Amazon Kindle Write On is a community where writers share their works in progress and solicit feedback from people on story direction, editing and fact checking. The service publicly launched in March 2015 and was in beta since late 2014. This service was utterly doomed from the start because it was trying to compete against WattPad. Amazon has just announced that they are closing Write On on March 22nd 2017 and all of the data will be unavailable.
Kindle Write On for most of its lifespan was a barren wasteland full of books with little to no comments or feedback. On the very frontpage the average title had six people actively participating in a conversation, most of them were merely status updates from the authors.
Amazon originally launched Write On to compete with Wattpad, who is the undisputed market leader. Readers spend 15 billion minutes on Wattpad every month and more than 500 writers have published completed works that have been read more than a million times. There are over 350 million stories, in 50 languages, on the site. Whereas Write On only has a few thousand titles on the website and the most successful titles were only read 10,000 times and the average one has somewhere between zero and one hundred reads.
I feel like Amazon never really got behind Write On. The only time it was publically mentioned was when it was first launched and the average reader was unaware it even existed. None of the authors had any critical success with selling e-books and there wasn’t a single posterchild to evangelize it on social media.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
