Update on Wattpad Experiment: Introducing a Cold War Memoir

ByPhyllis Zimbler Miller

Why publish a work-in-progress chapter by chapter on free site Wattpad I was asked on Facebook?

I have discovered very good reasons for doing this since I began the experiment on Wattpad with my dystopian fiction novel THE MOTHER SIEGE. (Click on the dropdown table of contents to read the short chapters published so far.)

  1. This commitment sets a prompt for me to actually write chapters of a work-in-progress. I personally have so many writing projects and this way I have created an external expectation to continue writing this book.
  2. I am hoping to build an interested fan readership before the book is published.
  3. And there is always the possibility that a book agent or publisher will stumble upon the work-in-progress and become interested in acquiring it.

There are other sites besides Wattpad on which to undertake a similar experiment. I chose Wattpad because I had recently read good things about Wattpad and then discovered that I had actually joined the site some time ago.

Now I have been so pleased with my external commitment to writing chapters of THE MOTHER SIEGE — an imaginative novel of the future — that I have decided to simultaneously try the experiment for a nonfiction telling of the historical past — TALES OF AN AMERICAN OCCUPYING GERMANY: A COLD WAR MEMOIR.

I have all the original documents from when my husband Mitch and I were stationed with the U.S. Army in Munich, Germany, from September 1970 to May 1972. In the future I will be sharing some of these documents here on my author website.

And while many of the true tales I will be telling in my Cold War memoir are humorous, underlying everything is the very real concern that, without American troops stationed in Germany, the Soviets could have marched over the border between East and West Germany to expand their sphere of Communism.

Click here to read the beginning of TALES OF AN AMERICAN OCCUPYING GERMANY.

P.S. Thanks to Yael K. Miller for creating the terrific cover for TALES OF AN AMERICAN OCCUPYING GERMANY.

© 2013 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks, including TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO PUBLISH AND MARKET YOUR BOOK IN THE AGE OF AMAZON and the romantic suspense spy thriller CIA FALL GUY.

4 Comments

  2. Great idea – thanks for the tip. I’ve been using blogs but it’s awkward to do that. Got an idea for a mystery and a non-fic so …. maybe that’s the way! What happens if your novel grows and you have to go back and revise earlier chapters?

    1. Cathy — That is a very good question about revisions.

      I have already been making slight revisions. First I make the change in my original Word doc for my own records. Then I go into the correct chapter on Wattpad and make the change there (very easy to do). The truth is that this is a work-in-progress so changes should be expected.

      Eventually I hope to publish each book experiment as a Kindle ebook — and even then revisions can be made.

      I had thought of using a blog to do this, but realized why not look for an audience at the same time. And since there is a “promote to Tumblr” option on Wattpad — I set up a Tumblr blog for each experiment. I don’t know if this will increase the audience, but who knows?

      (According to Tumblr rules I had to create a separate account for the second Tumblr blog in order to be able to interact as that blog in the future.)

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