News
28th Sep 2012
Publishing Deal for Teen Wattpad Sensation
Wattpad, the website where anyone can instantly self-publish has bred its first literary star.
At age eighteen, Abigail Gibbs has received a six figure publishing deal from Harper Fiction, just as she embarks on a degree in English Literature –without the anxiety of looming student debt.
Although her book, The Dark Heroine, has just been published, she already has a global readership of 17million reading her initial chapters through the website.
She began posting chapters of her novel on the site when she was just fifteen, but stopped once she had acquired an agent.
Now the slew of avid Wattpad followers have to buy the book to read the final five chapters.
The novel, as you may have guessed from the title, is a teenage vampire romance filled with “overwhelming passion which transcends two separate worlds.”
Gibbs admits to being unashamedly Twilight-inspired, but promises her novel ‘is bloodier and edgier’.
Which are your favourite books written by teens? Have you read any Wattpad entries that have you hooked?
Mekella Broomberg
I remember when I was a kid being awed that a teenager could write a book after learning that Angela Mitson created the Munch Bunch. Now as a cynical grown up and tend to think ‘oh FFS, go get drunk in a park’ when I hear stories like this, teen bloggers and Eragorn esque fantasy writers with twenty books to their name by the time they’re 19.
Another vampire story? This is getting ridiculous. The poor kid’s writing is technically immature – I doubt if she’s got the deal other than to boost Harper sales by pulling in more of the tween Twilight fans.
I’m also a little cynical about marketing this book as ‘The sexiest romance you’ll read this year’ when it was written by someone this young (she was fifteen when she began uploading the chapters).
[...] might have already heard about the story of Abigail Gibbs, covered here by The Bookseller and here by For Book’s Sake. The essential gist of this story is that a young writer posted her [...]
There are some truly stunning works by teenagers. Emily Harrison, winner of the Tower Poetry Prize in 2010 is an incredible poet and her first collection Typewriter on the Bed is very very good. Sarah E Melville’s Beautiful Things That Happen To Ugly People is a masterpiece