Okay, at the risk of sounding like an ass I'm going to chime in on this thread.
But before I start I'm going to state some qualifiers.
First, I'm not some elite tapastic member with a trillion subscribers. I have a bit over 100 subs which I've gained steadily over this year.
Second, I did not have a following prior to joining tapastic.
Third, my comics are not BL, Gag-a-Day, Slice of Life, or whatever it is that people like complaining about being overly popular. In fact, both of my comics are fairly niche genre wise.
Now that that's out of the way...
If you are having trouble gaining an audience on tapastic, it's not the websites fault. (unless you're a novelist, but that's a different story.)
And I get that that's hard to hear, when I was starting out as an artist I didn't want to hear this either.
If you're having trouble gaining an audience it's probably because:
1) Your art or story premise is not up to snuff. No one want's to read a cheap immitation of something else by someone who just picked up a pencil yesterday. It doesn't matter how good your writing is, or how much better you get later on in the series, 90% of people are not going to slog through this.
2) Somewhat related to #1, the way you are presenting your comic is misleading. If your icon is in full color and painterly and has a really cool looking character design, and I click it and see something of much lower quality I'm going to drop it right there. If you have to trick me to read your comic I'm not going to trust you. On the flipside, if your icon looks like shit, I'm never going to click it, and I'll probably never see whats beyond that. Even if your work is great.
3) Your writing is not interesting or well paced enough to keep my attention. Even if your art is great.
4) You aren't networking properly. You aren't making friends with other artists. Or worse, your behavior in public is scaring people away.
If you're still reading this and haven't completely written me off as an asshole, good for you. How do you fix these problems?
Well first you have to be honest with yourself. Which of these problems do you have? You might have to ask someone for some tough-love sort of feedback.
Once you've identified your problems basically all of these boil down to you need to develop more as an artist or as a writer or as a person. That takes time. There's no magic trick you can do to improve overnight.
Getting better at anything is a cycle of constant Study, Experimentation, and Implementation.
If you do not study, you will not know what there is to learn.
If you do not experiment, you will not discover what works best for you.
If you do not implement what you have learned, you will never improve.
If the problem is 1) You need to spend time improving your artwork, or better developing your ideas. These are my first indicators to how seriously I should take your series. You need to impress people.
Figure out what you care about and then crank that aspect of your story up to 11. Make it so I CANT IGNORE what you're rying to do because it''s truly interesting.
If the problem is 2) You need to redo your icon so that it is a better representation of your work. If you aren't making a comic in a painterly style & full color, dont use a full color painting as your icon. If you don't know what to use for your icon, take a panel from your comic and adapt it. Be honest. Capture the tone of your work. Accurately show me what I'm going to find if I click through.
If the problem is 3) You need to rethink how you're telling your story. Study pacing, story structure. Pay attention to what other work inside your genre is like. Immitate what you love and subvert or ignore what you dont. Give your audience what they came for and show them what they never realized they wanted.
If the problem is 4) And this is the hardest one to fix.... You need to stop being shy and truly interact with people. Share your ideas, Talk about your process, or the techniques you use. Even better ASK OTHER PEOPLE what they do. On the flip side, if you are actively networking, but you're scaring people away, you need to examine what your behavior is like. Stop being a jerk, Stop being negative, Stop putting yourself down, Stop not caring about what other people have to say. Respect yourself, and Respect others. Help where it's needed and ask for help where you need it