Do you guys/girls find it troubling to put down only one genre for your comic(s)?

[kirahaydenyin]

Sorry I'm new here so I'm not sure if this was asked before. I'm a little worried that people might skip my manga based on the sole labeled genre I have written down. I kinda wish that you can put down a few main genres for your comic, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I feel as though my manga Witch Spine is as much as a Drama Romance as it is Action. Does having only one genre label matter?

[dojo]

You can add more tags to the series besides the main one right below where you pick your genre to add series tags, although I personally can't tell you what the difference is between the main genre and the series tags (I'm sure someone else will come in here who is able to explain that).

But I totally feel you. While my comic, A Perilous Journey, is without a doubt a fantasy story, I have trouble deciding what I should really be listing my other, Paisley Brickstone. I'm honestly tempted to just switch the genre to Horror once the main story really gets going (which is is now that I'm past the prolog), but even that I have issues being completely set on. It's not really slice of life, despite being about a bunch of kids in school, it's not really comedy, because although there is humor in it the humor isn't the main purpose of the story. Horror is really my best bet if I'm considering what the main themes of the story are, which are pretty dark. I HAD listed it as fantasy, but the more I think about it, that tag isn't entirely appropriate. There are fantasy elements, sure, but all the other genres I could be listing it as are stronger.

I guess just thinking about what the main purpose and themes of your story is and deciding the genre based on that is probably the best way to go.

[lizm]

I'm eternally grateful for any website that gives me the option to pick at least two genres for that exact reason--I feel like it's hard to say which one genre describes my main comic best. Aside from that one, I also have a 4 panel spin-off where the comedy genre is clearly the best choice, for instance, but a lot of long-form stories have such heavy shifts in mood it's really hard to narrow it down to just one genre.

It might be helpful to not only try and figure out which genre is the predominant one but also consider what people will expect from seeing that genre tag (perhaps combined with your comic's thumbnail). My train of thoughts for my own project was something along the lines of: "Fantasy? There's magic and all but there are also daily life arcs, it's probably a little misleading. Romance? Definitely there but builds up very slowly and isn't the main focus. Drama or Mystery? Has a lot of both but the number of jokes probably outdoes the darker mood. Comedy it is!" I'm considering changing it to Mystery soon when the story hits a significantly darker point, and also because Comedy is perhaps more frequently used for gag-a-day style comics.

I also added additional genres to my comic's description - that way people clicking the thumbnail will quickly know what kind of story to expect even without reading many pages.

[revisionstudios]

I feel this is especially hard when you're like me and intentionally mesh two very big genres together. I swear they used to give you an option to select two, but they took it away shortly after I joined (or maybe it was a bug at the time)

[SirHellsir]

I just put my comic on Top webcomics and it was specially bad since the genres to pick feel completely arbitrary and lacking on any of the genres of my comic. At least here there are more options and as mentioned above the tags serve as an extension

[spadesart]

yeah!! my comic is a mash of adventure, fantasy, and sci-fi all pretty equally and it felt....wrong? to just pick one :/

[shazzbaa]

Sorry I'm new here so I'm not sure if this was asked before.

If you click the little magnifying glass up in the top right of the forums, and do a search for "genre," you can find three or four other threads of people expressing frustration with the Only One Genre system. You're definitely not alone in that complaint!

although I personally can't tell you what the difference is between the main genre and the series tags (I'm sure someone else will come in here who is able to explain that).

The difference is that if you come to the website, click on "Comics," and browse, you can sort them by genre. You can't sort by tags -- you can only see things with a tag if you do a search for that tag. Also, you can arrange comics in a certain genre by things like "most popular" or "most recently updated," but I'm not sure what determines the order of search results, so you can't sort comics in a certain tag.

(as an aside, I really really think that making it possible to sort comics by certain tags would solve the genre problem)

I feel as though my manga Witch Spine is as much as a Drama Romance as it is Action.

Overall, I agree with @lizm -- I think the best choice is to pick what genre's expectations are most likely to match your comic. For example, if you had a story about the day to day life of magical family of elves, it would probably be better to pick "Fantasy" -- the average person who would enjoy that story would never think to look through all the mundane comics in "Slice of Life" to find that story, even though that genre is probably more accurate.

[nelmathyria]

This bugs me too! My comic is about superheroes, and I feel like it's not quite sci-fi, not quite fantasy, so I'm not totally sure how to categorize it (I just went with sci-fi but I don't feel like that completely represents my comic) Even though you can add extra tags, I'm not sure how much it helps and I do wish we had the option to pick at least one other genre!

[Zanreo]

Sometimes, yeah?
It's a "gaming comic" - but that's honestly more of a theme than a genre.
"Comedy" - except for a few parts and stories
Overall, "parody" would fit the overall series best

[dojo]

OH thank you! That's very useful to know B) And yeah I agree with you, their search system could def use a little refining to help with stuff like that.

[ChipGod]

Yeah, I'd like to do Comedy and Slice of Life

[indagold]

I guess tags help? Other sites I was on had multiple options including "psychological" which basically fits my work. All I can put in is fantasy even though there's horror, drama and sci fi in it. And one of my comics is intended to be surreal/experimental so I can't find any labels for that.

[Jinral]

i've run into this problem here and elsewhere. Maybe adding the extra genre's to the webcomics description(or summary?) may help a little bit? as well as what others have said with adding tags.

[KrispyKremeBits]

I see where your coming from, my comics a Fantasy Action Adventure but I just label it as fantasy because it's about aliens when it's so much more than that. I wish Tapastic would allow for multiple genres to be added to a series...

[Down_the_Rabbithole]

I know I do. It's mostly fantasy, but there are quite a few horror elements I will be using. After all, I am going for that familiar fairy tale type atmosphere, so those things are often seen together.

[spooktacularprize]

I absolutely have trouble.

My comic, Between Hay and Grass, started as being labeled sci-fi; but during the prologue there isn't a lot of information that would tell a reader that that's the genre; so I changed it to mystery for now.

It is absolutely Sci-fi, mystery, and comedy; at least; and is best described as sci-fi/mystery/com-dram

I don't think tags are searchable, unfortunately.

[littleelliebot]

Haha its good to know I'm not alone in this!

yeah Idk why but I feel weird calling mine Sci Fi/Fantasy
IDK why cause when I really sit down and think about it, it IS scifi/fantasy.
lol.
I kinda just stopped caring and I tag it as both in the tag area P:

[VikiKuli]

Absolutely! I feel like Wednesday 7 is almost a superhero comic (not exactly but close to it) and superhero comics contain such a wide range that it can be so hard to pick just one category. I guess we have to choose a category that is a main focus in the comic, and for mine it's fantasy.

[shazzbaa]

I don't think tags are searchable, unfortunately.

Series tags are searchable! You just can't sort them. Search for "deaf" and my comic pops up, because it's tagged that way .... but, for example, I have no idea why the comic "...I Forgot" is listed above my comic, so if you use a tag that a LOT of other comics use, there's no way that I can see to really "climb the ranks" so to speak. The only reason mine shows on the first page of that search is because there's so few comics with that tag.

Though you might be thinking of the individual episode tags, which do literally nothing!

[hushicho]

It's really frustrating, I agree. Most of my work is considered modern/urban fantasy...which is fantasy, but the "fantasy" tag tends to accumulate people expecting high fantasy, which is usually a whole different experience. There are frankly too few genres available, and since we can't choose multiple, we're stuck trying to distill our unique stories into a singular genre label.

Which kind of sucks if, say, you have a modern fantasy series based strongly around interpersonal relationships, with elements of parody and satire. How do you distill that down?!

It's just not a very good system right now.