The era of the internet has made many things possible for people, especially in the field of art. Teenagers nowadays have developed a knack for writing stories on the internet and it is evident that all around, there are budding writers who would like to share their craft on different platforms.
One of the most famous writing and reading platforms for today’s youth is Wattpad, an online community for writers to post their literary pieces such as poems and stories. It started its operation in 2006. Three years after, the mobile app for the Apple, Android, and Blackberry devices was made public.
Due to its accessibility, there continues to be a growing number of Wattpad writers and readers who submit and read different genres of stories.
In 2014, according to SocialBaker, the Philippines was ranked as the second biggest user of the site, with 23 percent of the site’s traffic coming from the country.
Wattpad’s co-founder and CEO Allan Lau said in an article that among all genres available in the site, Filipinos are more inclined to reading fan fiction (stories that are based on celebrities, book characters, movie characters, game characters, and other fictional characters), celebrity fictions on Korean pop, and the popular celebrity tandem Kathniel (Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla).
Not only are Wattpad books available on internet browsers and the mobile app, they are also becoming available as physical copies. The site signed a contract with Summit Media, a publishing company in the Philippines for them to print Filipino Wattpad stories and sell them in different bookstores, which has made accessibility easier especially for those who have no access to the internet. After this move, Wattpad also turned to making the stories into teleseryes, showing them on TV5. Some have also been made into movies, just like the books “She’s Dating the Gangster”, which was the first book to be made into a movie, “Diary ng Panget” and “Talk Back and You’re Dead,” both starring Nadine Lustre and James Reid, among others.
Youth nowadays turn to Wattpad as an art form, with some people writing and submitting stories during their spare time in hopes of catering to an audience and to pour out their ideas, no matter how big or small the readership of one’s work is.
By Reginald Posadas
