With the launch of their brand new Wattpad Creators program, Wattpad says they will pay $2.6 million to writers this year.
On June 30th, Wattpad announced the launch of its Wattpad Creators program for writers and its Creator Portal with informational guides for writers. Creators is expected to replace Wattpad Stars, a similar program started in 2015.
As part of this new program, Wattpad will be offering creator stipends—fixed payments to support writers on the platform who qualify. Wattpad says these stipends will amount to at total of $2.6 million* in payments to writers this year.
They estimate that over 3,000 writers will qualify for the program and 500 will be eligible for cash stipends of up to $25,000. All participants in Creators will have access to perks like editorial and marketing support from staff, sponsored brand partnerships, educational programming, and special consideration for Wattpad's other opportunities with Paid and Studios.
At launch, the program included several of Wattpad's top hit-making authors, like Kate Marchant, Jessica Cunsolo, Claudia Tan, Tamara Lush, and Sondi Warner.
To be eligible for Creators, authors must have produced a new story part in the last 3 months, have one completed story over 50,000 words, and have at least one story that has reached a minimum "Engaged Readers" amount depending on genre.
Engaged Readers is a new statistic that measures the number of readers who have spent at least 5 minutes on a story over the past year. For less-popular genres like Paranormal and Horror, that number needs to hit 100. For the most-competitive genres, that number is much higher—5500 for Werewolf, 7500 for Romance, and as much as 9000 for General Fiction.
This new focus on readership numbers and the exclusion of Fanfiction seems to be part of Wattpad's broader push toward a focus on original, long-form stories and monetizable content.
*In their press release, Wattpad did not clarify if this figure was in USD (US Dollars) or CAD (Canadian Dollars).
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