Wattpad’s taking 5 million authors to school with new YouTube series (Exclusive)

Wattpad is launching a creator education video series it hopes will give writers a leg up.

Each episode of Story School will tackle common issues authors might face, either on the page or in the course of their careers. The series—which is starting with four episodes, but may expand to more later—features Wattpad content lead Leah Ruehlicke along with Wattpad-published authors Loridee De Villa (How to be the Best Third Wheel), Matthew Dawkins (Until We Break), and Jessica Cunsolo (With Me).

Episode one, for example, tackles writer’s block, a common bane of authorly existence.

Wattpad head of content & creator development Nick Uskoski says it wanted to develop this series because the more than 5 million writers publishing original work and fanfiction on its platform can struggle to find advice geared specifically toward them.

“We’ve pioneered the growing webnovel category,” Uskoski tells Tubefilter. “Because of that, and the way webnovels operate in a little bit of a different fashion, we found that a lot of them aren’t able to find the information they really need. If you go out and search on Google ‘how to write a book,’ it’s very much going to tell you about traditional publishing.”

Story School, he says, will instead give advice with webnovels in mind: The series’ topics were selected based on feedback from Wattpad authors.

“We’ve been able to compile a lot of the major pain points that [authors] consistently bring to us,” he says. “The super obvious biggest one is writer’s block, and then around that is ‘How do I make a story?’ ‘What is a story?’ ‘How can I serialize?’ ‘How can I better tackle metadata?'”

While this is Wattpad’s first creator resource webseries, it’s not the platform’s first go at trying to support some of the 5 million writers posting original works and fanfiction on its platform.

Last June, it introduced a creator program that doled out $2.6 million in cash stipends to English-language authors hitting certain reader engagement targets within certain genres.

“I think it’s really important to us to continue to support creators and invest in them over the coming years,” Uskoski says. “We have this great platform that is this open door for them to go through and and express themselves, but really all the value comes from their expressions. We want them to feel like they can come in and feel really comfortable and feel like they get to be their diverse and authentic selves all over our platform. This is a huge hope that we can do that.”

Story School‘s first episode is embedded above, or you can watch it here on YouTube.