Do you prefer weekly or monthly updates?

[cfmateus]

Hello everyone and thank you for stopping by.

I haven't updated my comic for over 1 year due to personal issues. However, I want to get back into it.
What I want to ask is what do you, as a reader of other comics prefer?

1. Monthly updates
2. Weekly page.

I personaly prefer the full chapter update because people will have a good chunck of content. However, that's what I used to do to my comic which ended up burning me out and take all the inspiration from me. The quality significantly drops at latest pages compared to the start of the chapter pages.
Weekly update with 1 page is very doable if I have some pages done in advance.

What do you prefer?
I would very much appreciate the help.

[nickolaidas]

I do a meaty chapter which will hopefully help engross the reader to the story. It may take a month, it may take two.

I get that small frequent updates are good for clicks, but they hurt the impact of the story.

[igneriss]

As a reader, I much prefer weekly updates. With monthly updates, by the time the comic is updated I would already forget about its' existance. Also, I usually read comics as a short break in-between other tasks, so I prefer just few pages in one update.

[faisalhussein394]

For my main comic, weekly. Well not really every 7 days, it's actually 10-11 days. So I update 3 times a month.

If I ever make another comic, I will consider it a side comic and will update it once or twice every month.

[Zhengo]

I personally prefer big update chunks monthly as opposed to small updates. But I think in places like tapas it's faster to grow with weekly updates, so that's what I've been doing. I hope to find a compromise and switch to bi-weekly with larger chunks once I have a more dedicated reader base.

The problem with small weekly chunks in my opinion is that it kinda limits the flow between some scenes, particularly action scenes. They're best read in one go, but I usually have to split them to fit my schedule

[cfmateus]

I do have the same opinion. As a reader myself, I prefer to wait until there is a considerable amount of pages before I go back to that one comic to binge read it.
That's what bothers me a bit, the engagement. Ofc I draw the comic for fun since it's a project I have been working on for about 4/5 years. However having no one ingage or just to subscribe to the story kind of makes me wonder why do I bother if no one reads it.

[cfmateus]

I wonder, does this aply for specific themes of a comic? When I refer to monthly updates I mean a good chunk of content, around 15-pages, maybe more.
However since you reas in in short breaks I understand your point of view.

[BlairFujin]

I'm also in a smaller update read in between doing other stuff canp which is why I struggle with starting some longer running series - can't seem to find a moment to sit down and read everything to be up to date
I also tend to forget what was going on with longer breaks

[cfmateus]

Yes! My comic is a Fantasy themed one so there is some fighting and action happening. I think weekly posting would break the flow like you refered. Unless I post 50/50?
I do have shorter chapters that I tend to finish pretty fast but once there are larger chapters it tends to be hard posting monthly. Sometimes I can post it every 2 months but I feel like people will forget the comic exists.

[cfmateus]

Would you consider a bi weekly update enough? (in your situation ofc) for example, 5 pages every 2 weeks or something?

[BlairFujin]

I'll be perfectly honest, it depends, there are some series that can go months without updates and I'm not lost but there were some that were updating weekly that I dropped cause I kept forgetting what was going on
Now that I think about it the main difference was what was happening at the end of upate. When it's a natural end of a chapter/scene or where you'd do a cut in a film/tv show - I'll be fine. But when it felt like someone just made a week long pause mid sequence, by the time they finished it, I no longer remembered where they started, or what were they responding to.

[allenT]

Monthy. I like to read a few pages all together.

[igneriss]

No, the genre doesn't matter in my case, it's just my reading style ( : I know that comics are usually much better when read in bigger chunks, I myself have a very long fantasy series which has a better flow when read at once or at least chapter by chapter. However, as I a reader, I like smaller but more frequent updates to read in between other things. If I have more time, I usually don't read new updates but catch up with some comics I'm not up to date yet which are rotting in my to-read list. If I know that there's going to be a long read, I procrastinate reading a lot
But again, that's just my reading style, probably each reader has their own so you just do how it's easier for you!
If you start uploading more frequently, readers who prefer to read more content at once will just wait for few updates and read everything once a month or something, so it's not like you'll be losing them. At least that's what some of my readers do.

[fleurravenbooks]

I would rather read longer chapter once a month than four shorter chapters, because in my opinion i would rather wait a bit to read everything than to wait for small parts ( in theory i would still need to wait a month for finished chapter)

But if you don't have big audience it's better to upload weekly.

[rajillustration]

So I tried doing Monthly and on WT (because I upload to both Tapas and WT) it would not fit in an update because it was too long (like the people doing 60 panels are doing less gradients which takes up loads less space and they're also allowed more space, pretty sure). Even doing 2x a month updates I still have to crop my WT updates in half, so...I do 2x a month and hope that it fits.

[Azifri]

I used to prefer long updates and as often as possible, but that was back when I was a grad student and thought I had not time xD Now I prefer weekly short updates, because sometimes I can barely keep up with those. A 1 - 2 page update also gives me a better chance to appreciate the work that went into it and pay better attention to details in the story.

(Edit: I read and write mostly scifi, and my own comic updates 1 or 2 pages a week)

[fsarbolaez]

As a creator and reader, I feel it all depends on what you write.
More frequent updates might benefit a story that is faster paced, has shorter segments that don't need much elaboration, and leans on action. Doesn't leave the reader too long to see what happens next, while the event is still fairly fresh in their mind.
Meanwhile, something like a slow burn with longer events, and a more suspenseful or meditative atmosphere, might benefit from a monthly update. Gives the reader time to mull over what they read.
Though this is all my own speculation.

[Phantomobservant]

I prefer making weekly comics and prefer reading monthly comics

[TheLemmaLlama]

I'm on team 'longer updates', but if waiting that long to update drains your inspiration and just doesn't work well for you as a workflow, you can have the best of both worlds and post on two different platforms; update weekly on one and update monthly in chunks on the other

[nickolaidas]

This. This so much. This is why I decided to put episode summaries at the beginning of each issue from now on in order to help casual readers remember what was going on.

Especially when it takes 1-2 months to update my work.