Within a year, Wattpad had helped Todd sign a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Gallery Books (for a reported mid-six-figure advance). “If she was a few minutes late posting a chapter, there would be young women on social media, very nicely asking, ‘What’s going on?’ It was an obvious place for us to start this journey into seeing if we could adapt things from Wattpad.” “That’s how we realized there was something really special not only about Anna’s style or about the fandom built around it, but the interaction between the two – how Anna was able to cultivate a community and keep them enthralled,” says Aron Levitz, general manager of Wattpad Studios.
Late that year, Wattpad’s engineers noticed roughly five per cent of reading traffic was going to Todd’s story. The result was a 100-chapter fanfic (featuring One Direction’s Harry Styles) that racked up more than a million reads in just a few months. In 2013, Todd was a 25-year-old army wife who’d been devouring One Direction fanfiction on Wattpad for months before writing some of her own. The story behind After is already the stuff of modern literary legend. The second is as proof that Wattpad – the Toronto-based storytelling platform that nurtured Todd’s writing – made a savvy decision in building its business model around the desires of young women. The first is as a book franchise that has sold 11 million copies, been adapted into two successful films (so far) and cemented Todd’s place in the pantheon of pop-fiction superstars. There are two ways of looking at Anna Todd’s After series, about a virginal college freshman named Tessa who falls for the laconic bad boy on campus.