Wattpad: a literary oasis of the Web 2.0, or a cash cow monopolizing on the infernal musings of a thousand Club Chalamets? In this episode, Hannah and Maia are joined by Youtube superstar Princess Weekes, to ponder the eponymous literary platform; from its gaming origins, to its heyday as a fertile space for burgeoning writers, to what it is now which is… bizarre. Is Wattpad f-cking up our relationship to literature, or should we just be happy that we’re literate at all? How do we critique an institution like Wattpad without punching down at its readers? And how much has the internet affected the kinds of books that are sold to us? These questions and more answered here. Tangents include: Hannah and Maia buying each other “sad broad” snacks, and an extra special shoutout to Regina, Saskatchewan. 

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Princess Weekes's video:

https://youtu.be/54v0KJZJuyw?si=_AT1SGUzJ_KRnbx7

Intro and outro song by Ian Mills:

⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic

SOURCES

“Wattpad: Building the world’s biggest reader and writer community” The Literary Platform (2012) https://theliteraryplatform.com/news/2012/10/wattpad-building-the-worlds-biggest-reader-and-writer-community/

Margaret Atwood “Why Wattpad Works” The Guardian (2012)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/06/margaret-atwood-wattpad-online-writing

Andrew Liptak “Wattpad is launching a publishing imprint called Wattpad Books” The Verge (2019) https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18195753/wattpad-books-launching-publishing-imprint-self

Bianca Bosker, “The One Direction Fan-Fiction Novel That Became a Literary Sensation” The Atlantic (2018) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/crowdsourcing-the-novel/573907/

“The Master Plan” Wattpad https://company.wattpad.com/blog/2016/11/30/the-master-plan

Chelsea Humphries, “Is an Algorithm the Answer? Wattpad Books’s Challenge to Publishing Infastructure” The iJournal (2019) https://theijournal.ca/index.php/ijournal/article/view/33469/25726

David Steitfeld, “Web Fiction, Serialized and Social” The New York Times (2014) https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/technology/web-fiction-serialized-and-social.html

Hazal Kirci, “The tales teens tell: what Wattpad did for girls” The Guardian (2014) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/16/teen-writing-reading-wattpad-young-adults 

Abigail De Kosnik, “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” Cinema Journal (2009) https://www.jstor.org/stable/25619734