Every book lover today has access to millions of books in every language known to man. And it’s not just paperbacks, it’s also e-books in the kindle device or downloadable books on smartphones.

With so many universes existing together in this world, all fictional, mythical and real; The readers’ brains are forming new stories, alternate universes, different endings, character developments and entirely new stories with just the same characters. These budding writers who don’t just up and write books like J.K. Rowling and Chetan Bhagat, find themselves a browser-al way through.

There are two websites that exist on the Internet, don’t worry they’re completely safe from viruses and malfunctions. these are; Wattpad and Archive of our own.

Wattpad:

Wattpad is a community for readers and writers to publish new user-generated stories in different genres, including classics, general fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction, poetry, fan-fiction, spiritual, humor, and teen fiction.It aims to create social communities around stories for both amateur and established writers.

The platform claims to have an audience of more than 65 million users, who can directly interact with the writers and share their opinions with fellow readers. Although available in over 50 languages, 77% of its content is written in English. A number of Wattpad users are translating stories to continue to build the platform.

Statistics

As of January 2018:

• 85% of its traffic and usage comes from mobile devices,
• the site has 65 million unique visitors per month,
• there are over 400 million story uploads in total,
• there are over 65 million writers

New authors and teens

The most frequently voted stories appear on the “What’s Hot List”. According to the profiles visible on the site, many of these authors are teenagers.

Wattpad section also has a Featured Story list, which promotes content reviewed and approved by staff and an editorial review board. Many of these featured stories are written by self-published and professional writers from different genres. Lately famous authors like Margaret Atwood, Paulo Coelho and R L Stine have also joined the professional bandwagon of authors currently active on wattpad.

The website/app also encourages the writers to interact with their audience and promote their stories across social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

The website can easily be accessed by anyone from anywhere and at anytime and the the most interesting of stories. Some writers and their works make it so big, they find their own stardom through this website. Anna Todd, a girl who started out as a normal teen fan-fiction writer wrote a book called “After” in 2014, and the book struck so big that the entire series is being created into a movie with her on the producer’s chair, and taking home huge six figure cheques.

On Wattpad, anyone can be a writer, and a reader all at the same time.

Archive of Our Own:

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit open source repository for fan-fiction (fic) and other fan-works contributed by users. The site was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works and went into open beta in 2009. As of 2018, Archive of Our Own hosted 4.2 million works in over 30,000 fandoms.^[1] The site has received positive reception for its curation, organization and design, mostly done by readers and writers of fan-fiction.

Features

Stories on Archive of Our Own can be sorted into categories and tagged based on elements of the stories, including characters and ships involved and other more specific tags. Volunteers called “tag wranglers” manually connect synonymous tags to bolster the site’s search system, allowing it to understand “mermaids”, “mermen”, and “merfolk” as constituents of the “merpeople” tag, for example.

Archive of Our Own allows users to rate their stories by intended age (“General audience”, “Teen and up audiences”, “Mature”, and “Explicit”), relationships, orientations and pairings (“F/F”, “M/M”, “F/M”, “Multi”, “Other”, and “Gen”), and to supply content warnings for their works (e.g. “Major Character Death”, “Graphic Depictions of Violence”, “Underage”, and “Rape/Non-Con”). Archive of Our Own allows writers to publish any content, so long as it is legal.

This allowance was developed as a reaction to the policies of other popular fan-fiction hosts such as LiveJournal, which at one time began deleting the accounts of fic writers who wrote what the site considered to be pornography, and FanFiction.Net, which disallows numerous types of stories including any that re-purpose characters originally created by authors who disapprove of fan-fiction. Readers can give stories kudos, which function similarly to likes on other sites. The site does not require real names from its users, who may identify themselves by one or more pseudonyms linked to their central account.

So feel free to read and create wonderful works of fiction or fact with AO3 and Wattpad and you’ll never have to be stuk with dealing the the harsh realities of life all alone!