Wattpad Story Scraper

Scrape Wattpad — the world's largest social storytelling platform, home to hundreds of millions of stories across romance, fantasy, fanfiction, horror, and more. Search by keyword, browse by genre or tag, pull full story metadata and chapter lists by ID, list everything a writer has published, or extract full chapter text. No login, no API key, no proxy required.

What this actor does

• Six modes: search, byCategory, byTag, byIds, byUser, chapterText
• 22 genres and 26 languages exposed as ready-to-pick dropdowns
• Recently-updated feed — narrow a genre browse to newly-updated stories via feed: "new"
• Author profile enrichment — byUser results include the author's bio, location, follower/following counts, votes received, and join date
• Full chapter text extraction — clean, readable plain text with paragraph breaks preserved
• Rich filters — completed-only, free-only, mature-content toggle, minimum votes/reads
• Client-side sort — most votes, most reads, most comments, or newest first
• Empty fields are omitted — every record only contains data Wattpad actually returned

Output per story

• storyId, title, description
• authorUsername, authorUrl, authorFullname, authorAvatarUrl, authorVerified (detail mode)
• authorBio, authorLocation, authorGender, authorFollowers, authorFollowing, authorVotesReceived, authorNumStoriesPublished, authorNumLists, authorVerifiedEmail, authorAmbassador, authorJoinedAt, authorWebsite, authorFacebook, authorBackgroundUrl, authorDeeplink (mode=byUser only — from the author's public profile)
• categories[] — genre names (e.g. Romance, Werewolf, Fanfiction)
• tags[] — free-form community tags
• language, languageId
• completed, mature, isPaywalled, paidModel
• numParts, storyLength, voteCount, readCount, commentCount
• coverUrl, storyUrl
• createdAt, modifiedAt, lastUpdatedAt, firstPublishedAt (detail mode)
• chapters[] — full chapter list with partId, title, url, length, voteCount, readCount, commentCount (detail mode, byIds)
• copyrightCode (detail mode)
• recordType: "story", scrapedAt

Output per chapter (mode=chapterText)

• partId, storyId, chapterTitle, chapterUrl, storyUrl
• chapterText — full plain-text chapter body
• wordCount, characterLength
• voteCount, readCount, commentCount, draft
• publishedAt, updatedAt
• recordType: "chapter", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	search	search / byCategory / byTag / byIds / byUser / chapterText
searchQuery	string	romance	Free-text query (mode=search)
category	select	–	Genre filter; required for mode=byCategory
language	select	–	Language filter
tags	array	["werewolf"]	Tags to browse (mode=byTag)
storyIds	array	–	Story IDs or URLs (mode=byIds)
username	string	–	Wattpad username (mode=byUser)
partIds	array	–	Chapter IDs or URLs (mode=chapterText)
completedOnly	bool	false	Only finished stories
freeOnly	bool	false	Exclude coin-paywalled stories
includeMatureContent	bool	true	Include author-flagged mature stories
minVotes	int	–	Minimum vote count
minReads	int	–	Minimum read count
sortBy	select	relevance	relevance / mostVotes / mostReads / mostCommented / newest
feed	select	–	mode=byCategory only: blank = Wattpad's default (most-popular) ordering, new = recently-updated stories in that genre
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap (1–500)

Example: browse a genre, most-voted first

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "4",
  "language": "1",
  "sortBy": "mostVotes",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: full story detail + chapter list

{
  "mode": "byIds",
  "storyIds": ["358371807", "https://www.wattpad.com/story/105872-a-and-d"]
}

Example: extract a chapter's full text

{
  "mode": "chapterText",
  "partIds": ["1406121589"]
}

Use cases

• Reading apps — build genre/tag-based discovery feeds from real Wattpad catalog data
• Content research — analyze trending tags, tropes, and genre popularity
• Fandom / fanfiction analytics — track fanfiction volume and engagement by fandom tag
• Archival / backup — export a story's full chapter text for offline reading or preservation
• Writer intelligence — pull an author's full bibliography with engagement metrics
• NLP / dataset building — collect long-form narrative text at scale for language research

FAQ

Do I need a Wattpad account or cookies? No. Search, story metadata, chapter lists, and chapter text are all public and readable without logging in.

What does the mature flag mean? It's Wattpad's own author-self-reported content flag, not a moderation verdict. It's exposed as-is and can be filtered out via includeMatureContent: false; note it is self-reported and not exhaustive — some explicit stories are not flagged by their authors.

What happens with mature-gated or removed stories? A small share of stories are gated behind Wattpad's in-app mature-content confirmation or have been taken down; these resolve with 0 records for that ID rather than partial/garbage data, and the run reports which IDs were not found.

Why is sortBy applied "client-side"? Wattpad's own sort search parameter isn't consistently honored by their API, so the actor fetches the requested batch and re-orders it locally by votes/reads/comments/date — giving you a real, working sort instead of a parameter that silently does nothing.

Can I look up a story from just its URL? Yes — storyIds and partIds both accept full Wattpad URLs as well as bare numeric IDs.

What's the difference between byIds and search? byIds returns full detail (chapter list, author profile fields, copyright code) for exact known stories. search/byCategory/byTag return lighter list-view records for discovery.

How many chapters can I extract at once? Up to maxItems (max 500) partIds per run — each chapter is a separate output record with full text.

Will storyUrl/chapterUrl links open for me? Yes, in a normal web browser — Wattpad is one of the most-visited fiction sites in the world and these are its standard canonical links. All actual data extraction in this actor goes through Wattpad's own API host, not the web-app pages the links point to.

Is content available in languages other than English? Yes — 26 languages are supported as a filter, from Spanish and Portuguese to Arabic, Hindi, Vietnamese, and more.

Limitations

• No "hot"/trending filter — Wattpad's own filter=hot parameter is a documented no-op that returns the exact same ordering as no filter at all (verified by direct comparison), so it isn't exposed as a separate option. Wattpad's default byCategory ordering already is the popularity/"hot" ordering. feed=new is the one server-side feed filter that's verified to actually change results.
• feed only applies to byCategory — the filter query parameter is silently ignored by Wattpad's search endpoint (used by search and byTag), confirmed by comparing identical result sets with and without it. Applying it there would silently do nothing, so it's scoped to byCategory only, where it's confirmed effective.
• No comments extraction — every public comments endpoint tried (/v4/story_parts/{id}/comments, /v5/..., /api/v3/story_parts/{id}/comments) returns 400/404 without an authenticated session; commentCount is still exposed on every story/chapter, but comment text itself isn't reliably retrievable without login.
• No curated reading lists — Wattpad's "lists" feature (/v4/story-lists, /api/v3/lists) requires an authenticated session (returns 400 anonymously) and isn't exposed.