Bite-Size 2.0: A Creator Discussion and Advice Thread

Oh boy. I live for talking about this.

• Music. 95% of my ideas come from music. Metal music to be precise.
They live in the guitar riffs and solos, when that tasty lick hits, then I get a flash of an image. Then the lyrics develop the idea further. I listen to a lot of music, because that's where all of the ideas live.

•As I mentioned before, the idea is sparked by the music. Now...Dragon Sparking was in development hell for around 10 years, and I kept fumbling around due to life getting in the way. But the music kept me thinking about Dragon Sparking.
In particular I must shout out Dragonforce. Without that band, Rip as a character would not exist in the form he has now. Their music shaped his personality, fighting style, and appearance. Listening to their music was the place I could get full images of who Rip was. There was something about the guitars that brought him to life...and a buzzing sensation I'd get in the back of my head, just past the temples, that's when I knew the music had brought a character action to life.

Going even further in, the bands Iron Savior, Freedom Call, and Dark Moor all pushed those images further. Rip is a child born of Power Metal, and without it he wouldn't exist as he does now. Not only that, whenever I felt like quitting, their music brought me right back into creating the DS world.

Additionally I use musical sections to craft my fight scenes. I get strong mental images that show me the movements, facial expressions, and emotional outbursts.

One additional thing I use is Wikipedia mythology lists. I'll read down the list without clicking anything and just use the blurb to come up with ideas. While listening to music of course xD

•Idea hording...not really? I'm kind of a flash in a pan, where if I don't use the idea almost immediately, it's gone. At most I'll do a quick doodle to remember it, other than that, I just write in the moment into the comic. I don't often have ideas about anything else other than Dragon Sparking. If I do, it's assimilated into the DS Multiverse I plan on creating over time.

Ideas:

• I rarely struggle with raw ideas. I'm often overflowing with them and the problem is they often distract me because I'll get really excited about whatever my latest idea is and not be able to think about anything else! I have story ideas all the time when I'm just alone with my thoughts; they'll just keep coming up like annoying pop-up ads. Most of them are novel, but not necessarily good, so my approach is to let lots of them flow, write them all down and then pick out the actually usable ones and keep any viable but not currently helpful ideas for later. My day job pretty much employ me for my ability to think about a theme for a bit, then dump a ton of ideas based around that theme.

• Turning an idea into an actual viable product is really hard. Often the act of chaining down the idea makes it dull and frustrating as I have to confront the logistics of making it a story or notice the holes in it that my sheer excitement at the new idea weren't allowing me to see.
  Nowadays, I'll look at my idea, then I'll start to try to hammer it into the shape of a basic three-act structure, assigning roles to characters, looking for things the narrative needs like a catalyst and climax and coming up with deeper details for how this novel lore actually works mechanically. I have a bad tendency to fall out of love with the idea at this stage and go pretty quickly from "this is the most amazing idea ever" to "this is absolute trash and unusable". Nowadays, I try to make this process more like refining or iteration and not just give up at the first obstacle.

• Yeah, I have lots of folders and notebooks full of ideas. Errant is a rework of an older idea, a comic called Fan Dan Go I did years ago, which was itself a mixture of a bunch of ideas from other vague comics that I rolled up into one big weird comic about magical knights with emotional drama and this bold, retro aesthetic. I mixed that mixed with some notes I made about Arthurian Legends I found interesting and reworked the plot to have.... a plot, which FDG didn't really have.

• I love to look into history and mythology and Shakespeare because the themes are so big and there's so much room for interpretation. I'm also very likely to be inspired by things that are visually striking, especially if they're colourful and evoke strong emotions. I try getting too directly inspired by any particular work, but sometimes I'll experience something like Deltarune or Netflix She-ra and I just can't help myself, my imagination will be aflame and I won't be able to think of anything else!

Preferred Name: Em
Pronouns: they/them
Genres I create: LGBTQ+ Fantasy
Where I plan to take your writing journey: A good question. I'm mostly focusing on finishing my current story, for now
Link to Tapas Account: https://tapas.io/emrowene

The question of being too niche is something I worry about a lot - my current novel is an lgbtq+ fantasy novel, but more specifically, it's a gothic fantasy novel, heavily inspired by both classic fantasy and Victorian gothic horror.

I've made myself a home in both lgbtq+ writers' twitter and gothic literature twitter, so I know the niche is there, but I've also worried that branding the story as a "gothic fantasy" will turn some people away from it. I also hesitate to brand it as gothic horror- gothic horror is a very different beast from regular horror - it's not what most people think of when they hear "horror," and often, its more about an aesthetic than horror content.

As to the third question, I think it's entirely a matter of your goals for your story. No matter how niche you get, there will be someone out there who can relate to it. If, however, your goal is to gain a large audience, then it may be possible to be too niche.

Oooh, niches are an interesting topic!

• Oh boy, all the time. Slow start, not romance focused, page format, it keeps going.
• On the positive side, I have high fantasy, saturday morning cartoon-like, a certain type of slow burn pairing, heavy worldbuilding, and cartoon with anime inspirations.
• You have to be your own fan! I try to emphasize it's a comic about character interactions and magic first, punching and smooching people way later, and putting what's strong about the comic first.
• Absolutely possible. You can have a work that's so about you and ignore any outside influence, that it literally only appeals to you - valid, but not going to get any audience. It's always good to analyze where you can make some compromises to make some fans and friends.

I don't know for sure about the mass appeal question xD I'm pretty aware that my comic is never going to check any boxes for mass appeal, so I'm not too worried about it. I'm fine with however many people end up liking it.

• I guess I do a more 'retro' style comic that is a throwback to the Silver Age of comics, 80s and 90s action cartoons, and early 00s Shonen comics. So my influences are varied, but I think I do well enough in making it a good combination.

I also have an anthromorphic main character, so I guess I could fall into the 'furry\scaly' niche, but...not by choice. That would be something people assume by assimilation. I...really just have animal based characters, because that's what I grew up with, (TMNT, Street Sharks, Duck Tales...etc)and I like designing them.

• I'm bad at marketing, and even worse with identifying with any niche, so not really. I just try to put it out there and hope people like it.

•Sure? I'm not really sure what to say xD

Ooo I love niche content!

• Nah, for the most part not really. Sometimes I think about how things would be if I made a story more appealing to the masses, like if I would actually be able to make income off it, if people would recommend it like they do with other stories. Although if I dropped what I did for something of mass appeal than it wouldn't be mine, thus I would probably immediately lose interest, and drawing the comic would become a complete chore. I would rather stay niche than possibly lose my love for one of the few things I'm decent at.

• My comic's niche is psychological drama, character study, centered on heavy themes, long form slice-of-life story with no fantastical elements or romance. It's also intentionally uncomfortable and/or upsetting to read (although for some it is very uninteresting.), it's a big hurt/comfort story with the 'hurt' getting more screen time than the comfort.
  I'm not sure how many novels have the same or similar story types, but I know like %99 of webcomics aren't anything like my comic, in all my time reading I've only found two. Drop-Out being the closest like mine.

• Sort of? I'm trying, but it's in a rather weird spot for me give it's in an awkward position between drama and horror. The comic is meant to be a form of catharsis for people who've been through abuse, or people with serious mental illnesses like depression, but there is a veeery small percentage of people like me who would find that stuff cathartic. Luckily I've recently found creators like me on Twitter, and I've been studying how they market and who they market to, but I'm still learning.
  Either way I must be doing something right since people actually like it, and are actively keeping up with it.

• Totally! You can have something that literally only about 5 people will like, usually it's weird porn, but too niche is very possible. In the indie scene creators usually just want to make something they want to see more in stories, and sometimes their taste is just too out there for everyone else, but if they're happy with it then that's all that matters.

All right,, Niche discussion...

• Yeah, as much as I like to think of my comic as "something I'm doing for me", part of what spurred me to make it was seeing the wide acceptance of stuff like Steven Universe, The Lumberjanes and the new She-Ra cartoon. Works made by queer women that have a similar vibe to my work in style, tone and content that got huge widespread popularity. Having had a career struggling to find a place, it sort of felt like it was finally the "right time" for my kind of work, but it's still always going to be a struggle to get seen, and Tapas is so dominated by stories about male-male romance, it's sometimes like.... "Is my mostly female cast action comic out of place here?" and "Were those series actually just flukes, maybe it was just good marketing and other people aren't all as desperate for that kind of content as me?" But... well, I'll keep trying and see how this goes, I guess!

• I've used a lot of things as a marketing tool, but I've often found that actually a lot of people are more put off by it when I put forward things like the LGBTQIA+ themes, female creator etc. I think it makes them think it's gonna be this badly-written and drawn "zine" like thing where really aggressively ugly characters talk about nothing but Social Justice and how men are trash or something? They're more likely to pick up my work if I just show them the art and tell them it's an exciting action comic! And that's fine, I guess. Most of them surprisingly don't put the comic down when between the monster punching it turns out to be about social justice, women, feelings and and gay stuff, so good on them!

• I have definitely seen people whose work hits a popularity ceiling that's created exactly by their niche. I think what I'd call a comic that's "too niche" is one where the niche is very overbearing, like every joke is about a certain niche interest or fetish, or every page is drawn to really target a very specific sort of audience. If that niche audience is big enough and you can find enough of it, you can make a fine career for yourself with a super-niche work, but when you hyper-optimise for a niche, you make work that nobody else can really vibe with.
  I don't want to be like the LGBTQ+ action comics I used to see on tables at cons, where all the characters wear bulgy hotpants and tanktops with rainbows on and they're all pouting all the time and they're like.... superheroes whose powers come from being gay and they have like... magical bondage gear or something. Nobody can enjoy that unless they're very into that "scene", so it might have a very dedicated audience, but it's a small audience. It's not that it can't or shouldn't exist, but it might be too niche to be financially viable because comics are a medium loved by introverts and that scene is dominated by very extroverted people and loud events.

Hello, hello, it's the first time I've been on the new thread so I'll just say my name real fast as introduction since that's how we're doing it here, I'm Rachel--raj is just my initials--she/her, fantasy enthusiast, illustrator, comic maker.

so on with the daily discussion, which is about niches.

1. TBH I see niche interpreted different ways. To me it's more about varied interests, but on here it's more about genre and artstyle. So, as far as my comic goes my genre is fantasy, so I'm hardly niche there, but I make up for it by having an art style and a way of storytelling that is unique for tapas. I wouldn't say it's niche to the world of comics in general, but for tapas? Apparently it is, that's what people keep telling me.
2. So as far as interests go I love crafting, cooking, video games, indie music, certain shows, books, and fandoms--but as far as like...niche genres go...I don't really think about it. I guess I wrote two comics based on lesser known video games at one time, and I also wrote an anthro comic...but it wasn't because I was trying to get into a niche genre or because I consider myself "part" of the genre--they just happened to be that way. There's a lot of niches out there that have rules on how you're supposed to write, and I just don't have the time to bother with all that discourse, youknow? I'm not a fan of the gate keeping nearly every niche has, so I just try to stay out of it, and just write what I write without offending somebody.
3. I think your interests always become a part of your marketing. There's really no other way to market. If your comic or novel has a niche in it, stick it in the tag, why not? No one's sending you to jail for not being niche enough. (well...some might be very upset if their niche isn't depicted in exactly the way they want it to be but this is why we have a block button, because again--gatekeeping can be real a mess online)
4. I do think it's possible to be too niche but I think it's just very hard. It's like taking too much vitamin A. Yeah, people HAVE done this, but...probably no one here. Like speaking as a person who was once trying to research netting patterns for my history of crafting blog to keep the art of netting alive--it's really hard to find a niche that has no audience. (also, try netting, it's a fun craft)