Wattpad Launches Book Publishing Division

Posted on March 20, 2019

Wattpad is known to many as a writing community and a fanfiction destination. The company is now entering the book publishing realm with the announcement of Wattpad Books. This will be the company's first direct publishing division. Wattpad Books will launch this fall.

Ashleigh Gardner, Deputy General Manager at Wattpad Studios, Publishing, says in the announcement, "We bring something completely unique to publishing: an engaged global community, the most diverse set of writers on the planet, and the technology to find every type of hit imaginable. Wattpad Books is more than a new division for us, it’s a validation and celebration of the creativity, interests, and world-building that happens on Wattpad every day."

The Wattpad Books site says it will "disrupt traditional publishing by harnessing data to unleash the most groundbreaking stories from Wattpad directly onto bookshelves." There are six books slated to launch this fall with the first, The QB Bad Boy & Me, debuting on August 20, 2019. Some of the other titles include I'm a Gay Wizard, Trapeze and What Happened That Night.

The individual pages for the books contain stats from the Wattpad community. The page for I'm a Gay Wizard says it has over 400,000 reads, over 18,000 votes and over 7,600 comments. The page for What Happened That Night says it has over 1 million reads, over 45,000 votes and over 4,000 comments. It will be interesting to see how these numbers translate into book sales for Wattpad's titles.