Should I update my wattpad story?

I happen to be a Wattpadder (most of the people here aren't).

I'd suggest going over it with a fine-toothed comb and looking for areas to improve it. E. g. spell check and grammar check (again), read it over to make sure the story line is consistent and logical, that sort of thing. If you can get a beta reader to help you, that's even better. But recognize that a good beta reader won't just tell you what you want to hear. They will show you where you can improve. Be open to critiquing.

Also, check your tagging, your cover image, your blurb, and your categorization. All of these are ways for people to find you. They might not be if these areas aren't helping or enticing them.

Finally, learn what the really successful people on Wattpad know or can intuit. Check out a user named @MichaelLimjoco (full disclosure: he is a friend of mine), as he has a very good book on how to succeed at Wattpad.

And keep plugging! Nobody is a perfect writer at the very beginning. It takes time and patience to get better, and also to build a readership.

Would you believe I've never heard of this 'Wattpad'? What the heck is it?

I think I heard/read Jespah mention it once before, but not sure.

I probably started with liking jespah's writing back on abuzz, and yammered at her off and on over the years that she should write. Little did I know.

There was some damned thread about a duck that was one of those participation type threads, and both Jes and a woman whose name I forget - remember that she was a cook somewhere and also had a lot to do with a cranberry pond, or maybe it was just with cranberries: Jes and that woman were hilarious and fast at it.

This is fascinating. I had no idea this existed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wattpad

"Wattpad is a writing community in which users are able to post articles, stories, fan fiction, and poems about anything either online or through the Wattpad app. The content includes work by undiscovered and published writers. Users are able to comment and like stories or join groups associated with the website. Around half of the users are U.S. based; most users also come from the U.K., Canada, the Philippines, Australia, United Arab Emirates and more.

History

Wattpad originated in 2006, as the result of a collaboration between Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen.

In February 2007, Wattpad announced the addition of over 17,000 eBooks from Project Gutenberg making them available to mobile users.[5] According to a June 2009 Wattpad press release, the mobile application had been downloaded over 5 million times.[6] In March 2009, an iPhone version was released. This was followed by the launch on BlackBerry App World in April 2009, Google Android in June 2009 and Apple iPad in April 2010.

Growth and Funding

To date, Wattpad has received almost $70M in funding from investors. In 2011, Wattpad announced that it received $3.5M in total funding from its current investors, and from W Media Ventures, Golden Venture Partners, and Union Square Ventures, which is an early investor in "Twitter, Tumblr and other social-media success stories." Then in June 2012, Wattpad raised $17.3M from a group of venture funds led by Khosla Ventures.

The latest round of financing happened in April 2014, where Wattpad announced $46M in Series C funding led by OMERS ventures. "

Ayup.

I got a featured story there, 'n stuff.

Fascinating. This ain't like the publishing business as I used to know it in the 1960s and '70s. Learn something new every day if you're not careful.

Well, that site is free. If writers want to charge for their work, they're better off using Amazon's Kindle publishing platform. Quality, as you can well imagine, varies rather widely.

I am a member of the site, but have not submitted anything.

How does one deal with the danger of plagiarism on that kind of a public site? I mean, if I had a ms. of something I hoped to sell to a print medium, I sure would be careful about posting it on a site where anyone can read it for free and, perhaps, download a hard copy and sell it under his/her own byline to some publication. Is this never a fear among the people who tend to expose their work online?

I have stuff to do this AM but want to get back to this. Wattpad does prevent a hard copy/paste of its content. But that doesn't prevent screen shots or just someone pointing a camera at a screen.