Wattpad, the online reading and writing community, has released After Dark, an app that offers its users a curated selection of romance and erotica.
The app, which is a free download, features thousands of erotic stories posted on Wattpad. The stories in the app are organized under such broad categories as bestselling romance, fan fiction, urban and LGBTQ. Other After Dark categories include "panty droppers," chicklit and romantic suspense. In the app, as on the website, fans can set up personal libraries, share stories, and comment on titles.
Citing the popularity of the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, Melissa Shapiro, Wattpad’s head of global marketing, said “interest in mature stories has spiked.” Shapiro acknowledged that the After Dark app is intended to take advantage of what seems to be an insatiable demand for erotic fiction of all kinds. The app, she said, gives Wattpad’s adult readers access to “all the steamiest stories from Wattpad.”
The After Dark app was developed by Wattpad Labs, a unit focused on creating new products around Wattpad content and its users. Recently, Wattpad debuted a Romance profile on its site that offers reading lists, contests and information about the site’s romance community. More than 40 million people use Wattpad each month. The romance genre, the company said, is one of the most popular categories on Wattpad with more than 23 million stories shared among its users.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the number of romance stories shared by Wattpad users is 23,000. It is 23 million.
