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byelacey
Aug '20
4

I will preface this with the fact that no one's journey is going to be the same and all I can do is offer advice and what has worked for me. Take everything as such, and not hard and fast rules to success. Cool? Cool!

First things first, hi, I'm Lacey, I make the comic Lies Within. It's currently not updating on platforms, but it went strong for 3 years on both Tapas67 and Webtoon92 and gained ~30k subscribers on each. I was inspired by the recent post "If you want to be popular, do this" to make this in earnest, because I think some of my marketing tips can actually be useful to others. I'll do my best, anyway!

  1. Make good work. This one's a no-brainer but I felt I needed to stick it here. Your first attempt won't be your best. Spike Trotman of Iron Circus once said you're going to make ~200 bad comic pages before you make good ones (paraphrased, but you get the point). Sure, certain genres like Romance have more popular comics, but they have more comics overall. No one genre is a free ticket to popularity, but the good news is that even the most over-done and popular tropes can be interesting depending on who's re-telling them. You've gotta have a compelling story first.

  2. Pick a regular update schedule and stick to it. This could be twice a week, once a week, once every 2 weeks--just pick a frequency and a day and be reliable. If you can't make an update or need a hiatus, make a post to let your readers know. (I tend to delete these posts later, as they interrupt reading for future readers.) I wouldn't say treat it like a job (unless that's what you want to do)--more like a social commitment. :slight_smile:

  3. Know your audience. This can be hard but I get most of my info from context clues in the comments section, but we also tend to make stories for specific groups of people. Is your audience mostly teens? Adults? A mix? Do they prefer reading vertical scroll comics on apps, or do they like going to a personal website where pages are set up in print format? Having an idea as to who your comic is for is important when it comes to knowing where and how to promote it.

  4. Advertise smart. (This is gonna be a long one) Casting a wide net and linking your comic all over a creator forum is fine, but where are your readers most likely to be? Let me break down my marketing strategies for the spots on the internet where I advertise my comic. For reference, my audience is a bit of a mix but skews young.

"So what do I post?"

Obviously, comic update posts. That's the first one. On your update day, post a "hey! I updated! heres a link!" with an image of a crop of the page, or your comics logo, or a mixture of both. If you only update once a week, consider making a new post a few days later with a different crop. Keep it fresh!

Also! Take a page out of the books of most popular comic creators on social media. Check, Please! and Griefer Belt have entire accounts dedicated to characters speaking in-character; Long Exposure's creator made mini comics/drawings with their comic characters before launching their comic and they're doing it again for their next project. Draw your characters into popular memes. Allow people to relate to your characters in context they already know, and they'll care about them!

Twitter - Twitter is a great creator hub. There are hashtag events, webcomic discussions (webcomic chat), and accounts specifically made to retweet webcomic updates (webcomicupdates, webcomiclibrary). Engage with your fellow creators. Get excited about and share their work, and you'll find people that get excited about and share your work in return. Most of my readers from twitter make webcomics themselves. It's fun to read and geek out over each others work!

Instagram - Instagram can be a great tool if you take advantage of popular tags. Sure, you can use webcomic, comic, comicupdate, etc etc--but think outside the box, too. Is your style manga-esque? Use the manga tag. Is it full of monsters? Vampire, supernatural, monster, etc. People follow tags on instagram, branch out and find some readers.

TikTok - I don't know how long this advice will be viable to US-based folks and non-US folks once the app goes poof (if that's still happening? I don't know). I've found some success in TikTok, they love Webtoon over there. So much, I usually get asked what my "webtoon" is called. My most popular TikToks tend to be comic-style videos, where characters talk to each other in speech bubbles or voiceovers. Once more, go forth and meme your webcomic characters!

Tapas - Your cover page is your comic's biggest advertisement! It's your hard work, at a glance! Tapas recently made them nice and big, which I absolutely love. Make sure your comic's title is easy to read, and that your cover image is interesting and alluring to new readers (without being a lie, haha, don't go making a Romance cover for an action series?). Second, is your comic's genre reflective of your comic's content? And are you making the most out of your genre? I would describe Lies Within as a drama with an LGBTQ+ cast, and when I got an email about tapas adding the LGBTQ+ section, I took the opportunity to make that its primary genre. I believe there was a form to fill out right before the genre went live, and I filled it out and was picked in a LGBTQ+ collection. As long as my comic was updating, I was near the top of the category and that gave me a huge boost every week. I digress. Make genres work for you.

I wish I had hard and fast rules about how to make trending, but I try to line up my updates with my social media announcements about the update to drive as many people to the update at once as possible. I also left questions on SM, and asked folks to like and comment on the update comment. I nearly always got on trending on update days.

Cross-Platform - Are you only posting on tapas, or only on webtoon? What's the reason for that? Is it time? That's fair! But understand there are unique audiences to each platform and posting in more than one place is an opportunity for more eyes on your work.

I hope this helps in some way. It's not quite 8:30am and I feel like I've rambled on long enough! If you have anything to add from your own experiences, please feel free!

Edit: One more thing! I touched on this earlier re: popular creators, but you should absolutely be watching folks who have "made it", or are doing well. While it's true everyone's journey is different, it doesn't hurt to learn from other creators!

Find your "mentors". Check out the staff picks section. Check out the popular (free-to-read, so there's no advertising advantage) comics in your genre. Look at the covers, read the synopsis. Read the comic! Why does their work stand out? What are they doing different? Do they have social media? What are they doing over there? Learn from successful people. Don't DM them asking for free advice, but just observe, follow and learn.

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There are 105 replies with an estimated read time of 15 minutes.

snowy
Aug '20

I guess I can stop blaming my extremely poor view figures on being a black-and-white traditional page format comic.

sigh

Okay, thank you for the tips. I will actually try the ones I haven't done already, and I'll give it another 6 months or so.

byelacey
Aug '20

Comics don't have to be in colour to be popular, that's for sure! Best of luck!!

Jenny-Toons
Aug '20

I've also got some things that have kinda helped me from this other post:

pilot-obvious
Aug '20

I think social media is a huge part of building an audience that some people don't utilize. I had an internet presence before I started posting my webcomic and I'm pretty sure a majority of my subscribers are from Instagram and Twitter.

There are great art communities on those social media platforms! I've made countless friends from both sites and they're huge supporters of my work.

byelacey
Aug '20
Jenny-Toons

Yeah this is such a good point specifically, and your entire post is great!! Thanks for sharing, Jenny!

Iris-Grimoire
Aug '20

Another thing that also helps is just making friends in the community in general, even if you already have non-comic artist friends. Ignore that little voice saying "oh your comic isn't big like theirs they're too far", if there's an appropriate opportunity to chat and you're polite about it, just take it. Maybe you'll even meet people who have similar goals/niches and you can work together to achieve them by sharing notes! It's not a competition, we're all here to grow together.

That said, didn't know about using multiple crops in a once-per-week schedule, I thought that QRTing was enough. I'll try that out for sure! Tiktok also kinda intimidates me, but I might test the waters by making videos for twitter first.

byelacey
Aug '20

Getting excited about friends' stuff on social media is really fun and has the added benefit of being public so others see your excitement and think "maybe I'll like this thing too"! Yes yes yes! It takes nothing away from you to be pumped about the work of others!

Jenny-Toons
Aug '20

Oh! And don't be afraid to repost your work! You can even get real creative with it or maybe add more depth to those previous pieces.

I see a lot of people do redraws of previous works, or they do side by side of something they changed in their style. Or hell -- sometimes, people repost it because they really liked that piece and just wanted it back on their timeline. :blush:

summermcallen
Aug '20

Thank you very much for the tips :slight_smile:
I think its also really important to figure out which time is the best to update.
because sometimes I get a lot of views and others literally no one look at it.
So I'm pretty curious which time you think is the best for your audience?

byelacey
Aug '20

So this is one thing I played with over time and actually what influenced me most was other social media. I knew that if I posted my comic at 8am EST, readers would trickle in a bit slower due to simply not being awake, than if I posted at 11am EST. 11am is when twitter really starts to pick up, and at the time (and still) that's where my biggest following is so I'd post at 11, tweet my update links, and hope!

As for days of the week I've seen lots of different opinions! I update Tuesdays/Thursdays, it seems like Wednesdays are really popular days too. And though weekends seem slower on Tapas, I've heard folks say Sunday nights are great for Webtoon because that's when a lot of originals update.

Now that I only update on my website, I tend to schedule pages to post at midnight--1 because there's no trending to worry about, and 2 it's a popular time for webcomic websites to update and lots of people are still awake, watching their RSS feeds.

I'm sorry this answer is all over the place. I think it's one thing that's gonna vary depending on your audience.

summermcallen
Aug '20

ah ok thank you. <3
Social media sadly didn’t work by me :frowning:
I tried it for so long, but don’t get follower and nearly no likes or retweets, even when I use the hashtags to support webtoons.
I think that works mostly only for accounts with a lot follower. Some accounts only get fucked up from the twitter algorithm XD

ml_eaden
Aug '20

This is great advice! I started by writing on blogspot, and then moved to Tapas. I've had more engagement on Tapas, but not much. I like Tapas as a episodic platform. It's much easier than posting to blogspot. I haven't started an instagram, but twitter has been fairly helpful, and posting on the tapas forums have worked well too. I'm working on a more professional cover - which I know is very important. I'm looking forward to doing more projects here. Thanks for the forum post!

Humbug
Aug '20

I havent had any luck on Twitter and Instagram and I've been using relevant hashtags. I've got the numbers I have now because I have been featured briefly on both sites, but I cannot seem to grow organically on social media. I'm pretty sure I know my audience, but I have no idea how to reach them.

I only have the first two points down, but that's only helping me so much.

byelacey
Aug '20

A lot of the growth I could control on twitter came from interacting with other creators. Start following webcomic creators, comment on their posts, and make yourself known! Admittedly, hashtags can really be tough on twitter on account of their "top" feature boosting already popular creators to the top of the hashtag. The big accounts get all the eyes.

Sometimes, folks do art share threads where they ask you to post your art and they'll retweet it! I did one for webcomics a bit ago, and you've inspired me to make another!

Here it is: https://twitter.com/byelacey/status/129544479317108326428

domisotto
Aug '20

I do, but folks are promoting their stuff, hoping to make a sale, they are not there to find someone else to read.

And, well, I rarely get likes or retweets when I advertise--honestly, I think people are actually less likely to want to read you if you advertise your book, no matter how clever a quote or a pitch I put in.

There is always this dead silence apart from my already existing nice friends.

The other day, i hit my Twitter best with 167 people liking my first line from the 'Write the first line for a novel inspired by this picture" and that made zero difference in people looking at my profile/links to my books. Only 3(!) out of these 167 people retweeted my line. Probably zero of them visited my profile.

Social Media just baffles me. I end up talking about what interests me on Twitter, but it doesn't translate at all in my readership numbers.

foxnflames
Aug '20

Social media boosting can be beneficial, whether comic or novel creator. Plenty of people read both. I’ve seen some topics where people post their social media accounts. Wouldn’t hurt to help each other promote and gain followers.

Of course, this is on top of engaging outside of the forums under comments on our updates and such. Increase your visibility so people will say “hey I know that profile, I see it everywhere.” Some people shout each other out in their author's notes (I got a sub that way). Definitely don’t beg people to do so, but it’s another option