Inside The World Of Wattpad (& Its Wildly Popular Film Adaptations)

After, Kissing Booth, and My Life with the Walter Boys – do any of these Netflix titles ring a bell?If so, you may have the popular story-telling platform called Wattpad to thank for it.

What is Wattpad, you may ask? In short, it is a reading and writing platform which was set up in 2006. With its social media-like setup the app allows users to create a profile and write their own stories as well as connect with other readers and writers from all over the world.

The app has over 90 million users and is well-known for its fanfic obsession (you will likely come across plenty of ‘Dramoine’ and Harry Styles inspired writing on the site). However, the results of these young adult fascinations have championed successful writing and film careers for a number of Wattpad alumni.

A prime example of this is the book and film franchise, After by Anna Todd. Did you know the rebellious Hardin was originally depicted as Harry Styles in Todd’s Wattpad novel? Yep, really.

Before the now five-part film franchise became a major hit, Todd posted the complicated love story of Tessa and Harry (now Hardin) chapter by chapter on Wattpad. The now published author began writing her story under the username ‘Imaginator1D’ in 2013 and has become one of the biggest Wattpad success stories to date. The book was published in paperback in 2014 and later made into a film in 2019.

Of course, Wattpad isn’t all about fanfiction. Gina Musa the author of Wattpad sensation turned movie, Bootcamp says, “They have tones and tones of genres there, so it is easy to find where you fall or whatever your niche or what your genre is”.

Musa, whose love for writing began at the age of eight when she would write these “little corny short stories”, describes Bootcamp as her journey into writing her first full-length novel. She began writing in 2014 and like many writers on the platform would post the story chapter by chapter each week.

Her novel follows Whitney, a girl whose “negative high school experience” leads her to sign up for a summer fitness camp where she “ends up meeting a hot personal trainer and falls in love.”

By the time Musa finished the book after ten months, it had racked up an “explosive” ten million reads and her efforts won her a Watty Award (Wattpad’s largest contest for up-and-coming writers).

Musa explains that she left her now Watty award-winning novel on her profile for a couple of years where it continued to be discovered by readers. It wasn’t until she graduated college that she received the news that there was interest in turning her novel into a film.

“It just took off from there, it took several years but a deal finally fell into place, and we got a cast and filming location. Two years ago I got to visit the set and meet the cast and it was a fun experience, and it just came out this August (in the U.S.),” she says. “It has been a long ride but also a really fun one.”

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• wattpad