I visited the plush headquarters of Wattpad, to see for myself a place where social writing was having some success.

The site’s co-founder, Allen Lau, is a cheerful, slim, and bespectacled man, almost giddily optimistic. “We’re doing something quite Internet native here,” he told me. “The stories have become interactive.” So interactive, in fact, that authors have begun to create dummy Wattpad accounts for their fictional characters—allowing them to join the conversation in the comment forum. Commentary pours into narrative, and narrative backsplashes into commentary.

Another innovation on Wattpad is the way Lau has monetized things. Advertisements for the launch of the movie The Fault in Our Stars, for example, were directed toward readers who clicked on tear-jerker romance stories that Wattpad had commissioned to serve as bait for Fault’s demographic. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, where the platform is particularly popular, Unilever sponsors content about young people who may or may not use Unilever products. (A television miniseries called Wattpad Presents is produced in the Philippines, too; it brings to life popular Wattpad love stories.) “Five years ago if you didn’t tell consumers that a story was sponsored they’d get very upset,” said Lau. “But five years from now it may simply be expected. And at the end of the day, if the consumer is not bombarded with advertising, maybe it’s okay.”

While Wattpad, like all platform companies, has found ways to monetize the labour of unpaid users, Lau believes that it also provides genuine benefits to would-be writers. “In the old model, with traditional publishing, people had to complete an entire book before getting feedback. Then you’d have to wait to get an agent, wait for an editor. There were all these gatekeepers.” Lau gives me an open and guileless smile. “The Internet has provided a new option for writers. I think it’s a powerful option. And the future of storytelling is very different.”

Perhaps, given how different this future is, it’s not surprising that conventional publishing is still not something Anna Todd aspires to. Despite her enormous success, she plans to continue writing on the Wattpad platform. Far from begrudging the lack of payment, Todd is so enamoured with Wattpad that she feels uncomfortable writing with more solitary media like Microsoft Word. “It’s weird not to write on Wattpad,” she told me. “Even writing a new epilogue for one of the Simon & Schuster books, I had to work on the Wattpad platform. It’s weird.” 

She is convinced that Word is a little defunct, in fact, like a typewriter or roll of papyrus. “I definitely think all writing will be like this in the future,” she told me. “That fourth wall between the author and the reader doesn’t need to be there.”

And Margaret Atwood has published a zombie story on Wattpad (Atwood laughed off those who thought she should be “endorsing Literature, Capital L”).

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