Keeping Wacky Alive! Let's Brainstorm 🧠

[FranklinBarnes]

I get the feeling Wattpad discussion groups and book clubs follow this XKCD comic, where everyone looks at what came before and thinks “OK now I’ve got it, this is the perfect system!”—instead of trying to outcompete other groups or do something specific better than they can, we need disruptive innovation that takes us in a different direction.

I really have no opposition to the general idea of book clubs. It’s pretty much, in some form, what I do with my off-Wattpad writing buddies. But I don’t think reinventing the wheel is the magic bullet which will pull us out of this rut. Wow, three metaphors in a sentence—my daily personal best! I will say again though that two tends to be the magic number for productive critique: unless everyone’s reading the same stories at the same time, rotations are inherently inefficient in terms of high-level, useful feedback. Given our unique circumstances and what everyone else has talked about with this place being prime for serious, high-level, verbose discussion, it would be a waste of all our time if the solution we settled on was a weekly comment spam rotation.

[Kamiccola]

Big agree on the book clubs.

I’m in a critique group that formed from my regional nanowrimo group and it’s been so helpful. You need to develop trust for a good experience and that means working with the same people, not a horde of strangers.

[Novel_Worm]

@CJtheSiteWizard

I still don’t understand what “book clubs” are.

@CJtheSiteWizard

We just need some people who can help run them.

So I used to run a book club on a niche discord server (it was just a few of us friends who met on Wattys Bootcamp discord) and it was a huge time commitment. The way we went about it is that everyone read five chapters of one books per week, and the channels were opened for discussion over the weekend. But eventually everyone got busy, and that was a lot of work. There was also the drawback of when someone’s reading only five chapters, they can’t comment on much, and since everyone was reading it, the feedback mostly kept getting repeated.
But Wattpad book clubs also do work, even if sometimes they have the same issues as above. So do traditional ones. Perhaps we can look into something that’s somewhat hybrid?
A lot of authors on here also want to go the trad pub route… maybe there could be something like first five chapters, then a partial manuscript and then a full read (because typically that’s how agents would go through it) and critiques based on that from say 5-10 people…
We could also set up something like a paid mentoring system or a critique on part of their work or their whole work from a ‘succesful’ author, something like wattys bootcamp does, but I’m not sure if there would be enough interest in that…
Maybe we can also look into collaboration opportunities for advertising writing services and platforms? Like we did with Frost a while back (the creator is still on Wacky, I believe). And maybe for some niche platforms, we could have paid advertisements. If it’s too many advertisements, perhaps it can be just two - three spaces, one for a ‘book of the month / week’ thing, one for a paid book advertisement, and one for a platform or service, which could rotate weekly / monthly.

[TheTigerWriter]

@alcoholandcaffeine

Wacky-vetted directory

I was thinking maybe an index of topics related to writing tools and advice. It’s always nice to have an index, in my opinion Even if people end up going to one particular thread all the time, sometimes, just sometimes, it’s nice to know you can go to an index to find something else.

[FranklinBarnes]

@Novel_Worm

A lot of authors on here also want to go the trad pub route… maybe there could be something like first five chapters, then a partial manuscript and then a full read (because typically that’s how agents would go through it) and critiques based on that from say 5-10 people…

I don’t see anyone on Wattpad realistically wanting to sign up for anything more intense than the current very light setups. People tend to be thrown off by the idea that they actually need to put serious energy into others’ books in order to get something in return—they see it as homework and not a learning opportunity.

[Novel_Worm]

Yeah true, but this could be interesting if we’re looking for people all over, not just from Wattpad, because this could work then. And there are quite a few people already on the forums looking to go this route

[FranklinBarnes]

I guess tell me more then how you see this being executed. When I think of things like full manuscripts or half manuscripts, they’re for completed works—which aren’t uncommon on Wattpad, but many people have projects in flux where this distinction becomes more unclear. It’s also extremely time-consuming to read multiple manuscripts, even if your own is being read multiple times in return. One or two in a high level of detail—perfectly manageable. Five? Ten? That becomes difficult.

[Kamiccola]

I was poking around, trying to see what new features you might have deployed, and I have two questions.

1. Is there currently a feature to pin a few topics? I know of the bookmark but I was wondering if there was a feature to pin so it’s easily visible for me, like one of the first options I see without having to click anything else. For example, we have a sidebar now. Instead of having to browse through everything, I’d like to jump into a specific long-running thread that I visit often. It would be cool if I could see it right there.

2. What was the thing with the groups? I signed up for a few but never saw them utilized. How would one utilize them?

While I’m at it, is the sidebar icon supposed to be a square? Kinda weird that’s why I thought I’d ask.

[Novel_Worm]

Hmm… I’m not very sure, honestly, just an idea that’s being developed on the fly. There are multiple ways: Maybe people can sign up to be paired with someone, and then it works like an exchange, and we could also have an option where you can opt to change partners at each stage, somewhat like a community facilitated critique partner exchange…

Another way is that there’s say five people in a group and all of them work on 4 books at a time while the other four read their books (but of course, in this method we can’t have an expanding pool, just new groups, because it would be too many books for one person to read), and this would be somewhat like working with a critique group. And then we could also set up workshop chats etc where each of these books gets discussed somewhat like a traditional book club, because by the end of one round, everyone has read all five books. Maybe people have an option of joining a group with just three others, based on availability. And time limits would not be strict, but definitely longer than a week long or month long exercize, because we’re asking people to read multiple books…

One more idea I had that I’m very unsure about is that we have a new category / channel where everyone can post their query (with them being required to read and critique someone else’s query first) and then other people can also go through theirs and give feedback, and the partial / fulls would be asked for if someone feels an interest or something. But with this, people might just leave it there after an intial period, so maybe this category gets wiped monthly, somewhat like the share your story threads on the old forums… Then again, I’m not sure a lot of people would request to read other partials or fulls at all, either, so this method might not work at all.

This is mostly just half baked ideas, but if it seems like it could be implemented well, I’d be willing to help develop them properly.

Edit: I’m not sure how half written or being writting at the moment manuscripts could fit into this, honestly. Maybe a thread of sorts where ideas / scenes are discussed and talked about, or say chapters at the most, but there’s still a commitment to give feedback to someone else’s work before posting yours, something like the Struggling Writer’s Den topic, except this is much more focused on craft based discussions or on a specific thing in a chapter. We have a channel in that discord server where we do this, so if someone wants feedback or help with a specific scene or part of an arc or something, they can post snippets from their work and we help each other with it.

Something regular for books that are being written is much harder for me to think of, because I’ve had bad experiences with having a manuscript criticized when it’s still being written, because I tend to rewrite or lose interest in the story, so I can’t really see what would be best

[FranklinBarnes]

@Novel_Worm

One more idea I had that I’m very unsure about is that we have a new category / channel where everyone can post their query (with them being required to read and critique someone else’s query first) and then other people can also go through theirs and give feedback, and the partial / fulls would be asked for if someone feels an interest or something. But with this, people might just leave it there after an intial period, so maybe this category gets wiped monthly, somewhat like the share your story threads on the old forums… Then again, I’m not sure a lot of people would request to read other partials or fulls at all, either, so this method might not work at all.

Places like r/PubTips on Reddit do a great job of this, but I think relatively few people on Wattpad are invested enough in the query process where explaining how to write a good query, let alone having people actually do it, will be difficult. And as you said: people lack incentives to read other people’s work simply out of kindness, and if these relationships are purely reciprocal we’re back where we started with the one-on-one exchanges. That might be evidence this is the best way of going about it.

@Novel_Worm

Maybe a thread of sorts where ideas / scenes are discussed and talked about, or say chapters at the most, but there’s still a commitment to give feedback to someone else’s work before posting yours, something like the Struggling Writer’s Den topic, except this is much more focused on craft based discussions or on a specific thing in a chapter. We have a channel in that discord server where we do this, so if someone wants feedback or help with a specific scene or part of an arc or something, they can post snippets from their work and we help each other with it.

A lot of Wattpad Discords have this sort of thing already and I think this works well, and is an idea we could steal given that people already post excerpts for help. It’s often very difficult to give feedback on excerpts provided out of context besides addressing things like mechanics, or if sentences read awkwardly—I remember once that as part of some writing game on some writing Discord long ago, I posted a few sentences of description, and immediately everyone was like “where are your five senses?” and “I didn’t see a character and so I got bored and I hope your family dies a gruesome death,” but of course most random excerpts from the middle of books will feel empty or uninteresting. There’s an upper limit on how much feedback can be offered on a work without reading said work: it takes a brave soul to diagnose from brief info about a book what’s wrong with it, and a luckier soul to be accurate.

There’s a fundamental paradox inherent in all these discussions: everyone wants high-quality feedback on their work, but people want feedback in greater quantity/with greater effort than what they’re able to give back, and the end result is that nobody really gets what they want. And we can’t force our members at gunpoint to read things they don’t want to read even if any program we come up with is in the best interest of Wacky Writers. This is how we recreate Animal Farm .

From what I’ve seen, while there might be more “demand” for in-depth critique exchanges in that a lot of people think these would be very nice, what actually seems to work is broad craft discussion, maybe the occasional question specific to someone’s work (e.g. I have a character who’s an astronaut fighting an invasion of space gerbils, how do you think they’d react to…), in the sense that this is what people will actually engage in. It’s a shame, and I think there’s some point about the tragedy of the commons to be made. But while I’m sure other people will have thoughts too, we might be setting the bar too high.

[Novel_Worm]

Right. It’s always that discussion with trying to set up clubs for something like this. That’s sort of where we went wrong on the discord, too - everyone simply got too busy to read the stories, and it was starting to get exhausting for most people. So while we all wanted to keep at it and support each other, it was hard to find the time. And with bigger groups, there’s also the concern of if there is interest, too.
But clubs are also working on Wattpad, and book clubs have been working for a long time. If we can find a way to strike that balance, it might be really great for the forum.

@FranklinBarnes

but of course most random excerpts from the middle of books will feel empty or uninteresting. There’s an upper limit on how much feedback can be offered on a work without reading said work: it takes a brave soul to diagnose from brief info about a book what’s wrong with it, and a luckier soul to be accurate.

Right. This is an issue, but somehow we were able to circumvent that on the discord - could’ve been the smaller size, so less people involved (we had about 10-15 active members at most, but it was always meant to be a smaller group)
And we did always ask specific questions, with the understanding that we were looking only at small snippets of someone’s bigger work. This does get more difficult to implement on a larger scale, and I don’t really have any experience with that sort of thing.

[DollyTH]

The conversation on this thread is awesome, but please remember to stay on topic with the task at hand - keeping Wacky alive. Wisp needs a place to feed her sandwiches!

[alcoholandcaffeine]

Phew okay I’m waaaayyyy behind on this

@CJtheSiteWizard

I’ll be writing a lovely long post for the next few minutes, so if you see me typing, that’s why.

Site wizard in da house! Hooray! Half my job is done, then

@CJtheSiteWizard

I have a new feature called “recent replies” which shows the most recent replies across all forum threads. I’m wondering if this might help drive engagement if people’s curiosity is piqued by whatever’s happening in another thread.

That’s interesting It might be intriguing to see more of where the conversation’s at instead of just the title.

@Kamiccola

Or maybe livening up the Discord Wacky is worth looking into? If we ensured it’s alive and there are conversations going on, we could try to attract writers to check that out if they already have Discord and it could be a gateway into the Wacky site.

We clearly suck at keeping it alive and none of us are really Discord aficionados, so…yeaahhhh

@FranklinBarnes

The fact of the matter is that unless you’re promising everyone who joins Wacky Writers a thousand comments on their story and an unicorn,

We might be able to get our hands on unicorns for everyone…

@Novel_Worm

We could also set up something like a paid mentoring system or a critique on part of their work or their whole work from a ‘succesful’ author, something like wattys bootcamp does, but I’m not sure if there would be enough interest in that…

A pairing service is what we could try to offer, mediate encounters between readers and writers, but anything resembling a book club of anything is not something that I think would be sustainable for the Wacky team. Sure, users can come and host their book clubs here if they want, I think the forum environment is a good place to keep track of stuff and organise, but this would be a members-generated activity, not something we could officially set up ourselves. We barely have the resources to keep the forum running as it is.

@Novel_Worm

Maybe we can also look into collaboration opportunities for advertising writing services and platforms? Like we did with Frost a while back (the creator is still on Wacky, I believe). And maybe for some niche platforms, we could have paid advertisements. If it’s too many advertisements, perhaps it can be just two - three spaces, one for a ‘book of the month / week’ thing, one for a paid book advertisement, and one for a platform or service, which could rotate weekly / monthly.

That is something we have considered and is up on our virtual WIP whiteboard lol.

@Kamiccola

While I’m at it, is the sidebar icon supposed to be a square? Kinda weird that’s why I thought I’d ask.

Oh lol, I see what you mean now, I also thought it was a graphics error or something haha.

@FranklinBarnes

I posted a few sentences of description, and immediately everyone was like “where are your five senses?” and “I didn’t see a character and so I got bored and I hope your family dies a gruesome death,”

lmao that escalated quickly

[alcoholandcaffeine]

So, anyway, book clubs – great places to be, not something we can “afford” to build under the Wacky brand, but something we’d be happy to host as a platform if our members want to run them! Right now, we’d prefer to focus on easier to manage writerly events, which we can also work with on our socials, so stay tuned to see what we’re cooking up

[CJtheSiteWizard]

@Kamiccola

While I’m at it, is the sidebar icon supposed to be a square? Kinda weird that’s why I thought I’d ask.

No, lol. I’ll figure out what’s going on with that. It should look like this:

Open:

Closed:

[FranklinBarnes]

I’d be willing to help host/moderate a book club in terms of the day-to-day mechanics, but for marketing other people would have to help out, and I’d rather not be the only one in charge.

[Novel_Worm]

@alcoholandcaffeine

A pairing service is what we could try to offer, mediate encounters between readers and writers, but anything resembling a book club of anything is not something that I think would be sustainable for the Wacky team. Sure, users can come and host their book clubs here if they want, I think the forum environment is a good place to keep track of stuff and organise, but this would be a members-generated activity, not something we could officially set up ourselves. We barely have the resources to keep the forum running as it is.

Yeah it is a huge time commitment. I’d be willing to help out, but not with running the day to day mechanics of it - that gets tiring really quick!

@alcoholandcaffeine

That is something we have considered and is up on our virtual WIP whiteboard lol.

Yay! That could also drive engagement if it’s two sided, like if we got those platforms to advertise us, it might bring more people.

[CJtheSiteWizard]

@Kamiccola

While I’m at it, is the sidebar icon supposed to be a square? Kinda weird that’s why I thought I’d ask.

I need to know if, after a refresh, this is still a square. I can’t reproduce it.

[Kamiccola]

Looks better now.

However, why does it ask me to look for topics? It’s a working search box, btw. Just surprised what it’s doing here.

[CJtheSiteWizard]

It’s a new beta feature I’m testing. I have to enable it forum-wide, but I mentioned it here.