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Nov 2021

Just something I'm curious about. Frankly, I never know what to choose, because my growth on Tapas has been... SO unpredictable.
I've been writing my main webnovel, Freakspotters, for about a year and a half. It's at... about 77 subscribers right now. It's admittedly kind of niche: it's about an autistic lesbian changeling, who might also be a little gender-confused... and how they're roped into a coalition of supernatural entities that want to take over the town.
I usually try to describe it as "quirky, campy, supernatural, and sapphic." And there're some people who really like it! But actually getting people to subscribe/like/engage? WAY easier said than done.
I have a bit of a platform on other social media--Instagram and Tiktok--and I post about my webnovel there on occasion (I actually post to IG for every update!). I've also put effort into the whole ordeal--I drew up a header (despite my... questionable art talents ahaha) and someone else is even doing a cover for me. I've started using tags, and I've even started self-promoting in the forums.
I was considering making it 100 subs by the end of the year, but try as I might, that still seems like a fever dream... what's a good balance between "ambitious" and "realistic"?

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    Nov '21
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    Dec '21
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When it comes to my sub goals, I mostly just try to focus on the numbers, and not how fast those numbers grow. Though I have been hoping to reach 50 subs before my next episode releases in just three days. With just 3 more subs to go, it's a VERY tight fit, and based on my subscription pattern, I can predict I won't be getting to 50 until a few days AFTER it's release.

My pattern, though it's slowed down a bit, has typically been 1 new subscriber every 2 days. And if I don't get one for 2 days, I'll get 2 in one day. Again that isn't quite as true now, but that's how it's been for quite a while.

When I first joined I didn’t really have a goal but then after the first two weeks I had a big jump in subscribers and set a goal for 250 in my first month. I think my next goal was 400, but I don’t remember for sure

Now for my new work I again don’t really have a goal in mind. I’m just enjoying sharing an older work of mine lol. I think I need more time to see how my subscribers trend before I even could set a goal. After the initial week, I’ll have a better idea so I might kind of set a goal but honestly I enjoy comments much than any subscriber goal so I haven’t really paid attention to sub counts as much

Ahh, that makes sense. I don't even get subs that consistently, but I might be able to kinda guesstimate, especially with how much more energy I'm beginning to put into making people see my stuff... again though that's a smart way of looking at it!

Oh what, that's insane!!! I've been writing for a year and a half and I still don't have half that ;u; Do you know how that happened?

And yeah, that's fair. I only have the one webnovel, and honestly, considering the algorithm here doesn't like me all that much, I think my next project might be elsewhere, haha.
Same on the comments though! I honestly wish I got more comments, they're part of what motivates me to keep writing :')

Early on, it can be good to roughly aim for goals that have an actual concrete payoff on Tapas. For example, 100 subs will unlock ad revenue, and a small trickle of funds will start making its way into your account, and then 250 will allow you to unlock ink donations and the ability to withdraw your earnings.

That said, if you focus too much on the numbers, you can get a bit lost. To quote Bruce Lee: "It's like a finger pointing at the moon. Don't focus on the finger or you'll miss all the heavenly glory".
Subs can be used as an indicator of how appealing your comic or novel is when people are able to see it. But sometimes when somebody has a low number, they get focused on fixing the number itself instead of fixing the issue of "people are not compelled to read this comic/novel". So they do things like sub for sub which will, on a one-off occasion, make the number go up, rather than addressing the root of the problem and using feedback and research to improve things like their cover, banner, blurb and the presentation of their content.

So my advice is this: First aim for 100 subs. If you're struggling to get 100 subs within your first year by just sharing your work around on the forums and social media, get some feedback on your cover, banner and blurb. Look at what popular novels on the site look like in terms of the style of their cover, the typography on their cover and what their blurbs say, and try to emulate it. Tapas tends to favour illustrated light novel looking covers with a manga or manhwa esque style, contrasting places like Wattpad or Radish, where photomontage covers still rule, and it's a general good rule to make sure your banner aesthetic matches your cover. You can get some great feedback about this stuff here on the forums. :smile_01:

Ahh, that makes sense.

Yeah, I'm getting a cover from someone, hopefully it pops up soon...

If I don't reach 100 by the end of this year, though, I'm gonna be really bummed. :^(

Don't.
The amount of subscribers is never an objective indication of how good your work is. I've seen people with downright professional artwork struggle to get to 100 subs even if they've been posting for well over a year and I've seen... comics in which the drawings were literally stickmen done in MS Paint getting over 500 subs in less than a month. There are A LOT of factors why a work might not instantly get a certain amount of followers, and objective quality isn't necessarily it.
Other factors could be:
-Lack of promotion. Either you're not reaching your potential audience or you already reached the people who were going to be interested in your work on that particular platform, hence why you're not attracting new ones (happened to me on these very forums).
-The platform is... simply not the right one for you. I mentioned this many times already, but my Tapas stats are basically nothing compared to my ComicFury stats. Although I may have way less subscribers on there (31), my comic on that platform has nearly 40k views with an average page view count of 40-50 pages a day. And on Webtoon I have around 194 subscribers, which is higher than what I have on Tapas. Granted, Tapas is also where most of my active commenters are, but like... my entire audience is currently made of 373 subscribers, with quite a bunch of people following the comic from other platforms even without being subscribed. My Tapas audience is less than half of my entire audience. So again, if you're not getting a certain amount of subscribers on Tapas, it doesn't hurt to try other places before declaring your project a failure :slight_smile:
-What worked for one creator isn't necessarily going to work for you. One example: I see many comic artists saying how TikTok is a very good platform to promote your work. What most fellow creators don't seem to realize, though, is that TikTok is good as long as the work you're promoting is in your own native language and aimed at people of the same country as you. If you, like me, are from a different country and making a comic in English... TikTok is going to be basically useless, because literally zero native speakers are going to see it. On the other hand, I had MUCH better luck with Instagram reels... something the great majority of creators I talked to seem to struggle with. So yeah, experiences of what "works" can be wildly different depending on the creator, too.

Another thing: you said that you have a webnovel, not a comic. Novels on Tapas are notoriously harder to promote, so their numbers aren't really comparable to comics. Even with incredibly popular premium novels, you'll often notice that, if they had a comic made out of it, the comic actually has far more subscribers than the original novel. Again, this is mostly due to how Tapas tends to promote comics a lot more compared to novels, it doesn't necessarily have to do with the objective quality of your work.

Re: the question of the topic, I just go with the flow. I got in not really knowing what to expect, I'm grateful that I got the number of subscribers I have (especially given how my genre/style aren't exactly what's popular on the biggest platforms nowadays), currently wouldn't mind getting to 500 subscribers across all platforms, but I try not to obsess too much over numbers, 'cos that can get frustrating soon.

Yeah, I know, The Almighty Algorithm and whatnot... and obviously, I'm not gonna quit or anything, but I'm allowed to be bummed out, haha!

And yeah, I'm trying to promote more often on the forums and in the Discord, we'll see if it does something.

As for other platforms, I might give it a shot? But I don't really know a lot of places for webnovels... I'm DEFINITELY not going back to Wattpad, and the only other thing I've even kinda heard about is Royal Roads. I tried this platform called Voyce once, but it was super janky and one day just nuked my whole account.
Eh. If things don't speed up, I might start publishing on RR, too.

And I'm gonna try promoting on my IG and Tiktok more, actually! I already have a couple thousand followers on each, so it seems worth using.

Ahhh, that's rough, too. It's definitely more of a comic platform...

And hey, that's fair! It's something I'm really trying to work on, haha. Thank you for such a thorough answer though!!! You've just kinda ignited my urge to work harder.

I pretty much go off the guide, it says I should get my first 25 subs so that's what I shall do!

@Llyrel Thank you for sharing your experience it is very helpful, and what other platforms can you recommend to publish comics besides tapas and webtoon? i'm interested in trying to publish a comic in different platforms and learn from the results. I'm struggling with my sci-fi comic I think it's not a very searched genre here in tapas.

Yusss, Royal Road is apparently one of the biggest platforms for webnovels, from what I could understand. I'm not very familiar with other platforms, so I guess webnovel writers could be more helpful with that, but I think there's also Radish and, for US-based writers who want to publish paid content, Kindle Vella? Also, there's good ol' blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger.

@ybarrolaemmanuel No problem! :smiley: The platforms I've tried so far are:
-ComicFury: has a bit of an "old school" feel, but offers A TON of customization options. You get your own website which can be customized in any way you want (and, technically, even monetized, if you use ComicAd), there's no "premium" vs "community" comics competition, every single comic that just updated shows up on the homepage for everyone to see and even better... since there's no app/app store to deal with, you don't have to worry about your mature content getting censored :smiley: just make sure to slap a mature content warning on it and you're good to go!
-DillyHub: I admit I haven't dedicated much attention to this one. I love the UI, the monetization options and how it has nice display options for both print format and vertical comics, but so far it seems pretty... dead? ._.
-Wordpress.com: not exactly a webcomic platform, but can work for comics. Has some rather in-depth stats. If you want to monetize your site, though, I strongly recommend making a Wordpress website though, rather than using Wordpress.com's paid plans: they cost a lot and the only one that actually allows you to monetize the site is the $300 a year one. A Wordpress website is a bit trickier to set up and promote, since you'll have to direct all the traffic to it yourself, but costs WAY less in the long run.
-Tumblr: has a couple of customizable webcomic layouts + searchable tags under every post. I don't use it because I don't like how little control you have over your posts once they get reblogged, but if you don't have an issue with that, it's worth a shot. Keep in mind that it's much easier to build an audience with fan art and fan comics on there, though.

Other webcomic platforms I know of but haven't tried yet: GlobalComix, FlowFo, Epico Ink.

You could also try webcomic collectives like SpiderForest (submission based, requires you to have an indipendently hosted website for your comic to join) or even publishers like Hiveworks or Band of Bards!

I go by fifties (50, 100, 150,etc). It's achievable yet ambitious.

Llyrel pretty much said all I had in mind so I just wanted to touch on this aspect. There are some amazing sci-fi comics on tapas, some of which I own as print copies and there is even one where the author won a major award in their country, but on this site, they're almost invisible. What I'm trying to say is, don't be discouraged; as you pointed out, it's just not a genre that's popular here.

Ooh, I'll check out Radish! I'm unfortunately not American though, so Kindle might not be for me, haha.

Also, wow, you've got a whole WEALTH of knowledge haha that's so cool!

A lot of luck mostly and a good story! I just followed the general advice of posting daily to be in the fresh section and responded to all comments. I was also active in the forums but while my first readers may have come from here, most discovered my novel on the site itself.

My novel also had some popular subjects - BL and werewolf which helped a lot! My more niche short story (Love Yourself: A Genderfluid Romance) only has 100 subs and it’s been up for like a year now where as the one with more popular subjects has almost 1200 subs.

I think if you write more niche story it can only be expected that you’ll have a much smaller audience. I’m not sure how popular lesbian romance is on tapas since I write MM, but adding in autistic and gender confused definitely shortens the amount of people who might be interested.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t write what you like! Just that your expectations might have to look different than someone who writes topics that are more trendy at the time. :heart:

I second/third the others on not focusing on the subscriber numbers as a goal. Tapas was the first site I posted my comic on, and the one I focused hardest on trying to promote at the beginning, but I have not even crossed the 25 subscriber mark. However, I am doing significantly better on Instagram and Webtoons.

I figured that it was a better use of energy to focus on the comics and hitting my weekly updates, and interacting with readers who wanted to interact, rather than focus on just the numbers.

Yeah, it does kinda suck that writing WLW romance might make me less likely to get views, especially if people aren't interested in neuroqueer stories. Oh, well, I'm totally gonna keep writing it anyway.

I originally went by the goals set by Tapas which is very realistic if a writer is brand new without readers knowing your work. It also truly depends on cover, a good synopsis, writing quality, and the first chapters. Updating often at first also helped until my first novel reached 250, then I decreased the updates to once a week when it got a good following.

After both of my novels, hit 250, my next goal was 1000 since there’s nothing after that. And then when I reached 1000, I focused mainly on ink support. It only takes a few readers who like and comment every chapter to get the novel noticed by others rather than dozens of dead subs.

I try not to set specific goals, as it is largely out of my control whether or not people subscribe. Including folks who actually do read and not just stop by- it shocked me with my first comic to learn how many people I knew irl who would see my adverts and keep up with the comic but not bother making a webtoons or tapas account to subscribe lol.

However I do tend to have a general sense for how much progress I would like to see at any given time. For example, my first comic I pretty much always felt content with the amount of growth it had- I had a solid reader base up front despite being a first series and continued to grow slowly but surely over the course of it's year and a half-ish run.

My 2nd comic on the other hand left me a little disappointed. Granted I only published it for 3 or 4 months, but it didn't really pick up much steam at all lol. I wasn't necessarily trying to hit a specific sub number with it, per se, but I did hope to see forward momentum each upload and that just... didn't really happen, unfortunately :joy: