Story about how my fanfiction reached 1 million reads (2/2)

In 1D fandom, there's this one particular ship that I really like, and I actually believe that the ship was not just a ship. The ship is called Larry Stylinson - it's a ship where Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are together as a pair.

Belt up now! I will tell you something shocking about One Direction!

The majority of our fandom believe that these two specific boys (Harry and Louis - see picture below) from the band were in a REAL relationship, so it technically can't be a ship. There is plenty of evidence for that, but I won't go into any details, because this is not the main subject of this article. Damn it adoniis! Let's continue...

The story that made me “famous”

After I discovered this in 2014, I only read Larry Stylinson fanfictions and also started to write some myself. And this is where my most famous story was born - I named it “Control”. I won´t tell you what it's about, because read cash would not be happy, but you can be sure that it's a smutty LGBTQ+ story.

I wrote it in Czech and it became so popular so quickly. All Czech Facebook fandom pages posted about it and I gained a lot of views and comments within just a few chapters. All readers were encouraging me to continue and so I was writing, writing and writing and the numbers were not stopping. I was feeling so good and for once in my life I enjoyed all the attention (I'm introverted, so this is strange).

It took me about a year to publish the whole story - it was originally 36 chapters, but it has grown into 77 chapters because my readers insisted that I need to continue. I couldn't blame them, but when I would have the book printed for real, the 36 chapters are the original story that I'm the proudest of.

After the story was finished, I´ve got an amazing idea - to translate it into English to be more famous! (Just a joke, but I obviously wanted more 🤣) I ended up translating it myself, all 77 chapters and I learned English so much better in the process. The success of the story was comparable to the Czech version, until the numbers started to be even bigger. What the Czech version gained after a year, the English one had in a few months. The same year both stories had 200k reads+.

That was in 2015 and I'm proud to say that every day since then I receive a huge number of notifications on my Wattpad profile and this month (August 2021), the English version of Control reached 1 million reads. ♥

Without me promoting it or anything since 2016/2017 - the fans just find it and read it. So amazing, isn't it?

Oh, and I almost forgot: Another amazing thing was that many foreign readers liked the story so much that they asked me for permission to translate it to their language as well, and I agreed. So one time, Polish and also Persian version of my story was on Wattpad - these got somewhere lost though. Russian was also an option, but it didn't happen in the end, because the translators that reached out to me got busy with something else (I don't really know 😅).

The only versions beside Czech and English that are now available are Spanish and Italian and that's more than I could ever wish for.

Well, this was the story about the fanfiction that made me “famous”.

I often joke about it (about being famous because of this) but to be honest, it's one of my biggest accomplishments in life besides getting to college, which is a common thing nowadays, at least I think so.

I still dream about publishing this book, or at least a similar, rewritten one but with the same concept, because I still love it. Maybe one day I will get it printed to just have it on my bookshelf as a reminder of old times and 1D fandom. 😊

Lastly, I want to show you this. This is a hand-made book of my story that I did in high school for a school project (yeah, you can see that I am proud of it ).

What do you think? Have you ever dreamed about publishing a book? I'd love to hear your thoughts, critique or really anything that's on your mind right now after reading my article. 😊

Take care. ❤️