Alternative Places to Consume Romance Online
AO3, wattpad, manhwa, and more!
Hi friends!
This week, I want to talk about places people are reading romance on the internet that exist mostly outside of the traditional and indie publishing landscape (but nevertheless deeply influence said landscape). And I thought the timing was right, both since two of the Dramione fanfic conversions were published this week (to much conversation) and since it was announced this week that Radish (a serialized publishing platform that has been popular with romance readers) will be shut down. As attention spans get shorter, I think we’ll continue to see shifts towards platforms with serialized fiction or shorter stories, even as mainstream and indie romances get longer. And where will all of the Radish writers go? There have definitely been several who have made excellent livings on the platform over the years.
One of my theories about trend forecasting in the romance space in particular is that trends tend to bubble up from fanfiction, into indie published romance, and finally into traditionally published romance. Many of these websites, where authors are writing stories in real time, often publishing a chapter a week, provide an excellent snapshot into the most current romance trends and where the market is heading.
So let’s dive in about where people are reading, and see if we can get to the bottom of where romance trends are starting. This is just a starting point - I’m sure there are many more places I’ve yet to discover.
An Archive of Our Own
Starting with the obvious. An Archive of Our Own, or AO3 to the true heads, is a fanfiction website that replaced fanfiction.net as the best place to read and publish fan works online. It’s probably the website where I spend the most time (if AO3 kept stats of how many words I’d read on the platform, it would be in the millions. I’m really putting in my 10,000 hours here). Recent fanfiction conversions have, for the most part, all come from works published on AO3 (we’ll talk about wattpad in a minute).
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As we all know by now, my current addiction is The Pitt, but I’ve also been deep in the rabbit hole for fic-producing fandoms around Top Gun: Maverick, Check, Please!, Red, White, and Royal Blue (a surprisingly prolific fandom for a work that ends with its characters in the exact romantic relationships we want them to be in), and even sexy Canadian ice dancers Tessa and Scott, among many others.
Pick a fandom, any fandom, and you’ll find fanfiction. There’s a spectrum of types of writing, along with its own vocabulary, in the fanfiction space. There are shorter form “one-shot” pieces, novel-length works, and opuses that spill into the hundreds of thousands of words. Longer works tend to be updated on a schedule, a chapter at a time, sometimes weekly and sometimes on time scales that will drive any reader to drink.
And while fanfiction has been a breeding ground for bestselling romance novelists, there are also writers who are staunchly determined to create work for fans for free and exist outside of any kind of for-profit ecosystem.
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Readers can provide kudos or leave comments, and authors often directly interact with their readers and take their feedback. And now, in the BookTok world, readers are increasingly sharing about their favorite fics alongside the published romance they are reading, treating fan works as equally legitimate to original works. Readers create fan art covers and sometimes even produce their own bound copies of the works for their own shelves or for semi-illicit distribution via websites like Etsy. There are even podfics, fan-produced audio versions of popular fics.
Last week, AO3 was down for a few hours after their bookmark system broke (as a reader on AO3, you can save bookmarks for your favorite reads to your account. Bookmarks are also an incredible resource for navigating the platform. Find an author you like? Look at their previous works and also at their bookmarks. Voila! Instant reading list). This caused meltdowns across the internet, including on TikTok:
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Wattpad
Did you know there is still a world where dark Harry Styles fanfiction is thriving (Duplicity, about a photographer hired to follow a band and getting drawn into a dark and dangerous world that she might not be able to escape has 112 million views and is still adding new chapters)?
Wattpad, “the world’s largest storytelling community,” is a site where writers can share fanfiction or original fiction, chapter by chapter, with lots of opportunities for reader engagement. Extremely popular with younger readers (per Wattpad, their largest global portion of readers are women younger than 24), Wattpad has also been the source of crossover romance fiction. The most popular recent example might be After by Anna Todd, a Harry Styles fanfiction that was traditionally published and turned into a series of movies that received theatrical releases.
Interesting tidbit: Wattpad now has their own publishing imprint, distributed by Macmillan books. Anna Todd has her own collaborative imprint with Wattpad, Frayed Pages, where she acquires fiction (including wattpad fiction) to traditionally publish.
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I haven’t read quite as much on Wattpad as AO3, but in my experience, breakout stories on the platform tend to be serialized and extremely long. There are many hugely successful dark mafia romances on the platform. The below video is hilarious and also gives an incredible overview of the type of fic you might find:
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Because Wattpad is an actual for-profit company (AO3 is run by the Organization for Transformative Works, which is a non-profit), their user interface is much more designed and optimized for online reading, community building, and user interaction.
WebTOON
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In 2021, Wattpad was acquired by Naver, the parent company of WebTOON, another huge player in the online reading space. Webtoon and Wattpad also share a joint media operation, Wattpad Webtoon Studios, that helps platform creators find success off platform, whether in traditional publishing, film and tv, or otherwise.
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Webtoon is basically the graphic novel version of Wattpad - creators upload comics, often a chapter at a time in long running serials, on a platform and app optimized for fan interaction. Currently, some of the platform’s most popular stories are romances, including Rules for Dating Trash (a good girl dates a bad boy) and Love Bites (a werewolf romance). Huge crossover hits from the platform include Lore Olympus, an adaptation of the myth of Hades and Persephone that has now been published (but remains on the platform, with 1.4 billion views to date).
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Manta
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If you’re into webtoons, perhaps you’re a fan of manhwa (referring to Korean print comics). Shout out to my friend Emily, a school librarian who knows what tweens love to read. She’s been reading romance and romantasy manhwa on Manta (who, similarly to Wattpad, call themselves the “world’s leading storytelling platform”). Despite the fact that there are some stories available to read for free, Manta is subscription-based. A standard subscription costs $4.99 per month. Manta also produces their own bind ups of popular comics on the site to sell. Novelizations of the comics are called light novels. The most famous to American readers of these might be Under the Oak Tree, published by Inklore, Random House Worlds manga, manhwa, and manhua imprint. It’s a sprawling, medieval set romantasy novel that hit the NYT bestseller list at #7 for hardcover fiction.
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And More!
Other places people are engaging with short form romance content include Quinn (an audio erotica app) and ReelShorts (a Chinese short-form video entertainment app).
Quinn has a robust TikTok presence, with the brand itself posting content that looks a lot like the content readers post about spicy audiobooks (warning these are extremely NSFW):
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And ReelShort advertises on TikTok, getting viewers hooked with brief installments from micro dramas like “Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas” that viewers need to download the app to view the rest of (dying to know what happens when you find a homeless billionaire husband for Christmas).
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More ReelShort titles:
Dr. Boss is my Baby Daddy
Never Reject a Wolf Princess
The Alpha King and his Virgin Bride
Daddy Help! Mommy’s in Prison
My Three Ungrateful Brothers Come Crawling Back
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RIP livejournal, home of the Andrew Garfield Jesse Eisenberg Social Network fic Carry It in My Heart that is rumored to have been written by Casey McQuiston and served as the source material for Red White and Royal Blue. RIP tumblr. Are there any members of Gen Z who read this newsletter? What is your livejournal? What is your tumblr?
Where do you read romance on the internet (if anywhere)? Do you have a preferred method for navigating the chaos and finding great new stories? Does reading on your laptop feel like a different activity than reading on a kindle or reading a physical book? (yes). Let me know in the comments!
xoxo
Inkitt!
There's a relatively new platform called Novelo (novelo.com) and there's many romance novels/novelettes published there!