Introducing Wattpad Originals

At Wattpad, helping authors build a career is at the heart of everything we do. We’ve democratized publishing, empowering millions of writers to share their stories, build a global audience, and make money. This unwavering commitment to authors has driven us to continually innovate for writers all over the world.  

Balancing Paid Content and Free Reading: Introducing Wattpad Originals 

Today, we’re introducing Wattpad Originals, a new way to balance free reading and paid content. With Wattpad Originals, authors will no longer have to choose between monetization and growing their free reading audience. 

With a catalog of some of Wattpad’s most popular stories, Wattpad Originals will replace Paid Stories with a model that allows readers to pay to read ahead or wait to read for free. For the most passionate fans, readers can unlock new chapters of an ongoing story early using Coins or a Wattpad Premium+ subscription. Readers who prefer to enjoy their favorite story for free can simply wait: when a new chapter is added, a previous chapter becomes free, with most stories adding a new free chapter every week. Only the ten most recently published  chapters will  be behind a paywall, and readers will be able to see how long they need to wait until the next free chapter becomes  available. For completed Wattpad Original stories, a portion of the story will always be offered for free, allowing readers to try before they buy. 

This model--used to great success by our sister platform WEBTOON--will strike a better balance for readers and authors, creating more opportunities to build fandoms and reading communities while also making money.

Wattpad Originals are curated by our content team and receive editorial support and feedback throughout the writing process. There are currently over 1,600 Wattpad Original stories in six different languages with titles in every genre. 

Wattpad’s History of Supporting Authors

Supporting authors means helping writers grow in nearly every aspect of their writing careers. Over the past year, we’ve dedicated new resources to developing tools and programs to help authors hone their craft and take their writing careers to the next level. With the Wattpad Creators Program, the Story School education series, and the Wattpad Publishing Scheduler, we’ve added important new resources to help authors evolve as artists and develop their skillset. 

But whether an author writes for fun or for their career, we know monetization is important. 

Wattpad has long provided a suite of monetization options for authors, enabling them to earn money from their work while building their fan communities online. We’ve experimented with a variety of options over the years, but ultimately brand partnerships, adaptations deals with  Wattpad WEBTOON Studios, and on-platform paid content sales have proven most impactful. 

Launched in 2019, our Paid Stories program added paid content to Wattpad for the first time. This program paid out millions to authors, but a key feature of Wattpad has always been the ability to instantly reach millions of readers around the world. That immediate access to a global audience, combined with Wattpad’s free-to-read model, has helped an entire generation of diverse new authors build global fandoms. Incredible storytelling and ease of access on our free service has helped authors build enormous influence all over the world, and even achieve viral status for their webnovels. However, Paid Stories created a difficult choice for authors, between quickly growing a free story, or monetizing and accepting the potential of slower audience growth.   

With Wattpad Originals, we’re launching a new model that can work for every kind of reader and writer on Wattpad. 

Our ongoing commitment to helping authors succeed

Writers are the cornerstone of our business: their success is our success. Whether it’s connecting authors with sponsored brand deals or providing a pathway to TV, film and book deals with Wattpad WEBTOON Studios, at Wattpad we’re committed to providing new ways for authors to earn money from their work. We can’t wait to see what kinds of incredible storytelling take shape in Wattpad Originals. Here’s to more stories, innovations, and moments of creativity to come! 

Readers will start to see Wattpad Originals updates for English-language stories starting on October 3rd. For more information on Wattpad Originals, please visit the News & Updates section in the Wattpad app.

###