A Timely Knight wins 1st Place at the Lazy Awards, in the Fantasy category!

So, during this quarantine, I got really into Wattpad.

Now, I know what you might think. Wattpad is home to teen fictions about impossibly hot, bad guys falling for impossibly hot, shy girls, and werewolf stories where the hot Alfa claims a shy, unassuming girl. And you might be right. There's a lot of those in the platform. Like a lot.

However, and not unlike anything that's actually worth doing, Wattpad is more than meets the eye. Sure, there are tons of questionable stories written by hormonal thirteen year-olds, and sure, a lot of those are truly terrible. But, as it turns out, there is a lot of potential in Wattpad.

In these five months I've been active on the platform, I've met several writers who are not only quite talented, but also amazing people. And by connecting with them, I have become a better writer. How, you might ask? Well, a pair of eyes can only see so much, especially if they're judging their own work. My book, A Timely Knight, has gone through several revisions to get to where it is, and I'm positive it still has some more to go. Every single person that read it left valuable comments, whether about the plot or maybe suggesting an edit to make the wording sound better. Other times, they just leave encouraging notes, or even just random thoughts about the story.

These are all potential readers who are actively engaging with my story. Currently, A Timely Knight, sits at 2.8K reads, which means it's still in diapers. Yet, I've been slowly doing several efforts to increase readership. One of them is participating in as many contests as I can. Within the platform, users organize Awards, as they call them; prizes are limited to things you can use in the platform itself, like stickers for your book's cover, reads and comments in your book and follows from the hosts. The judges are other Wattpad users, average readers who enjoy a certain genre and want to try their hand at critiquing.

So far, I've participated in around fifty of those contests, of which twenty or so have reached the judging stage; a lot of them have been simply abandoned, or not enough participants joined in. My category is usually Action/Adventure, which is one of the least populated in Wattpad, so there's that. Today, I won my eighth first place. Of those twenty contests, I've only lost on three occasions; the other nine, I have either placed second or third. It's a good feeling, especially because those awards have a certain degree of relevance within the platform, and because it helps my book reach a wider audience.

So today, with another first place under my belt, I keep trying, working to get my book published. Today I'll send more queries to agents and hopefully something will come out soon. And even though I can't include "First Place Winner at the Lazy Awards" in that email, I still consider it quite the achievement. And it helps. A struggling writer's career is a tough one. So we take any win we can get. Today I take this one.