Any advice on publishing outside tapas?

[Lahin]

I am thinking about publishing my story outside of tapas and from what I've seen over the past months, neovel and fictionate seem like good choices. So, for now, I'm going to try fictionate out.

Any advice? Like... what to do, what not to?

[Ennuiwolf]

I don't have experience on those sites and I'm new to tapas, but I think the same things could come into play, meaning that developing a base is going to depend on you. So you'll have to focus on making connections through forums, promoting your story there, using tags appropriately or joining contests or such. I believe every creative hosting site should have forums, so you'll have to work to build your audience there.

[LittleFoodie]

They both doesn’t have a forum and the audience is fairly small. But no harm in trying them out.

[Toastbuster]

Don’t do Neonovel. I haven’t used it myself, but I’ve heard from a few other people that they’re really shady. They also tend to be one of the places that spam the comments of Tapas stories, which is always a red flag. I’m not familiar with Fictionate.

The other platforms I’ve used besides Tapas are Fictionpress, Quotev, Royal Road, and Webnovel. First three aren’t too bad, though FP is kinda dead and Quotev has a lot of obnoxious pre-teens. Webnovel is a big no no. They’re hella sketchy and will try to steal your work.

Hope this helps!

[mcarrowolga]

I'm publishing my story on ComicFury, with ComicAd banners.
Surprisingly, I have more readers there than on Tapas, even though ComicFury is a webcomic site. Plus, I get paid.

Here's my novel there: http://kangassk.cfw.me/

There were talks on CF forum about making a novel section on ComicFury but there are just not enough novels there at the moment. Maybe if more people mirrored their stories there, we'd have a chance...

[fleurravenbooks]

im wondering the same, but i think (correct me if im wrong because i might be) wattpad and tapas are the most popular places for original novels, i know of AO3 but i think its for fanfics

[surenlicious]

Oh, I started my web novel on AO3 first since they have a original category. It wasn't a big success but the adueince did leave a kudos and comment every now and then. Wattpad I find to be a scourge honestly, its why thus far I've only been hanging out here.

[fleurravenbooks]

Wattpad is nightmare if you don't have audience or aren't smutty fanfic writer for popular fandoms ( nothing bad with that )
As for A03 thanks for letting me know

[Lahin]

I started on Wattpad and honestly it was... an experience lol. But I found out about tapas from a discord server I happened to find so that was nice. But I'm pretty sure 99.9% of all my views there were from me checking for mistakes lol. I took everything down from there a while ago and I've been only on tapas since.

If anyone knows about Royal Road, please do share your advice. I'm a little daunted by how professional it looks on the forums side, so I haven't posted there yet.

[LittleFoodie]

RR is a pretty good site for views, though it leans heavily on the gamelit/isekai genre. So if you are not writing those genre, don’t expect explosive growth and viewership. But in my opinion, you will still get way more views than Tapas since all readers there are for novels.

[ivanskilling]

Neonovel is different from Neovel - the names are easily confused though, I agree!
Neovel has been pretty ok for me so far. The readership is small but growing. I'm waiting to accumulate the minimum amount of money to transfer out through Paypal.

[Toastbuster]

@ivanskilling Oh, really? I thought that had just been a typo. Didn’t know they were two different things Thanks for the correction!

[chestnutriceeee]

I used to post my story on RoyalRoad a while back. The experience was nice. You get a ton of views soon, though the readers are very silent and rarely interact. I didn’t get far enough myself to see if it is true, but almost everyone there told me you won’t get a good following before you have a good chapter count and a consistent record of uploads.

The forums seem professional, but that is because of the review swaps that go on there like sub for subs go on over here. The review swaps can become a hassle, people are good and are very helpful with review swaps, I have learned a lot from those personally. But there are also a few that will just insult your work for no reason, and encountering them when you are starting will be very problematic. They are rare but are there.

Your performance on RoyalRoad will highly depend on your genres. Fantasy, action, thriller, and stories in similar genres do very well. Romance or slice of life dies out super quick in my experience. The chapter lengths also play a part. My chapters are short and made for Tapas, they got a good number of complaints.

Overall, RoyalRoad is a good place with friendly people, but uptight, I’ll say. If you think your story can fit, go for it.

[Lahin]

Thanks for sharing!

Since mine is a Slice of Life with pretty short chapters(all around 1-1.5k words) it probably won't do that well. Giving it a try won't hurt I guess... But that made it a lot clearer. Thanks.

[ivanskilling]

No problem! I didn't know there was a Neonovel either. The names are really too similar!

[chestnutriceeee]

No worries! Do give it a shot, you never know how things will turn out! All the best!