Advice for promoting comics on social media or otherwise?

[lemon-lime-comics]

I've been working on a comic for around a year now, and I'm just starting to publish it. I know building a fanbase takes time, but I want to find more people who would be interested in my work.

I've tried social media, but the issue is I generally don't know what to post, and even when I did try and post consistently, I got little to no engagement or followers. I know social media, especially now, is difficult to get noticed on, but I'm not sure of any alternatives

Any advice on what kinds of things to post, where/how to post to get engagement, where to find potentially interested people, or other ways to promote would be very appreciated! Thank you very much and sorry if this post is clunky or unnecessary, it's my first time posting a topic

[Kelheor]

Hi, welcome to the forum! It's a great way to start
I would recommend trying Reddit, you can find big groups like r/webtoons or r/webcomics there. Read the rules, look through the other posts for references. People usually post good looking panels or pages or artworks of their comics.
It's also great to cross platform because you never know where your audience will find you, so you can try publishing on Webtoons, Global comics, etc.
You can also join Tapas and Webtoons discords. While they probably won't generate you a big amount of readers, there's a chance to find fellow creators, participate in some small creative stirs like drawing your characters for a holiday banner or getting a chance to get your art being featured on their Instagram, which other people will see.
Here's Tapas server link for example

Join the Tapas Community Discord Server!

[RedLenai]

All right! Let's see what can we do here:

I generally don't know what to post

Well you can share:
- Works in progress (Sketches, lineart, base colors) of panels
- A time-lapse (Showing from start to finish the process of a panel) // This can be in images or video
- Promo artwork (Be it character profiles, or any kind of artwork with them)
- Promo Panels (Grabbing a panel from your recently posted episode and put the link to the new chapter with it)
- Share a few panels of a scene from your series (It can be something mundane or an important scene, try to leave it in a cliffhanger)
- Challenges! Like, drawing the character of your series in different styles, or drawing someone else's character in the style of your series, your character with X clothes or color scheme, a doodle of your characters from your series each day and many more.
- Memes or vines, show your character's personality through well known stuff that is trendy or all-time funny
- You can live-stream your process! You don't need to share your face, simply use the mic or if you're too anxious to use one you can still chat with your viewers in the chat box or use OnStreamChat (You'll need to learn how to use OBS and streaming softwares too) and then greet the people that comes by, tell them what you're doing, engaging in conversation as you draw.

Personally I share my posts in Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.
On Facebook I try to be in as much possible groups that allow self-promo and are either oriented on similar art styles to mine or that are comic readers.

Then I'm also part of communities such as subrredits or Discord servers.
I'm not as active in Reddit but in Discord I'm in at least 40 servers, and yeah I also try to engage as much as I can for a few minutes too.

Then I use Youtube and Twitch to livestream my process.
And then TikTok and Instagram again for short videos to cover more ground.

I don't know if I get engagement, most of people nowadays don't bother in commenting or subscribing to a series. But to cover more ground you can always post your series in several places too.

[system]

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