Getting paid on Wattpad

[Envylope]

Sure if you wanna write some werewolf stuff.

 

[Eldoria]

Sure if you wanna write some werewolf stuff.

Werewolves?! Harry already shot with a fireball (in my thread) before the serious incident happened. Lol

 

[Emotica]

All the numbers I've seen from all platforms unsustainable for the writer. You trade your own pacing and scheduling for a relatively small payout unless you're successful, which is a different story. Like @Envylope suggested, you also have to account for if you'd still be writing what you want to for that payday. I think there's enough reason to experiment with different genres, but after seeing someone writing a few dozen "alpha werewolf" books simultaneously... Yeah, that sounds like Hell. They either really like werewolves, or it's the only thing keeping the lights on. If I were being paid enough to write that much werewolf fiction, it wouldn't take many paydays until I could afford to do what I wanted.

That being said, the country your from may be a factor. The numbers I've seen across platforms are low for my home country, but I suppose it could be considered a lot more in some countries. Personally, I haven't seen any paydays worth taking, as you give at least partial rights away to your hard work. If getting paid for writing is your goal, then you could actually get paid far more for writing 1-2 page articles. I'm assuming these platforms are able to pay so little because there's an oversaturation of people that would practically pay you to read their Sonic The Hedgehog fanfic. Like I said, that can definitely change if you're successful. We don't have accurate numbers for how much people make when they go down the track of having their novels turned into cheap TV, or at least mass-published to every Walgreens checkout line. They could be doing well, but ultimately, I think the dealbreaker would be how much they promote your book. If they'll actually promote the book, and you have other things to sell (as they'd likely own exclusive rights to any book you contract until another agreement is reached) you could count the "free" marketing as part of the payout.

Lastly, I'm pretty sure most of the platforms base their contract offers off pre-existing success, so you could either expect a pretty lackluster offer, or know your worth. I can't recall which platform was offering $200/month, but that's totally not worth being contractually obligated to write, not risking your own distribution rights. You could easily make that much writing 2 or 3 articles in much less time. I'm surprised these platforms even offer that much, because if people were willing to take that, they'd easily sign up for some kind of creator reward program that pays out tenths of cents per view.

If I'm not making my (personal) stance clear enough, if you can't easily clear around ~8K/month under contractual obligation, I don't think it's even worth the stress. If they don't pay enough, there will come a day where you're choosing between real life and writing (emergencies, birthdays, etc.) and the writing won't even be paying enough to make that decision worth it.

 

[Joyager2]

I’ve seen from a few of your posts that you’re really interested in finding a way to make money off your writing. As most folks have pointed out, that’s not really feasible from a webnovel perspective. The best way to really start making money from writing fiction is to write short stories and submit them to lit mags. It’s this way for a lot of reasons: writing short fiction improves your writing ability overall, novels take an enormous amount of work for what is often very little payout (not that short stories are necessarily easy), and you get paid a flat rate per-story rather than signing an ongoing contract or chaining yourself to the success of your work.

That said, it can be a little cutthroat, especially as many lit mags struggle to stay afloat in a world that reads less and less, and short fiction is still something that takes a lot of work. If you’re interested, this website compiles a huge list of magazines and contests that are accepting submissions, with links (and statistics!) attached. Some mags have submission fees, many do not, so pay attention. Also pay attention to the genres they’re looking for.

Also also, I’d recommend finding some mags that publish the genres you’re interested in and getting a subscription. You’ll help keep them open, have something new to read, and will get a good feel for what kind of stories they publish.

 

[autumnsugar]

I recently started posting my novel there and it’s actually doing ok (since my novel is a romance) but I think Patreon is probably your best bet as a new writer, since a lot of these writing sites work u to the bone for barely any pay

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Wattpad didn't used to (be a mess) but evidently there was some drama between the founders of the company and one of the key players left, forcing the others to struggle just to keep it online (a discussion about this collapse is what sent me both here and to SubStack).
The person who first pointed me to Wattpad used it to make a lot of money - first by being one of said founders, but second by using it to build a "brand" she then "sold" to Amazon.

The best thing about the meltdown there is that it is 99% of the reason why Substack no longer discourages fiction. It was originally non-fiction only.