Hello everyone! My name is Vera aka the evil slash cliffhanger writer! If you've read my stories, you already know I'm all about emotional roller coaster stories filled with twists and heart-touching moments, which can educate and inspire readers at the same time.

This is my second time participating in Wattpad Block Party, and I'm super excited to share my thoughts with you. Before I start, I want to thank Kelly Anne Blount for featuring me in the summer edition of Wattpad Block Party. I'm honored to be a part of the event that brings so many great writers and readers together.

Today, I'm going to talk about one of the things I'm sure many of you are curious about. A few readers has asked me this, so I thought I could try to convey my thoughts on this topic in this post. *sends her evil popcorn to readers before she starts* Here we go!

If you're using Wattpad as your writing platform, you probably have wondered how to become successful on Wattpad. You've seen all those stories with millions of reads and wished one day your story could get millions of reads too, but how?

Now, you may have heard about the ways to promote your story or interact with other authors. You've probably heard that by joining book clubs, being active on the forums, commenting in books, and joining competitions will bring you far. This most certainly will bring you results, but I believe there is something more important than grinding to get readers. That's writing.

I've seen some writers working their hardest to promote their work (even spamming other people's profiles or books and begging readers to read their book), but they failed to see that their writing is far from good. They continue their efforts to gain reads, but the exposure won't bring them nothing in the long run if they don't pay attention to their writing. Sure, they may get new readers and their reads will increase, but exposure without quality is nothing.

Call me an idealist, but I firmly believe that a high-quality writing and writing from our heart can get us much more success than any promoting can do. This is what brought me success. Not grinding but writing from my heart and working hard on improving my writing.

However, before my success came, I was also one of those people who paid more attention to numbers than writing, which didn't bring me anything.

Now, I want to share my story with you so you can see that you don't need magic, and you don't need to work excessively on reaching readers by interacting and being active everywhere.

I started posting Bullied in the beginning of November 2016, which was a story I wrote for NaNoWriMo. As I wrote thousands and thousands of words each day so I could meet this project's challenge of writing 50k words in only a month, I did all I could do to gain more reads.

I joined three book clubs. I became active (although not much) on the forums. I commented on many books. I joined a few competitions.

One month of these efforts later, and I still had only around 200 reads on Bullied, but only later I realized what I was doing wrong all that time. I didn't think about the quality of my writing. I thought only about the way to get readers.

I don't know if it was a pure luck or not, but readers started adding Bullied to their reading lists massively in the beginning of December 2016, and the number of reads kept rising ever since. I can never thank those first readers enough because Bullied didn't contain my best writing at that time. Not by a long shot. I can only guess why people started reading my story, and that is that they recognized I wrote Bullied from my heart and with passion, which brings me to the most important thing if you want to be successful.

Write from your heart.

Readers will recognize when a work comes from the writer's heart, and there is no better way to enthrall readers than that. Pour all your feelings and efforts into it, forget about doubts and whether people will like it or not, and just write all that your heart desires. That's the true magic.

From time to time, I stumble upon writers who write books to satisfy others or gain popularity by giving readers what is deemed popular. That's a proved formula for some, but is popularity really more important than touching the hearts of readers with a genuine content?

Becoming successful takes time. It takes patience. It can take years of hard work, and then some more.

No one gets million reads overnight. We all start from zero, and what may seem like an overnight success is just the tip of the iceberg.

Sometimes, your writing journey won't go smoothly. You'll start from zero and have only a few reads even months later, but don't fall into despair. Don't give up or think you're a lost cause. And don't blame readers for not reading your book (Seriously, there are some writers complaining about readers not reading their book as if readers are bad for not choosing to read what they don't want to read).

Instead, think what may be the reason why no one reads your book. Do you have poor grammar, terrible punctuation, a bad cover, a bad blurb, or is your writing bad? Whichever it is, it's nothing that can't be fixed and improved in time.

Join book clubs where you can get feedback on your book and see what you can do to improve. Study about writing and grammar. Write as often as you can. Write regularly. Read a lot. You'll see your writing will get way better in time. It's true that the more you write, the better you are at it. Practice makes perfect.

Also, think about your presence on Wattpad. Are you one of those writers who post once in a few months (or even years) but want more readers? If that's the case, then you can't expect much. Put yourselves in readers' shoes. Would you read a book that never gets updated?

And last but not least, interact with your readers. Don't be shy! Respond to each comment. Of course, it's impossible to respond to every single comment when you receive hundreds or thousands of them daily, but try responding to them for as long as you can. Readers love interacting with authors, and that way your readers will see that you genuinely care about what they have to say. Interacting with readers is the best way to build a strong readership.

And that's it from yours truly—evil writer! Thank you everyone for reading my post! You deserve loads of my evil popcorn! *goes to her secret factory and produces tons of her evil popcorn* *sends evil popcorn to everyone*

And remember—never give up and always believe in yourself!