I've been on the Forums (and Tapas in general) and I feel like I've gotten a pretty good grasp on how things function around here. Generally speaking, the best way to build up an audience when it comes to webnovels seems to be to post daily to stay on the "Fresh" page and just hope for the best. If not, you're probably -- like me -- forced to ship the novel around on external social media and directly here, on the Forums.
Now, there's admittedly something I've noticed about a lot of threads here that are about promoting said novels -- be it subscriber celebration or just a general thread of self-promotion -- and it's that they're not all that effective. I speak that not only from my own experience, but ultimately from the fact that, looking over those threads, a very large majority of the links posted don't actually get a single click recorded on them.
This isn't actually all that surprising. Most people actively using the "promote your work" threads are there to promote their work, and not much else. Putting myself in the shoes of a reader, I don't see myself going through the thread in search of something new to read. And the readers are the people who should be visiting those threads for it to actually have any real effect.
I saw some threads that are about gathering recommendations of novels, keeping everything on the opening post, directly designed for someone interested in reading. That's a good alternative. But there are two issues here, too: the first, that a large majority of people using the forums are still fundamentally creators and not readers, and the second, that, after a while, much like the site itself, it just gets overwhelming to the point where scrolling throujgh the massive opening post just doesn't seem all that appealing.
Now, all these tactics work a lot better for comics, because comics are an inherently visual medium -- it doesn't take more than a few minutes to get through a page, form an impression and decide how you feel about it. Hell, it takes even less to decide to just check out the page right after if you're unsure.
With novels, it's inherently more complicated. There's times when you can tell you don't like a certain writing style from the first few paragraphs, sure, but even before opening a novel, there's automatically more work you're putting in as a reader, since you know you're going to go through 1-2k words. Between a comic and a novel, and with such a large number of works, one is far easier to check out.
That's why, in a community of authors, we pretty much need to support each other if we want to get some acknowledgment and recognition of what we've actually made. And with everything I've just laid out, it's clear that the only way that will realistically happe ns if there's some kind of incentive.
Firstly, I don't mean that in a "sub for sub" way. I know a lot of people do that -- if they do, more power to them -- but "sub for sub" generally has the same implication as "follow for follow" on Twitter, at least for me. You're getting a number raised up, but it's unlikely you're getting someone who will actually engage and continue to be interested in your work. And the same likely goes for the person you subscribed back to and their work.
The "read for read" model is a lot more interesting, and I remember seeing one thread roughly around the time I joined. It seemed to eventually die down, I guess. It's probably the model we should focus on -- "you read my work, I'll read yours." Maybe give some feedback and some general comment, with no expectation of subs or likes. It could be structured to a degree, make sure we control the amount of people reading at a time and know who is supposed to read whose work, so it doesn't get flooded and just end up as another self-promotion thread.
I've actually had a lot more success offering reviews and, in return, asking people to just read as few as two of my first chapters, and I'm up to 25 subs now. I don't think that's too bad, for a bi-weeky novel around for less than two weeks. At least from what I've gathered.
I don't know. Maybe I've gotten the wrong impression, but this is the behavior I'd much rather see, and I think it'd be a lot more beneficial for everyone.
