I’m slowly learning something, and it’s not to take the first offer you get. On anything. Ever. Especially if you’re looking for something better than what the other person is selling.
I learned this when I started applying for colleges, and again when applying for jobs. I’ve refused a good handful of schools and a few potential employers just because they weren’t quite the right fit or didn’t sit well with what I wanted.
But it’s taken me a long time to do that with my art and my writing.
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My art was easier, because anyone could save an image on the internet to their desktop and call it their own. So I’ve stopped posting what I make publicly. But with writing there are so many traps to fall into: the disable copy+paste functions on websites. The inherited copyrights passed out to the authors of anything they post (even this blog is technically copyrighted from post #1 way back in 2009(?) before I even knew what blogging was.
And then there’s the promise of feedback. Of helpful critiques. Of finding someone who wants to be a beta reader, or better yet, catching the eye of an agent or editor by posting on these widely-known sites like Wattpad, Inkpop, or Figment.
There’s also a promise of opportunity, being featured, doing guest posts, interviews, etc. All on these very small scale but seemingly big-scale platforms. Not that Wattpad is small by any means, but the opportunity of having a story featured there, doesn’t measure up to the opportunity of having my work published and mass-distributed by one of the big five houses in the future.
So I’ve learned to pass up on certain opportunities.
I recently got a note from Wattpad staff asking if I’d like a sticker on one of my project covers as a promotional aspect they’re doing to a certain movie coming out mid-summer. The deal would also have one of my projects featured on the movie’s profile’s reading list under a certain genre.
It sounds like a good deal, right? Promotion means more reads, and it’s just a little sticker tag, right?
But it’s turning out to be so much more than that.
I turned them down because the genre/category they wanted to feature the project under didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t see any aspect of the category within my project at all. So I felt like they were mislabeling the piece.
I also only post first-drafts on Wattpad. I do this for a very specific reason: because I know I can improve from there. And if people steal from the first drafts of my stories, I’m doing so many rewrites in the long run that it probably won’t matter all that much (plus everything’s copyrighted so if they steal I get to sue….. even if it is the first draft and I’ve got a whole new version done and ready for agents to read.)
But with the projects all being in first-draft form, they’re obviously not my best work. So I don’t want something I’m not ridiculously proud of, or something littered with spelling/grammar errors featured and idolized. Because that lowers the standards for publication essentially, or the standards young writers might set for themselves before pursuing publication. If that makes sense.
I also turned them down because, no matter how much I love to see the read counts on my pieces go up and up and up, it means more people KNOW about the story, which means if/when I publish it, some might say they’ve already read the thing and pass it up. Which wouldn’t help me in the future when I’m a broke writer living out of a cardboard box.
Because let’s be real here, advances don’t cover all that much usually, and you tend to have to pay it all back if your book doesn’t sell. So don’t go spending it the second the check’s in your hand.
So I told Wattpad no. I didn’t want the feature.
Because I’m starting to learn that there are better opportunities waiting down the road, and if I take the one in front of me, I may not get the others, much like what’s happened to me in the past. So we’ll see what comes next.
Care to share?
Have thoughts on whether or not I should have turned down Wattpad? Have a similar story to share? An opinion on the opportunities of the publishing world, even? Comment below!
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