Wattpad has launched a dedicated book publishing imprint, Wattpad Books. It will use machine learning in part to select stories from the site for publication. Wattpad launched as an online platform for mobile reading, amassing a library of public domain e-books. And it transformed into an online writing community where writers could post their work.
The company says that it has 70 million registered users, with more than 500 million stories uploaded to its platform. Wattpad Books is the company’s first direct publishing division.
Wattpad Books
Wattpad has merged into a “multiplatform entertainment company,” leveraging those hundreds of millions of stories into a vast catalog of potential best-sellers and fodder for film and television. Wattpadd has billions of data points from Wattpad’s global audience of more than 70 million people. Wattpad Books will introduce diverse, new, and undiscovered voices to book lovers everywhere.
According to the company, “Readers will find new genres, category-bending spins on traditional genres, narratives that tackle the experiences and struggles of marginalized communities, and stories that speak to the diversity of Wattpad’s global community online.”
To date, the company says, there are more than 565 million uploads of content on Wattpad and while all are called “stories,” some are, of course, something far more usable than others. The company tracks readers’ responses to various uploads and regular writers to find out not only is gaining audience on the site but also what sort of international trends can be spotted, as the platform supports more than 50 languages.
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