories - that sort of thing.

Hmmm...I mossied on to 'General Fiction' and the alarm bells started up - romance stories everywhere to judge by the covers (yeah - I know, not spost to) and titles. 

I don't want to prejudge them without seeing them but I'm pretty sure I know what kinds of wish fulfilment romantic lowest-common-denominator dodginess they'll be. 

I could be wrong but 40 million Wattpaders aren't going there to read Mansfield Park.

All in all I might just put Wattpad to one side for a while - I don't think I fit their demographic very well somehow.

Instead - I'll go back to the 100% awesomeness of medium.com...