You can certainly put up an amazing comic, send out emails to review sites, post listings, etc. but you'll always be operating at a bit of a disadvantage vs. the people who do use social media. On the other hand, for those with fairly limited time constraints, social media might be beyond the scope of what makes sense for your comic anyways.
Is this an addiction thing? I understand that can be quite a problem for some people.
Funny enough, actually, I don't have a personal FB account. Our Oops page is setup in Jeramy's name, my husband. An alternative might be to ask your family for some social media support. You can establish a FB page under their accounts, set them up as admins, and let them help you by posting frequent update or notifications when a new page posts.
In a way you can employ your own family. If someone is really good at Twitter, you can ask them to setup a twitter account for your comic and help keep it active. If someone is really good at Tumblr, you could ask them to help you setup a Tumblr page, and so on. Kind of creating a team for your comic.
edit: Cyndi's alerted me to a real danger of promotion on facebook without the right targeting so I've removed this rebuttal. I might throw together a targeting guide at some point, but in the mean time, look it up before you advertise. It's really helpful and on facebook at least neglecting it could kill your reach.
Facebook advertising can also be expensive and it might not make sense for most web comics. Unless you have a proven way monetize the incoming visitors and keep them to turn those costs into profit it won't help in the long run.
I'd imagine the exact combination of selling points and best strategies really varies from comic to comic. I leave the floor open to those who can speak with some experience.
Having enough content to promote is a huge one. I didn't start getting an audience with KYRIA until a year later when it was at the end of it's first big chapter.
Consistently updating is super important too. There are a few other things that have worked for others which haven't worked for me, but then again some strange things have worked out very well for me and not for others... soo there are many methods to try out there, I think :>
Thank you for the tips!
The one I relate to/agree with the most is the scheduling. Super important to build a buffer into your schedule. Stuff happens all of the time that you can't control. So it is better to prepare and have 5, 10 pages, or even a whole chapter done before you start posting a series- that way if anything happens or you lose your creative kick for a bit, you won't be "screwed". A lot of other artists I've met have had the same idea in that we are not machines, we need time to conserve our creative energy at times.
I'm quite bad at that I have to admit, I'm trying to work up a buffer now but I've rather organic is how I've been making the pages.
As for exposure, I'm working on that one. It a hard line to walk to getting your work out there and not being terribly spamming and switching people off (and unsubbing)
Thank you so much for all your helpful advice! I'd definitely like to see those tutorials. (Tutorials are the best!)
Right now, I'm using an iPad app called Brushes that is decent for paintings but pretty terrible for lineart. It doesn't really fit at all with my comic's style. To be honest, I'm really unhappy with my current setup, so I've been searching for something different for a while. I'm on a low budget, and the price tags on software like Photoshop that everyone seems to be using are pretty intimidating, which has kind of hindered my search. Thanks for the tip about vectors! I'll definitely have to look into that. It seems like that could help me finish comics faster, too.
Thanks as well for assuaging my worries on posting frequency! It looks like "keep on keepin' on" is the best thing I could do at this point.
Thank you for all the thoughtful and detailed feedback! I also love your hilarious Teddy Roosevelt comic 
Thanks for the great advice! I filled a few post-it notes with all those site and app names you dropped.
-Jon
creator of:
Shelby and the Blooms
Yeah, I agree with avoiding the Facebook promotion machine. They employ "Like Farms," which make you think you're getting genuine likes and fans, but if you look at the names of the "people" who have clicked "like," on your page, you'll find names like, "Dingh Footghrt" "Wragn Beedotug" "Chan Qitnoom" etc. They are just randomly generated strings of letters with a profile image that consists of either a celebrity or a bunch of flowers stolen off an FTD site. The problem is that these fake likers never follow up and interact with your site, so it can be very misleading.
-Jon
creator of:
Shelby and te Blooms
Yep, I don't want this thread to turn into Facebook bashing though, especially since this thread has been such a wealth of info. Feel free to private message and I can tell you about my experience and findings on it. 
Getting back on topic, I've got some general questions that haven't been answered yet.
What's the best way to go about branding a webcomic?
Is posting reliably on schedule to building reader's trust all there is to it? Or are there more methods to branding for webcomics?
Is building a eye catching website needed, or is just using sites like Tapastic enough?
And how important is it to do grass root guerrilla advertising, like hitting local comicbook shops and leaving flyers/minicomics for costumers to grab up, or attending comic conventions?
Do graphic design materials like logos and banners make a difference and are they really needed?
Does are some excellent tips and suggestions!
Has someone just starting up this are some great advices I plan to incorporate into my work 
@wr4ith0 and @CyndiFoster, I also found this thread to be very useful. I am curious, though, seeing as the thread is about a year and a half old, are there any updates to any of the information in the original post or any of the follow-ups? Any additional tips for someone like me who has plenty of pages and a very stringent three times a week update schedule, is listed in all the webcomic lists, posts to FB and Twitter, etc? I'm genuinely curious as I feel like I'm ready to take the next steps but not necessarily sure what those are. Any additional advice would be appreciated!
Hey my name is Del and I work on Requiem for a Grieving Hero. https://tapastic.com/series/Requiem-for-a-Grieving-Hero3
This helps a lot. I am starting to get into reading forums more since they have been helping me and I am trying to learn as much as I can in order to get promoted properly. I use facebook before the series started in order to get hype and I spent money on advertising there. It got me quite a few followers but after spending an amount that I am a little ashamed to admit now lol I only have about 10 people who actively like and comment on my updates. I feel thought that having the large amount of followers even if they are not active helps put the page out there more possibly? I am not sure exactly how it works to get the page out to more people but anyways I think I will hold off on actively adverting too much since you are onto something. I only have 11 pages in total out right now and have been actively advertising quite a but.
My main problem is that I update 2 times a week roughly the same time each update. But my content is slow starting. The teaser is meant to show people the potential but the start of CH 1 is really slow and involves the main characters going about their daily lives for the first 10 pages. I am 5 pages away from anything important happening and on Tapastic it seems to be doing well but after page 5 released on Webtoons I began to see a quick decline in followers and even about 10 people in two days unsubscribing. of course we have more subbing than unsubbing so it helps.
I am a little worried that people will dislike the series and not give it a chance due to its slow start. o.o
Dear Kialankay I found this draft sitting here from forever ago. I am quite sorry if the information never reached you.
Ah, ok well on the drawing front: Drawing on a tablet is actually quite impressive (I'm going to assume you have access to a computer as well though, correct me if i'm wrong). Here's a couple low cost options that might give you a leg up:
GIMP 2.0(the GNU free image editor) is a free, open source clone of photoshop that quite a few people use successfully. It's got a pretty solid tool. The main difference seems to be the lack of some drawing tablet pressure support and some of the more sophisticated selection algorithms.
Paint tool sai is the program i actually drew the teddy roosevelt comic in (thanks ^_^). It costs about 60 dollars depending on the strength of japanese currency at the moment. It's got some algorithms for smoothing out inked lines and it's really lightweight (unfortunately it only runs well on windows...). Go here for a 30 day trial and see what you think of it http://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/
And if you're tired of drawing with a mouse, monoprice is supposed to make a solid digital tablet for 50$. A tablet is really the way to go if you're serious about digital art. And monoprice is probaby the best way to get one on the cheap.
I'll send along some general art tutorials and maybe some sai specific stuff when I have time.
Hi Dglisson. I know I meant to make a followup post but it never actually happened. I'll have to see if i can dig out those notes at some point and remember where I intended to go with it.
I took a look at Beast Bait (http://www.beastbait.com/) and I had a couple suggestions. The first is a pretty simple user interface hack. Both your Topwebcomics link and your homepage take readers to a "recent" posts carousel page (with images too small to read). This has to be killing your ability to convert people who click on your link into readers. I don't have the stats on me on me right now, but I can tell you that only a fraction of people who end up on that page are going to be willing to click another link in order to get to the content. If you want more people to stick around on the landing page, try providing the latest comic page there full size and near the top of the page.
The other thing I immediately noticed about your site was that it does not appear to have any links to other comics. Consider adding a couple of your favorites. If you hang out here enough you should be able to find some friends you can feature who will return the favor. It could drive a fair bit of traffic to everyone involved and you'll get to bask in the satisfaction that you're helping others in a similar position.
This is how things were done back in the day, and pretty much the only way to find new webcomics back then. I've heard varying reports of current effectiveness, but it seems like it should still work as long as the links are decently prominent (banner links or the spiderforest collective's below comic carousel seem to work well).
[edit] Oh and one last thing. If you can you might want to set up comic panels to link to the next comic page when clicked on. This is a huge help when reading through archives and can be the difference between a giving up part way through and becoming a regular reader.
Hi Del,
The good news is you have a solid start. While you have nothing to be ashamed of now (nice use of the palace/hovels scene setting to convey information without outright stating it. "showing not telling" and conveying information through the world and action instead of direct infodump is preached by everyone from stephen king to chuck palahnuik) As you draw on a regular basis and keep improving your skills and personality will start to shine through your art and writing.
The bad news is that you have a solid start. And nothing more. You're all of 11 updates in. To borrow the RPG tropes you lean on, you haven't even assembled the party. There are characters on the splash page we haven't even met. And until we face the first boss, until the tension ramps up and you've built up the characters, the humor and the just plain awesome things that can happen in fantasy: the comic is on probation for readers. It might show promise, but it has a way to go before it actually can deliver on it. Advertising draws attention. Content is the reason people read and come back to a webcomic. It sounds like you blitzed hard when you were launching. And you've done a very good job since then keeping up with regular updates. That's solid.
If you're worried about people leaving because of the pacing... well that's the nature of the medium. You are trying to tell a dramatic story two pages a week. Some people won't have the patience for that and once they realize that, you're going to lose them. I assume you're doing this because you want to tell a cool story, and if so that's great. But you are going to lose some people along the way. Try not to let it bother you. I'm sure you'll get harsher criticism down the line (the internet is full of jerks...).
Buuut if you want to up your webcomic game while retaining subscribers there are some things you can do. I'd suggest two things: work really hard honing your pacing and humor. Yes, pacing. You can have an entirely dramatic/interesting comic that updates once in a blue moon and still keeps people coming back. You just have to understand that if all people get is one update, that update better work well on it's own. For comics that pull off once in a blue moon updates with a stunningly loyal audience, check out whitenoise.com, kagerou.com, heart shaped skull, mushroom go (now ended) and dresden codak. These comics of varying skill often broke the cardinal rule of regular updates, but they manage to keep a huge audience nonetheless. They rely on making every detail count towards telling the story and providing information in coherent chunks. There is an art to making comics dynamic and interesting. If you want to keep readers, this is a huge edge. Study what you can.
The other option is humor. I know you already employ this but take a look at one of my favorites paranatural.net. They have like five jokes on the average page. But it's all character based humour and it moves the story along (note: zack also does a very good job of providing plot progression in each comic). While pacing could take a while to dig its claws in unless you have time to dream up a slew of amazing details (effective but subtle establishing character elements, awesome bits of character building, rapid and sensible plot events, beautiful scenery porn) coming down the line, working hard to make parts of each update funny while conveying the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of panels and direct acknowledgement will go a long way toward keeping those uncertain followers.
If you're having trouble with these elements, consider using some friends as a test audience. See if they can help you vet your jokes, find ways to present information naturally through actions and art, and reduce the total word and panel length to highlight your best work while obsoleting the filler. Best of luck!
Hey @wr4ith0! Thanks so much for replying to me on this question. Web presence is something that continues to confuse me.
You're not the first person who has told me about the possible issues with my website. So because of that, I figured I'd re-do my website and give it a more traditional look and feel. I also have fixed it so each comic when clicked will lead to the next one as per your suggestion.
My previous version of the website had a bounce rate of about 40%. These days my bounce rate is about 70%! It makes me curious if my implementation is wrong... anyway, I know you're busy, but if you'd like to take a look at my new website set up beastbait.com5 plese let me know.
I've also taken your advice and started my own links page. So far I only have two creators on there but I'm hoping to get more soon!
unpinned Feb 19, '19
