How to become famous on Wattpad

After examining this social media and online book publishing site, I have determined that the overwhelming majority of the site’s users are teenage and college-aged women, and what they want to read is what I would call young adult chick lit, which has a clearly defined format of being written in the first person, featuring a girl protagonist who is average at best, and sometimes downright ugly, who gets involved with a “bad boy.” That’s right, that’s the term that’s used, “bad boy,” and apparently the term is so universally understood by this audience that an author can merely write “John was a bad boy,” without any adequate explanation of why he’s bad, and the audience immediately gets it.

It’s actually a condemnation of the entire female sex that this literature is overwhelming popular. Everything that game bloggers like Roissy have said turns out to be true. You can say, “they are only teenagers, they don’t really know what they want,” but I would say it’s the opposite, they are not sophisticated enough to understand that they are supposed to be more woke about things, and instead they go with their raw emotions regarding what sort of guy gives them what Roissy would vulgarly call “gina tingles.”

The reason why it’s on Wattpad is that mainstream publishers are probably too embarrassed to put this sort of stuff in print, and because girls in that age bracket have very little disposable income (not having jobs and being completely reliant on their parents for money), so reading for free is appealing. And they probably lack the technical expertise to grab free (but illegally so) books from Pirate’s Bay or Library Genesis. Compared to this free young adult chick lit crap, The Hunger Games is like Nobel-Prize-winning literature.

I’m not sure how I, as a middle-aged man, can write convincing young adult chick lit. I suppose by studying the most popular books, and then writing something similar, but with better grammar and a better plot, it’s possible. But reading though this crap is difficult. And putting myself into the mind of a teenage girl with “gina tingles” for a bad boy, that’s even harder. Too bad I’m not gay, that would make it easier to imagine.

On the other hand, last night I reread the first two chapters of Piers Anthony’s book The Apprentice Adept, and I found it quite enjoyable despite it’s horrible dialogue, it’s ridiculousness (a planet where the lower classes aren’t allowed to wear clothes, and where the male protagonist is, therefore, turned on by women who are wearing clothes), and in spite of (or perhaps because of) what modern feminist critics would call “misogyny.” (That Piers Anthony books are “misogynist” but chick lit is never called “misandrist,” that’s proof that we live in a gynocracy.)