How to post on Wattpad: stories, parts, tags and Hot Lists

Wattpad is the broad-audience platform of the three big English serial sites, and its own help center describes a machine built from stories, parts, tags and Hot Lists rather than fictions and chapters. This guide walks posting there using Wattpad's own support pages: story creation, publishing parts, the category and tag system, the Mature rating, scheduled publishing, and the Wattpad Originals program as its current FAQ describes it.

Creating a story

• On the iOS and Android apps, tap the Create button and select Create New Story; fill in whatever story info you have (cover, title, description) or skip it, and you land in the editor for the first part.
• On the web, click Write, then New Story; enter a title and select a category, with all other details optional at first, then save and open your first Untitled Part 1.
• Two hard limits: you cannot upload text files such as PDF or Word documents, and stories cannot be transferred between accounts. The writing happens in Wattpad's own editor.

Story Details are the discoverable metadata, editable at any time: title, description, category, tags, language, copyright, rating, story status (Complete or On-going), genre and subgenre, and story type.

Categories, subgenres, fandoms and tags

Wattpad's current classification system, its content taxonomy, is multi-label: a story can carry several genres, subgenres and fandoms at once. The rules as the FAQ states them:

• One to three genres, chosen in order of relevance, and up to nine subgenres with at most three per genre.
• Fanfiction attaches fandoms; a custom fandom can be submitted, is reviewed biannually, and joins the official list once at least 2,000 stories use it.
• Tags run 2 to 128 characters each, at least one and up to 25, should be a single word, and cannot contain periods, hyphens or spaces. Tags apply story-wide: every part carries the same set.
• Wattpad suggests spending tags on things the categories do not already cover: setting, time period, story theme, character occupation, mood, character ships.

Parts, publishing and the scheduler

Publishing a part makes it public on your profile; drafts stay invisible to readers. To publish at all you need a verified account and, per the help center, a title, genre and tags chosen. On iOS you can publish several parts at once; on Android and the web, parts publish one at a time.

The Publishing Scheduler is the serial writer's tool here. It works on the web, with scheduled parts visible in the app's My Stories view: schedule parts as little as 15 minutes ahead or up to one year ahead, with no limit on how many are queued; edit or unschedule any part before it goes live; the schedule follows your device timezone, and only you see what is queued. That is a buffer mechanism the platform built in, and it pairs naturally with choosing a release schedule.

Discoverability: tags and Hot Lists

• Rankings are per-tag Hot Lists, and a story's ranked tags only appear while it sits in that tag's top 1000.
• The FAQ's own arithmetic: #romance has 1.7 million stories, while #paranormalromance has just under 1.8 thousand, so the smaller tag is the realistic first ranking. A story can rank on several Hot Lists at once.
• The ranking algorithm considers "the popularity, trendiness, and user engagement of a story, plus the relevance of the tags used and when the story was last updated". Tag accuracy is explicitly considered, and untagged stories do not rank: "Remember to tag your stories to be eligible to rank!"
• The Most Impressive Ranking shown on a story reflects list size: #5 out of 500 stories counts as more impressive than #1 out of 50.

The Mature rating

A story may be rated Mature if it contains explicit sex scenes, self-harm themes or scenes (including suicide and eating disorders), or graphic depictions of violence including sexual, verbal, emotional and physical abuse. Suggestive images are hidden from users under 17 and from logged-out visitors, and Mature stories have discovery restrictions: underage users do not see them in search results or in Hot Lists.

The underlying content rules, verified against Wattpad's content page previously, draw the line this way: Mature is a 17-plus rating; explicit scenes between consenting adults are allowed where the sexual content supports the story rather than being its main purpose; pornography is prohibited. In the taxonomy, some subgenres, erotica among them, automatically flag a story as Mature.

Wattpad Originals

Wattpad Originals is the platform's current program for stories it selects and monetizes directly: a collection of stories "handpicked by our editorial experts", unlocked by readers with Coins or a Wattpad Premium+ subscription. Ongoing Originals publish one or more new parts weekly, and only the latest 10 parts are paywalled at a time; each new part frees an older one, so patient readers can wait and read free, and every Original keeps several free chapters as a preview. Completed Originals have a fixed paywall. The FAQ states the program's goal plainly: to "help writers make money from their work on Wattpad". Selection belongs to Wattpad, using editorial expertise, data insights and reader engagement; it is not a program you apply for through a form. Wattpad's older Paid Stories branding does not appear in the pages fetched for this guide, so nothing is claimed about it here.

Expectations and fit

Wattpad publishes no general author-earnings or audience figures, so this guide quotes none. What its own pages establish: discovery is tag-driven and the big tags are crowded (1.7 million stories carry #romance); rankings reward engagement and recent updates; creation is app-first with a year-deep scheduler; and platform monetization exists but runs through editorial selection. The craft constants are the same as anywhere: a description that sells (how to write a book blurb), endings worth returning for (cliffhangers and chapter endings), and a schedule you keep.

For the comparison with Royal Road and Scribble Hub, and the newsletter and membership routes, see where to publish a web serial, how to post on Royal Road and how to post on Scribble Hub.