How do you feel about advertising your work?

[ar-ninetysix]

Low audience growth from a terrible ad is better than nothing so yeah. Being able to sell stuff is a great skill to develop so you can grow your audience. The problem comes with actually putting yourself out there. If you're not charismatic and/or confident to some degree, it'll definitely be harder to advertise to those you wanna reach. It also greatly depends on who you're trying to advertise to whether it's a few friends or a whole community of strangers on the internet.

I'm not fond of trying to put my stuff out there, it's such a chore. Quite frankly, I don't especially wanna be super well-known or anything.. A small crowd is fine with me, but small crowds don't pay the bills. I gotta get myself out there. I don't find it humiliating so much as I feel like I'm annoying people with my product. Even if I take pride in knowing that somewhere out there is potentially huuuge audience who'll be able to latch on to my work, I think it'd still feel like I'm annoying people with something that's ultimately for me.

I think my best way of getting past all the negative thoughts is to just go in wherever I can, have some solid fake confidence, and expect absolutely nothing so I won't be disappointed by the lack of a turnout.

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

Me come from commercial media background, so it interesting to see how people do things differently in new system. Doing your own promotions (and doing small-scale things like printing flyers and posting on bulletin boards) is something me would call "guerrilla marketing", and it was effective because rare. Instead of paying money for advertising, instead you paid in imagination, energy, and time.

Of course, now that the Internet allows everyone to be a guerilla marketer, now it's the paid ad that stands out.

[Iris-Grimoire]

A bit of 1 but mostly 2. I like talking about my comic, I like introducing it to people that are interested; it's the threads and opportunities where you have to mention it unprompted (or a generic promo setting) that make me want to evaporate. You can't be too samey every time you promote your comic, but I don't have the ideas and elevator pitches in my head every day, and I usually have to update the pictures to my newest pages so it reflects what I'm currently doing, and when there's no response I think I pushed that person away forever even though they just don't know how to respond... It sucks, and being an introvert with low social battery makes it worse.

[QueenofBabyLoon]

Guerilla marketing.

I love it. This how the Vietnamese would have won a marketing war with the Americans. They would have just covered every big, paid, beautiful American ad, thought up by the best advertisement departments, designed by the best designers, with tiny, colorful, hand-made flyers.

But this does raise a good point. How do you advertise on the internet where everyone is advertising? How do you make yourself stand-out in this sea of flabbergasting talent where everyone is amazing and a specialist at some form or another of art. For a reader, it is so tiring to go onto one of these "Promote your Comic/Novel" threads and scroll through the breadth of works offered. Maybe it is just me, but I really feel overwhelmed on such threads.

[TheGentleArtist]

I don't feel any particular way about it. It does help to get your comic out there and build an audience. I guess it just feels nice

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

For webcomic, guest comics am probably the best way to go. Host artist gets free update and guest artist gets exposure. Me know "exposure" can be dirty word but here it am one of the better forms of publicity.

Me wish Project Wonderful was still a thing. Pricing scheme was very nice. Only problem was, it was transparent about how cheap the ads were. That am bad idea when ad am supposed to communicate value.

[QueenofBabyLoon]

You are a genius!!!

Guest artists!!! Of course!!! For comics!!! DC does it all the time, doesn't it? They just let another artist draw a panel for one of their series to show the style of that other artist. I remember when I was reading "Injustice" (the only DC comics I could come near to without dry heaving), every few panels the art would change and there would be mentions of other works produced by the artist who made those new panels.

That is SUPER efficient for me. I hope other artists see this! This would be such a cool way to get more advertisement. But at the same time, I assume for comic artists, it would be very difficult to include a panel of another artist into their stories.

What Chinese webcomic artists do is that another artist will make a tiny short story of a few panels about the work of the artist that is hosting them for an episode. And then that tiny short story will be put at the end of the episode.

Shows that you worked in commercial media. You know your stuff.

[AmysGames]

I definitely have a hard time with advertising, where sometimes it seems like everything I try doesn't work—including paid advertisements, which just felt like a waste of money when I tried it. But I'm also constantly in a mental battle of "it can't hurt to advertise this" vs. "this isn't interesting enough for a general audience" and usually end up just quietly dropping a link on social media, so that probably doesn't help my case.

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

Must have feedback loops in place. Need way for new readers to tell you how they heard about your comic. Then it just a matter of allocating more resources to advertising methods that work better.

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

guest comics

Writers of webnovels could do something similar in the form of side stories.

[cosgo]

I am very shy to promote my work. The language barrier. My language is Russian or Polish. I pay a professional translator for translating a comic. But I have to do promotion for myself. like this.

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

As long as you're paying your way, you might want to consider renting banner space from someone with a similar comic and also their own website. Can be surprisingly affordable.

Advertising is like a race. You don't always get first prize, but you won't win anything at all if you don't participate. Word-of-mouth doesn't work so well on the Internet.

[cosgo]

1. I have not yet fully understood the American culture of conversation . (I do not mean anything bad. Each part of the world has its own traditions)
2. I don’t have so much money to pay for advertising yet. But I will gladly do it. When the opportunity arises. You are absolutely right.

[Kann]

I don't like to do it and I really have no clue how to do it effectively. xD

Life would be so much easier if we could just sit and draw and our stuff would magically get noticed.

[gempompadour]

I don't like doing it for some reason. I always feel like a pervert standing on a shady street corner trying to get people's attention. I spam links like serial flasher and disappear into the night before I'm recognized.

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

When you realize that artists with worse art make better money because salesmanship.

[ForLackOfStars]

I don't like promoting my work, or drawing attention to myself in any capacity, but I see self-promotion as a necessary evil. Most work doesn't get discovered organically, and whether you like it or not, you have to be willing to work to get word of mouth about your work out there.

When I'm invested in getting my work noticed, I try to just do a little bit every day to help spread the word about it. It's best to focus on creating the best content possible, do advertising on the side, and be happy when results start rolling in. Self-promotion and advertising are long, slow processes, and results are anything but instant.

[Freemints30]

"Why hello there fellow human, would you like to take the time out of your busy day to read my crappy comic, If you do so now you get a second one for FREE!"

Im not a social person and it feels super awkward.

[QueenofBabyLoon]

The big problem with advertising and promoting is that … the time you invest in promoting, advertising and building yourself a network of friends, contributors and helpers, is time you are not investing in your art and story. You need to strike an equilibrium, I guess. Not that I would know how to do it, to be honest.

[LilithFairen]

I've tried advertising my work on various sites.

And pretty much nothing came of it.

So trying to no avail kind of dissuades a person from trying more.