Like a naive little author, when I set out to start serializing a book I was writing, I thought it would be fairly easy. This is the online era, is it not? We have the technology, yes? It should be efficient and effective!

Instead I slammed face-first into Wattpad. 

I’ve talked about the history of Wattpad in my Serial Nation Patreon, which explains that it was originally developed as a simple e-reader for old (think: 2008) not-quite-smart phones. It was not envisioned or designed for serialization specifically, and certainly not for readers or authors of serialized stories. 

I know a LOT of authors made their careers in the early Wattpad era, so most of you are probably wondering what the heck is wrong with me. It was popular and full of serialized stories! Millions of people read stories there! It works just fine!

It really, really doesn’t, though. I hated the limited tagging, the awful metadata options, the difficulty in cutting and pasting (something I hear they finally got around to fixing at some point), the lack of stats info for readers and for authors, and of course the algo-driven discoverability (the “why” behind the lack of metadata, because Wattpad has no use for ways to make story searches easy for readers). 

But to understand the Mariana Trench depths of my frustration, you have to know this about me (you probably do): I’m a fangirl. 

I got my serialization badges in the front lines of fanfiction, from Livejournal to Tumblr to Archive of Our Own (AO3). I was there when we spent hours learning HTML so we could hand-code headers to our stories for ratings, pairings, and content warnings. I look at my early stories (long since ported over to AO3) and cringe at the under-tagging. My modern fanfiction headers fill up the whole top half of the screen, and are considered moderately tagged:

HEY WATTPAD DO YOU SEE THAT?!?????

Spoiler: they do not see that. 

I beg you to look at everything there: rating, pairings, warnings, categories, characters, language, and stats (published date, updated date, word count, chapter count, comments, kudos, bookmarks). That’s before you get to the damn title! Then there are the summary, story notes, and (not shown here), chapter notes.  It’s so beautiful…

AO3 launched in 2008, but even now in 2026 not a single online platform for original writing comes close to these features. 

I kept waiting, kept hoping for more. Dreamed of integrating that kind of interface with a wiki, to share all the details of my story and characters with readers (like fanwiki! But built into the story!). World Anvil and Campfire have tried, to be honest, and RoyalRoad does have a fair number of stats. 

But the other fault-line with most platforms is that they lock you into their ecosystem. Getting your writing OUT of them can be a trial; for sites like WorldAnvil and Campfire, exporting the story is easy, since they both originally started as writing apps. You can export everything (story, worldbuilding, notes, etc.) but the drawback is that it is just a PDF or .docx file. Or, in some cases, a JSON file (the horror!). In other words, it’s a whole mess. 

I wanted the features, but I also wanted freedom and control. 

So I decided to build it.