Loridee De Villa’s Young Adult Romance, How To Be The Best Third Wheel, Wins Top Prize at the 2020 Watty Awards
TORONTO - December 4, 2020 - Wattpad, the global multiplatform entertainment company for original stories, today announced the grand prize winner of the 2020 Watty Awards: Loridee De Villa (@summerbackthen), author of How To Be The Best Third Wheel (1.3m reads). As grand prize winner of the 2020 Watty Awards, How To Be The Best Third Wheel will be considered for a publishing deal with Wattpad Books. The news was announced during a live awards event on YouTube today.
How To Be The Best Third Wheel follows 16-year-old Lara de la Cruz as she tries to navigate life, love, and high school with her three best friends...and their new boyfriends. Lara knows she can’t survive high school without her friends by her side, so she sets her sights on a new mission: become the best third wheel ever.
Eighteen year-old Filipino-Canadian author Loridee De Villa has been writing on Wattpad since 2015, where her work has accumulated more than 1.5 million reads. In October 2020, De Villa won the Shaw Rocket Fund Writers Accelerator Program for her other story, The Infinite Worlds of Ella Jane. As the winner of that contest, The Infinite Worlds of Ella Jane will be adapted as a 10 x 20-minute narrative podcast from Shaw Rocket Fund, Wattpad, and Shaftesbury, the award-winning production company behind the global hit TV series Murdoch Mysteries. De Villa will also receive a 16-week mentorship program through Shaftesbury, during which she will be paired with an entertainment industry mentor to guide her throughout the creative process of creating a finished podcast.
The Watty Awards is the world’s largest writing competition, with almost one million stories submitted to date. This year, writers from around the world submitted nearly 40,000 stories, of which Wattpad recognized winners in 11 languages. A full list of winners is available on the Watty Awards website.
In 2019, Wattpad celebrated 10 years of Watty Awards by considering one grand prize winner for a publishing deal with Wattpad Books. Shay Bravo’s Historically Inaccurate took last year’s award, landing on bookshelves across North America on September 29, 2020. Watty Award winners are also considered for high profile monetization opportunities with Wattpad, including Wattpad Studios development deals and space in Wattpad’s Paid Stories program, where writers make money from their work directly on Wattpad.
The Watty Awards showcase the best of Wattpad’s art and science approach to finding hit stories. Since 2018, the company has used its Story DNA Machine Learning technology to help sort and compare thousands of Watty Awards submissions each year. Wattpad’s human content experts are then able to review the most promising works and select winners.
Watty Awards winners are consistently some of the most creative and diverse voices on Wattpad, and their stories often go on to be extremely successful, securing huge publishing and entertainment deals. I’m a Gay Wizard by V.S. Santoni, and Given by Nandi Taylor are both previous Watty Award winners. Other previous winners include Beth Reekles’ The Kissing Booth, Vic James’ Gilded Cage, Katerina E. Tonks’ Death is My BFF, and Kara Barbieri’s White Stag.
For more information visit: https://wattys.wattpad.com
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