During my time on Wattpad, I've learned a few things. And one of them is how to optimize your story, to try and get the most reads, votes, and, hopefully, follows. It all starts with your story, my friend, so here are a few tips.

This can really help get your story out there. The Wattpad recommendation algorithm isn't going to be recommending your story with #lol #something #IDK to a PJO fan.

A few tags you might want to use:

You're also going to get less people in without a juicy description.

For example, has a great description.

Jason has a problem. He doesn't remember anything before waking up on a school bus holding hands with a girl. Apparently she's his girlfriend Piper, his best friend is a kid named Leo, and they're all students in the Wilderness School, a boarding school for "bad kids." What he did to end up here, Jason has no idea—except that everything seems very wrong.

Piper has a secret. Her father has been missing for three days, and her vivid nightmares reveal that he's in terrible danger. Now her boyfriend doesn't recognize her, and when a freak storm and strange creatures attack during a school field trip, she, Jason, and Leo are whisked away to someplace called Camp Half-Blood. What is going on?

Leo has a way with tools. His new cabin at Camp Half-Blood is filled with them. Seriously, the place beats Wilderness School hands down, with its weapons training, monsters, and fine-looking girls. What's troubling is the curse everyone keeps talking about, and that a camper's gone missing. Weirdest of all, his bunkmates insist they are all—including Leo—related to a god.

Now, this is the description to a book with hundreds of pages. You don't need to do all that, but it's a good description because it draws you in, gives you a pretty accurate description on what's going on, but doesn't give the whole plot away. You don't need a whole essay, but you may want more than "I'm bad at writing descriptions, lol, just read the book idiot."

This, as you can obviously see, does not draw readers in.

Getting into someone's Home Feed can lead to more people getting to see your story, as seen below.

(Image Credits - Me. That's my feed.)

As you can see, these places have a high concentration of PJO content, and are aimed and tailored specifically toward me. To a lot of PJO readers, it's the same. Remember, the more people who see your content, the more readers you may get. So optimizing your story by putting in tags and good descriptions can really help get your story into more people's feeds, which subsequently gets more readers, votes, and follows.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Most people on Wattpad do judge a book by it's cover.

These are both the same character, right? Same skin color, same backstory, same life, same hair, same jacket, same practically everything. But still, would you rather read a book where the first guy is on the cover, or the second guy? If you're judging solely based on covers, probably the first, right?

Same thing with wattpad. Let's say you're scrolling through your feed. Most books will show up similar to this:

A cover with a tag. When people see your story, they're not staring into the amazing, pain-stakingly designed plot, your hours of research, and all the writing guide books you've read? No, they see the cover, and a single tag.

If you have a great cover, your ideal situation goes something like this.

Ah, after a long day of work/school, I can finally relax on Wattpad. Oh, what's this? Man, that cover looks amazing! Let me just click here... Ooh, this story seems interesting! Well, one chapter can't hurt, right?

*27 chapters in*

That was...Wow, just wow. Author, I need you to post RIGHT now. Let me put this book in my reading list... You know what, this author deserves a follow. Here are some votes, too, along with a few more comments that you need to update.

*Spams 49 comments of UPDATE PLEASE*

Great! Let me see if there are any other fanfics they have while I wait...

This is basically what you want the reader to do. They found your book through their feed, marveled at your amazing cover (which is why they clicked in the first place), gave you 27 reads, 49 comments, followed you, and read another book of yours, and boosted your read-through rate (people who actually read through the whole book instead of clicking on one chapter than leaving.)

(On the image below, you can see that number of reads, votes, and comments drops from the first chapter, to the last chapter. A lot of people clicked off, not bothering to read through the whole book. Expect that when you write a book.)

See? All this, just due to optimization, and, a happy reader.

Just keep doing it. Change your cover, optimize your tags, rewrite your description. Don't stay on a boat that just keeps on sinking. Remind people they can drop a vote, follow you, or comment at the end of the chapter. Try something new. Put your books through contests. Have fun with it! The point of Wattpad is to have fun. You're not getting paid writing fanfics.

Stay true to yourself. You'll do well in no time.