'I Love Being Surprised': Wattpad's Head Of Content Reveals Her Favorite Types Of Stories
Media has evolved exponentially in the digital age, especially thanks to platforms like Wattpad. The website serves as a host for user-generated writing, giving amateurs and professionals alike the chance to expand their talents and grow as creatives. In some cases, that’s even led to massive successes for streaming platforms like Netflix, with After (2019) and The Kissing Booth (2018) highlighting the potential of the service as a launching pad for new voices.
With Wattpad growing more interconnected with Webtoon, that future only has room to grow thanks to new crossover hits like Bite Me that might be perfectly positioned for new horizons. During an interview with Just Watch, Wattpad Head of Content Alessandra Ferreri broke down what makes a story on the platform pop, what her favorite kinds of stories are, and
What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned from the previous Wattpad successes and how are you applying them to what comes next?
I think the biggest lesson that I've learned, coming from a creative background myself and then working in a creative field like this one, you really don't want to be too prescriptive about what you're looking for, what you think you need, or what you think you want to see. I've always been surprised at the things that have really landed, whether it's on Wattpad or on screens, delightfully so. I think that when we start to get too prescriptive about what's going to work and what it has to look like and what it has to be in order for it to be successful, we actually limit ourselves with what we're able to do. We want to be creative, and I think you kind of have to be creative in how you look at different stories and how you approach different spaces, especially for something like Wattpad content.
Wattpad stories aren't in a traditional pipeline, right? They're kind of in this liminal third space between when you're writing by yourself in your bedroom and then trying to commercialize it, or you're publishing your book and doing something in a traditional sense. We're kind of in that middle ground where anything can happen. Plot twists abound! You can maybe stop writing for six months and then pick it back up again, and you're an entirely different person with a whole different perspective on that exact same story. I think with Wattpad, and what I've learned in looking at so many stories on the platform over the years, is to stay really open-minded. You have to be genre-agnostic as well, trope-agnostic. I have my own personal taste, but I have been swayed many, many times by different ways that writers have put their work out there and what they've done with it.
What are some of the elements that have really drawn your attention for adaptation?
Wattpad is a user-generated content platform, which means you don't actually need permission to post there. You just have to fall within our content guidelines. Anyone's story can go on the platform, and so the measure of quality isn't really something that we're necessarily looking for. Some of the best writers in the world had to start somewhere, and you kind of get to see them evolve when they put themselves out there on a platform like Wattpad. For us, that means not everything needs to be adapted right away.
Not everything needs to be brought out of its little ecosystem. But if writers are interested in those types of opportunities and we find that the market is asking for a certain type of thing, then we're happy to make that connection. Teams like mine, the content team on Wattpad, are constantly looking at what the appetite is on the platform. What are writers wanting to write? What do readers want to read? Sometimes that's the same thing; sometimes it's quite different. Different appetites at different times.
Wattpad kind of acts like this mirror to pop culture in that it is often influenced by things that are or aren’t being made externally. Maybe you don’t see yourself in a hockey romance, so I'm going to put myself in a story that I think I would like to be in in some capacity, or a character like myself. I can create them on Wattpad. You're getting inspired by something else externally as well. Maybe a movie really got to you, and you decided to write something… I find the thing that does guide us is market interest. There's nearly no use in bringing forward stories that no one is necessarily ready for in some capacity. I've been at Wattpad long enough that I've seen that cycle of interest come back around. I know that eventually somebody will come knocking on the door. I know that's going to happen.
There were times when nobody was looking for vampires, or nobody was looking for YA, and then those cycles come back around pretty often. In fact, they come back more rapidly than they used to because media consumption just moves faster now. I think that really does help dictate what grows. We have an amazing library of stories. We have a huge catalog that we like to keep our eye on. We're constantly looking at, like, ‘What's this person doing over here? What's happening over in this community?’ When it comes to adaptation, it really comes down to, ‘Well, what are you guys looking for? What do you want?’ Then we get to act as librarians in that sense and make some recommendations on some of the cool things that we have found.
What are some of your favorite personal stories or romances?
I have so many. I'm a huge film person. I find that so much of my inspiration comes from film. I actually just went to a screening of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) last night, so that's really in my brain right now. I really loved it. I love being surprised. I think as somebody who reads a lot and watches a lot, I can usually pinpoint the twists in a film. Especially when you look at any number of scripts, you know the formula. That’s why I love being surprised.
One of the best ways to surprise me is to do different genre mashups, where you combine two different things. If you're gonna do werewolves in space or post-apocalyptic high school, any of those things where you can really mash up two properties or two things I love.I love fan fictions that combine different properties in one. What if Taylor Swift was in the '60s and Don Draper was her manager? I think there’s lots of fun to be had there. I think the weirder you can get, the better. Go for it. So that's kind of what I seek out on the personal side. Yeah.
What does the future look like for Wattpad?
Oh my gosh, there are always so many things happening behind the scenes. One of them is a little bit more technical, but because we're still a tech platform at the end of the day, I always like to take a nod to all the amazing work that our engineering team and product teams are doing. That really is the foundation and the baseline and why so many stories even get surfaced. So on the technical side, we like to monitor everything.
We have so many genres, which means you really can start mashing up your tropes and your settings and your time periods and all that stuff, which gives us so much more insight into what some of the different appetites are in terms of what people are reading and what authors are writing. I'm really excited for that because as we get to see, as we give more options, you can find more. You can pick up to three different genres; you can pick multiple subgenres. There are so many ways to categorize your story, so I think we're going to see some really cool inspiration from that. So that's a bit more on the technical side, but I'm really looking forward to parsing through a lot of that data myself.
The other thing that we have been doing is, because our parent company is Webtoon Entertainment, we have been seeing them adapt some of our stories into web comics, which has been such a cool experiment to see how text long-form web novels get turned into a web comic. They have a really wonderful slate coming up. There's a handful of them already on the platform. One of them is called Love Bites, which is a queer vampire high school story, which is based on the Wattpad story Bite Me, which did super well on the platform and is doing super well on Webtoon. It's really neat to see how even our company ecosystem is working together to take really great stories and turn them into different formats. I'm really looking forward to all of those new stories coming out. And so if you are on either Wattpad or Webtoon, take a look at the cross-format expansions that we've been doing because they're really exciting.
