In 2013, I saw a Today Show interview with the author behind the hugely successful Netflix movie, The Kissing Booth. Five years ago, the author, Beth Reekles, was already a Wattpad sensation. She published The Kissing Booth on the site at the age of fifteen and after garnering millions of reads, she accepted a three-book publishing deal with Random House.
I was fifteen at the time of the interview. I had just finished my first novel and wanted more than anything to have it published. Her story inspired me so much that I went out and bought the book. That’s right. I read The Kissing Booth before it was Netflix cool, but way after it was Wattpad cool.
I bought it at Target with my grandmother (Target’s book section really is fantastic). Of course, I was nervous to ask my grandmother for it. After all, it had the word . . . kissing . . . in the title. I could have died on the spot, but I didn’t. Quite the feat, trust me. Despite my grandmother’s slight skepticism, she still bought it.
After I read it, I began exploring Wattpad. I didn’t post anything for months, but the idea of Wattpad interested me. I could post my writing and people could read it and maybe, just maybe, I could get a book deal too? (Side Note: It kind of happened!).
When I turned seventeen, I made a Tumblr because I was one of those people who waited until she hit the age requirements of a site to make an account. Not many people were still on Tumblr at that point, but Beth Reekles was, so I followed her. She was one of the three or so people I followed.
On Tumblr, she talked about the script for The Kissing Booth. It was exciting to read her posts about it. Here was this book I had read that started out on a website I was then writing on, and this book had the chance to become a movie. It was incredibly inspiring to a young writer with the goal of being published before eighteen and of being interviewed on the Today Show.
Not long after, I stopped using Tumblr, and on the occasional times I would scroll through my Twitter feed, I wouldn’t see any of Reekles’ Tweets. At some point I heard it was being picked up by Netflix, and to be perfectly honest, I was worried. Netflix had been releasing a lot of “Originals.” Would The Kissing Booth get lost in a sea of content of which most is pretty great?
Time continued on and The Kissing Booth remained on my bookshelf in color-coded order like the rest of my books. I focused on school, my sorority and started copy editing for my collegiate chapter of Her Campus. I was so caught up in all of it that the announcement The Kissing Booth would be released in a couple of weeks caught me off guard.
Courtesy: Tenor
When I got the chance to finally sit down and watch it, I embraced the lightheartedness of it. The cutesy, cheesy explosion of colors whirlwind. The movie left me feeling as good as the journey to it. Beth Reekles continues to be an inspiration for me. She doesn’t know it, but she’s a major reason I write on Wattpad. If I didn’t write on Wattpad, I would have missed out on being in a fairy tale anthology, of having people read and interact with my work. I’m exceedingly grateful to her.
Courtesy: Marcos Cruz/ Netflix
Going back and watching that Today Show interview to write this article, I wonder if the Today Show hosts could have imagined that about five years later that same story would rank on IMDB at number four in the world for movies.