The book-to-screen pipeline has existed for as long as Hollywood has been around, but the democratization of that process really only began within the past few years, thanks in part to writer-reader community platform Wattpad. The original home of now-traditionally published works including “My Life With the Walter Boys,” “The Kissing Booth,” and the “After” series, Wattpad had a strong connection with fans of these titles well before Netflix made them widely famous with the film and TV show adaptations.
“I’ve been at Wattpad a very long time, almost 12 years. So in those very early days we were one of the world’s best communities for readers and writers with maybe a couple million users back then, around the world. Where we’ve evolved to today is really to be the center of fandom and pop culture,” Wattpad president Aron Levitz told Variety in an interview last month.
Founded in 2006, Wattpad was acquired by Webtoon owner Naver, a South Korean internet conglomerate, in May 2021 for an estimated $600 million. With 150 million monthly users, today’s Wattpad is certainly less niche, but very much retains its status as an alternative to the traditional publishing business — even though Wattpad has developed its own model for working with authors and creators who want to go that route with their Wattpad originals.
“I think the one thing that has stayed constant as we’ve evolved is this really beautiful mix of art and science that we have,” Levitz said. “We have phenomenal storytellers from around the world telling stories that are important to them. No one telling them they can’t write this way; no editor saying, ‘Well, that comma has to go here.’ It really is pure creativity, exploring universes that they want to explore. And you mix that with our understanding of the ones and zeros behind it: Where is a community really diving into a tertiary character? Why is everyone commenting on this paragraph? What overall macro trends we’re seeing on a day to day basis? And when you mix that all together, it really lets us stay at the forefront and even push what’s happening on screens and shelves all over the world.”
Wattpad’s operations have also grown to encompass working with creators to have their works adapted into TV series and movies, with a recent success story being the Tubi original “Sidelined,” based on a Wattpad original, “The QB Bad Boy and Me.” That producing system wasn’t in place when Ali Novak’s “My Life With the Walter Boys” was first picked up for adaptation at Netflix in June 2021, but as Season 2 of the romance series drops on the streamer this week, Wattpad is now much more prepared to shepherd future hits.
“While we didn’t produce ‘Walter Boys’ ourselves, that phenomenon started on Wattpad, and we’ve had huge successes with things that we have produced,” Levitz said. “So whether it’s ‘The QB Bad Boy and Me’ becoming ‘Sidelined’ on Tubi, one of their biggest hits of all time, things like the ‘After’ series by Anna Todd, which is still one of the biggest international hits on Netflix of all time — we’ve just seen again and again and again all over the world, the thing that sets us apart is not just the storytelling, not just the fans, but that fandom will then go travel to see the extents of the universe, whether it’s a screen, whether it’s the books we publish, and that’s really changed us for me. Wattpad is still one of the world’s best places for readers and writers to gather, but also a way to find new fans. Maybe a person didn’t know about Wattpad when they first saw ‘Sidelined’ on Tubi, but we see that spike in our users as they come back and create new fans, too.”
