Do you promote your Comic/Novel outside the Forum?

[arjunindica]

And If not then how do you promote inside this Forum ?

[Katzalcoatl]

Promoting inside the forum doesn't help much.
It is always the same people reading/answering the forums.
Promotions get spammed every day. Your comic/novel gets buried in that sea of promotion.

My suggestion is to promote once under the right thread and hope for the best. Spamming might help you get seen by the casual user but most people on forums are regulars. And some of them who see spam decide not to look at your comic/novel for the sole reason of seeing your spam.

P.S. I use social media to promote my novel using the right hashtags.

[BlairFujin]

I'd say it's the forum where I am not promoting xD (I mean, I will plug my comics when it's relevant...)
But I post previews whenever I update to social media

[darthmongoose]

I've done a lot of promo outside the forum. For starters, obviously there's the Tapas discord, which is worth joining and introducing yourself on because I think the staff pay more attention to it... and then there's social media. I promote fairly regularly on twitter, instagram, facebook, tumblr and tiktok. I also run ad campaigns regularly on comicad. Plus I ran a Kickstarter last year for the print book, and did a few comic and zine events.

[Bulalakaw]

I don't really know how to promote a novel on social media sites. Since places like Instagram and Twitter seem more oriented toward visuals, I can't really think of a way to make my novel stand out... at least for now! For the Discord server, I'm still mulling over it. I don't really know how to navigate servers filled with strangers. I mostly lurk even in Discord servers with people I'm familiar with or are close friends with. It definitely affects the rate of growth for my series, but I've come to terms with it. I'll probably have to branch out to SNS at some point, but for now, I feel comfy hanging around the forums.

In the few days I've been here, I try not to spam my link and just put it up when relevant. Which is pretty much one time as of now. I don't know how helpful sub4subs are, and I can't really imagine myself being able to keep up with my library if I sub to everything on those threads. I also try to join in on discussions whenever I can. Like this one!

[Katzalcoatl]

I use visual aids for my novel promotion. It ain't much but it's honest work. I get creative and use every single drawing my novel has and different ways to use said drawings. I basically squeeze the juice out of everything be it cover, chibi forms, whatever I can get my hands on.

I work hard to bring the highest quality I can to my readers. Giving me lots of material to work on. You can also basically take screenshots of certain scenes/phrases from your novel but don't abuse it (otherwise you will just bore people).

[darthmongoose]

I know quite a few novelists with a larger following on Tapas, and some promo techniques that seem to work are:

• Get some good promo assets done. You might need to learn a little graphic design and typography for this and then get onto canva and try to build a consistent set of banners and social media templates with a nicely paired title/heading font and body text font, and one or two colours. If you can afford it, hiring an illustrator or designer, or even just getting a little design guidance can be well worth it.
• Post regularly on places like twitter, instagram and facebook with quotes from your story presented in a nice font, with a simple, tasteful background.
• Read snippets from your novel on tiktok.
• Make memes about your characters and participate in trending tiktok memes.
• Look up what the best hashtags are for webnovels, writing and booktok and use them appropriately. If there's an appropriate trending hashtag, use it.

[Lucky_Foot]

Intagram
Youtube
Tiktok

Here's a hack for written stories. (they struggle the hardest)

Copy paste parts of your story into, Text to Speech apps , tada!
Instant audiobook, If you don't mind a robot telling the story.

It may hurt of help your novel depending how what genre it is.

[Katzalcoatl]

I read this message wrong but it gave me a new idea lol. Plus speech apps ain't bad.

[Bulalakaw]

This thread has been really helpful! I'm really having difficulty with promotion, but these replies are giving me some ideas! Since some assets for my novel are already in the works, I'll try thinking of how to use it for promotion (I also think I should discuss the terms of usage with the artist).

[Lucky_Foot]

heh heh, Listening to all those, Overlord audiobooks has softened my heart to Text to Speech

[cherrystark]

Yep, and it's hard. I am in a bunch of promo FB groups for my Amazon stuff. Most readers are not accustomed to reading stories in bite-sized increments so they tend to avoid those stories. The reader writers also are "purist" in a way. If you aren't on Kindle or Radish for example, they'll keep their distance. If you try to post with a non-Amazon link, you'll likely get ignored. Wattpad's reach is strong and people don't really want to read a novel that could be like a lot of content on WP.

I haven't had the best luck promoting outside author specific groups. I agree with what people have said. Create a specific brand for your work with your marketing. I'm focusing on building my author brand because I'm not going fto be writing my primary series forever. A line or two excerpt from the WHOLE work can be a great marketing tool but it stops being effective when you release an excerpt from every chapter.

The rest requires patience and letting nature takes its course. Colleen Hoover only went viral because of her fans. There are a lot of writers on social media out there so patience is the most important factor regarding getting your work out there.

[powerplantanimations]

I realized I got more readers on the forums than outside and stopped.... although... I do plan on promoting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all that.

Just not now (especially with College).

[darthmongoose]

You will get more readers on the forums early on, and it's not a bad plan to use them as the main base for your promo when starting out. A lot of my most dedicated readers who leave comments and likes are off the forum, so it's definitely worthwhile.
Buuut... the forums do have a sort of cap to them in terms of just how many people are here. Eventually nearly all the regulars will have decided if they want to read your comic/novel or not, and you'll only get subs here from occasional newcomers, so it's a good idea to promote elsewhere too. Early on, it'll feel a bit annoying, because it'll always seem like more effort to get less readers than you'd get from the forums, but it will pay off later.

Remember that a lot of people won't try something til they've seen it a few times, and if they see it in a few different places, they're more likely to try it, so keep promoting on various different social media.

[TheLemmaLlama]

Welll right now I also talk a little on the ComicFury forums, I suppose Though I'm not really focused on promotion at the moment; I wanna wait until I've accumulated more content

As for my promotion plans for when that day comes though, I absolutely intend to promote outside the forum. Mostly by posting relevant snippets/memes of my comic in communities that would be interested in that material. I've already identified a few such communities and wrote some notes on what to post where, though I haven't really put this plan into action yet so idk how helpful this was if I can't tell you it works for sure XD

[VersusVII]

I promote each update with a preview on instagram, facebook and now I started on twitter. It's hard find the right hastags, instagram got worse in visibility now and every strategy I try seems to fail.

On tiktok I'm trying to post wips about my comic making or talk about my OCs and plot.

[powerplantanimations]

Btw just read this message while I found out about the share button on Tapas lmao. That'll save me some time for Twitter.

I will say YouTube is the biggest place for me atm, but I'm holding off dubs for a whole other reason. I can't quite talk about it, but once this particular project gets off the ground, it could mean a lot advertising wise. Got ma' fingers crossed that this works out.

[JaveCraze]

Nope. I don't really know how, other than just.. posting it on my twitter and calling it a day. Marketing is a craft in and of itself, one that has to be practiced as well, and being that I'm just a hobbyist for the moment, I'm fine with relaxing on the advertising for now. I agree with the notion that promoting on the forums are a bit worse than promoting anywhere else, though, because you're mostly gonna reach "creators" and not "readers".. which is the audience you really want.

[system]

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