At Wattpad, says Ashleigh Gardner “we have a huge pool of content that we could never read ourselves as human editors. We really lean on machine learning to help us understand what those stories are about before we even open the page.”
Interview with Ashleigh Gardner, Wattpad Books
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When a publishing imprint announces its launch, any excitement is usually linked to the founder’s literary reputation. The rule holds true in the recent of case of Wattpad Books, the first direct publishing division for a company that calls itself “a global multiplatform entertainment company for original stories.” The web-based publisher, largely of genre fiction, has nurtured the careers of hundreds of authors and shepherded nearly 1,000 titles into print and on screen. Novels born on Wattpad have grown into hits online and later found homes at traditional publishers, such as Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan.
Ashleigh Gardner, deputy general manager at Wattpad Studios, will lead the new Wattpad Books division. She tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally how Wattpad will analyze usage data using innovative machine learning algorithms.
“We have over 70 million people coming to Wattpad to read each month, and they’re reading over 500 million – half a billion – stories each month. We have a huge pool of content that we could never read ourselves as human editors, so we really lean on machine learning to help us understand what those stories are about before we even open the page,” she explains.
“We’re able to see not only information about the content, but also information on how audiences are reacting to it. I’m able to see what readers in Canada are enjoying. What are the stories that people under the age of 18 just can’t put down once they start reading? All those different stats help give us a picture that helps inform what we publish when we actually go to read those stories. There are still, of course, human readers that are reading and evaluating those stories to make sure they’re ones that fit with our list and that we think will work for readers outside of Wattpad.
“But what I think is so interesting is that publishers are really trying to understand what readers want, and every book they acquire is a guess towards what they think that will be. At Wattpad, we already have this massive audience of people that are reading. We understand what readers want. We’re just looking for the best way to get that to them.”
