I post quite a few random chapters of books onto Wattpad and by a country mile, the two most popular part-stories I’ve shared are ‘Educating Daisy’ and ‘Fictional Fantasies’, totalling well in excess of 100,000 reads between them.

I don’t know if Wattpad readers know it, but when they add a story to a personal reading list, the author not only gets told this has happened, but the name of the list into which they placed the story is also reported.

This phenomenon has allowed me to really understand what people think of my stories and over the years, I’ve discovered there are several groups of people out there!

Firstly, there are those which are hiding my stories under list names which sound fairly innocent. Some of the smuttiest stories I’ve written have been filed by readers into lists called “Management”, “Private”, “Mine”, “My books”, “Werewolf” (when the story doesn’t contain any!) or “93”?!

Another set of readers are my kind of people who tell it like they see it. Examples of the lists my stories are placed into include “sexy time”, “horny”, “steam”, “smutt”, “My Fetish”, “spicy”, “18+” and “mature”. There are also a good number labelled only with emojis…you can guess which ones!

A small group of Wattpad users clearly go to extraordinary lengths to categorise their reads. File examples include “BDSM/Age Gap VIII” or “short story < 2 hours”. I personally love the fact they’ve managed to incorporate Roman numerals and length of time it will take to read – in my imagination, this subset of readers are most likely librarians!

The occasional list name just makes me wonder what was going through their mind, such as “you never saw this” or “dad never loved me”. Seems a strange thing to file a smut story under but…moving on.

Of course, there are the occasional negative list names such as “eh”, “ummmmm” or “meh” but they are fortunately few and far between.

My favourite reading list names are those that boost my self belief (which is sometimes a little lacking!). List names include “best twisted plots when my stomach churns”, “literally the best smut EVER”, “so good storytelling”, “must reads”, “absolute best”, “Nice ones ;-)” and “Best books ever”.

And then there is my personal favourite name for a reading list: “I shouldn’t be able to read this in public but I can”.

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The latest news from Fenella Ashworth can be found at http://www.fenellaashworth.com.
Fenella is a British author of contemporary steamy romance for 18+. Most of her stories are available from Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Her most popular books are ‘One Hot Wynter’s Night’, ‘To Love, Honour and…Oh Pay’ and the Daniel Lawson Series.