When Wattpad’s head of content, Ashleigh Gardner, noticed that Todd’s downloads were tracking into the tens of millions, she thought it prudent to drop her a line. She asked Todd if she would be interested in allowing Wattpad to serve as her agent; would she like Wattpad to sell her work to a bona fide publisher? Todd didn’t return the email for days, as the notion sounded “not real.” But Wattpad did eventually convince her, and then sold the work to Simon & Schuster for six figures—with Wattpad taking their cut. And presto: the story became a series of four hard-copy novels now sold in thirty countries. Paramount has purchased the film rights.

How? How did this happen? I—the pretentious and old-fashioned scribe, who believes in MFAs and agents and agoraphobic writers in coffee-stained bathrobes—stand on the sidelines and wonder. Todd’s prose is spontaneous—more like a chat session than traditional literature. Truman Capote’s comment on Kerouac’s On the Road comes to mind: “That’s not writing; that’s just typing.” If literary writing is a way to assemble, by accretion, more than can be produced by our spontaneous mental processes, then After cannot really be called literature at all. It is the result of an automatic, pseudo-oral process. It’s gossipy, highly sexed, and parsed into bite-sized morsels. And it has been extraordinarily successful.

Todd explains her success this way: “People spend ten years trying to get a book published, they have degrees, they’re a hell of a lot smarter than me, and they may have way better grammar than me. But I used the Internet, and that’s what set me apart.”

As I learned more about Todd’s work, and the platform on which she rocketed to stardom, I began to wonder whether I had somehow missed the boat. Had the real style by which storytelling works in the twenty-first century developed far from the place where I lived? Was I left, luggage in hand, waving from the dock? New forms of social storytelling meant authors and readers had more codependent relationships. It seemed old literary models where writers and readers exist only in their solitary silos were being torn down.

Wattpad bills itself as YouTube for readers. It allows anyone to post and download fiction free of charge. The platform’s users are mostly young (78 per cent are under twenty-five years old) and women (making up a three-to-one ratio with men). They are also overwhelmingly participants in some form of fandom, writing and reading alternate tales based on Game of Thrones or Harry Potter, etc. There are fanfics about brands (The Fault in Our Starbucks); there is crossover fiction (Pirates of the Caribbean meets Rocky Horror); there is work based on runaway Internet memes (for example, Alex from Target, the global obsession that began when a cute Texan department store clerk was photographed by a customer); and even fiction based on apps (in one Kafkaesque example, Kim Kardashian becomes Trapped in Her Own Game). 

Wattpad writers publish their stories episodically, with short chapters uploaded as they’re written. Once a chapter is posted, the website sends push notifications to alert readers. Readers then comment on the story’s progress, enthuse about who’s hot and who’s “a slut,” and point out plot holes for the author to correct. Typos and grammar problems are glossed over—a necessary indulgence. The writing is responsive, almost collaborative.

I managed to speak with Todd just as After was being shipped (in hard-copy form) to bookshops around the world, and I asked how it felt to be published on paper for a change. She told me, “It’s so strange to have only one editor. I’m used to having thousands of editors, you know? I’m used to spending a couple hours just reading comments after I post something—and those comments would help me make the story better—but working with the editor from Simon & Schuster, there’s just this weird silence when I send him something. I’m used to getting at least a ‘yay’ from readers right away.”