How do you feel when you see a comic that has 1/4 your art skills have more subscribers than yours?

[kyupol]

I feel they're doing something right as far as marketing goes. How about you?

[MidZM]

A lot of times when that happens it due to one or couple of factors.

• It's BL
• They brought people from a previous site where they were popular
• They got lucky and the Tapas staff saw their comic when it first came out and it was featured on Staff Picks (This one is a bit biased...)
• The RIGHT person saw their comic and loved it so much that is was shared by them causing a chain reaction of shares and subs.

And probably other factors, sometimes it is just them being good at marketing but most of the time when I see it happen it's one of those pre-existing or luck based factors I listed. (Except BL, BL is something that almost always gets you a lot of subs...)

[azureXtwilight]

There are a few factors why a comic is popular, some can happen to you, some you need to try hard from scratch:

1. Better marketing
2. Already has a fan follower somewhere else and they also moved here from there
3. Makes comic that are popular for casual readers BL/Slice of Life
4. Is already well-known for a work in another medium
5. The fans are the type to share another's work
6. Featured in front page

EDIT : Lol @Mid25 ninja'd me

Anyway, don't give up and see the guidelines on how to make your work more well-known

[JKNNKL]

art skills are subjective, its not really fair to judge art skills in such a mathematical way? lolol maybe you think that your art skills are 4x theirs but its actually just a different style, and their style happens to be more popular.... just sayin \00/

[PotooGryphon]

Meh, my honest thoughts is that question misses the point.

Creating webcomics shouldn't be based on doing better than the creators around you. It's more based on telling your story, engaging your audience, and having fun.

Marketing is very important to do to ensure a series is visible online, however even that on sites like Tapastic is based on audience engagements more than subscriber count. The more a series can engage their whole subscriber base to view/like/comment/share an updated episode the faster that series will raise up in Tapastic's algorithm and appear on Popular and Trending.

For personal site, creators have to work harder with ads, social media, and guerilla marketing with flyers at local comic book stores and conventions.

I'd argue that Tapastic's setup actually takes pressure off creators because we get to focus on engaging and having fun with our series' audience rather than the above mentioned headache of marketing. Granted that marketing is required in a series's launch, perhaps, however it's a bit of a balance since inactive subscribers can also hurt a series because they're no longer engaging lowering the series algorithm.

So yeah, a majority of the creator's time is probably better suited creating engaging content for their audience rather than worrying about other creator's perceived success. And a sliver of time marketing a bit too, definitely. ^_^ There's a way to setup ads to promote your Tapastic series on Project Wonderful for free.

[keii4ii]

Meh, my honest thoughts is that question misses the point.

To be honest, even for people who really want their comics to become popular, sub count is SUCH an inadequate yardstick. It doesn't tell me much.

(There is nothing wrong with wanting their comic to be popular, though! That's not the same thing as making a comic in order to be popular.)

[Mari]

Doesn't really make me feel like anything because;

1. The writing might be 20 x better than your comic's. Casual readers are very forgiving when it comes to drawings / drawing style, as anything half-way decent will look great to the untrained eye. So what you might want to take into consideration is if the story is good, rather than focus down on the technical prowess of the art.

2. Does the beginning of the comic have a strong hook? A lot of the time people check the first couple episodes before clicking away if they dislike the art style / feel indifferent to it. If you look at the stats and see that 40% of viewers drop out around episode 3, you might want to re-think & draw the beginning of your comic. First impressions are extremely important.

3. If the comic is comedy, does the comic utilize timing? A lot of the time I see comedy comics suffer because the artist doesn't utilize the timing of the panels correctly, rather than sticking with the 3-panel strip format. With comics the proper size & length of the panels is more than half what the actual joke is.

[shazzbaa]

My personal feelings kind of tend to be a reverse of Mid25's comments about luck -- my comic's style and story aren't a perfect fit for the branding of Tapastic, and I only joined last year, so the amount of subs I have here isn't really a reflection of my level of skill so much as my good fortune over time in finding the sorts of folks who like what I do. So, like, seeing someone else with more subs, whether their art is stunning or not, isn't all that weird or surprising.

"Art skill" is a weird factor to base off of anyway. Like, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that my pages probably take more technical skill than, say, Dinosaur Comics -- but if the timing is good and the jokes land then it doesn't really matter who's exercising more skill, does it? So many things go into making a comic attractive to an audience other than artistic skill -- the genre, the pacing, the humour, the story, the types of characters, the tone, the update schedule, the accessibility of the subject matter, the style......

Outside of Tapastic, I used to look at how long other comics had been running -- mostly so that, as a young creator looking around me to see how I was doing, I could see that the people with huge audiences were people who'd been doing this a long time, and I wasn't "behind." I used to definitely feel a pang of "ahhh!! I wish that were me!!!" when I would run into a comic that had gotten suddenly famous with fewer updates than my own, and I'd try to figure out what they'd done to achieve it. But seeing how crippling that sudden pressure has been to those few """lucky""" creators makes it a lot easier to tone down any jealously and remember that I hope for that kind of audience to find me gradually.

[ahhvecadoes]

Honestly, good for them? We're all trying to make it out here and while I might not think the art is at my "level" or whatever, they're doing something right and it's making them happy.

I'm cool getting gradual followers bc, like @shazzbaa said, it's less stressful and anxiety-inducing to have a huge following immediately. Feels more personal, anyway.

[blinkingkills]

"technical skill" is not the end all be all of how popular a comic can be.

i'm not gonna say that i don't get jealous and petty because i do, and thats a personality flaw of mine, but once i calm myself i realize that my being able to draw a person with good proportions has very little to do with whether someone actually wants the read the comic.

maybe they convey emotion better than i do, maybe their story is more engaging.

maybe their background don't look like a desolate post apocalyptic city when its actually supposed to be just a normal city.

composition, color, linework, ability to draw action, fluid storytelling, interesting story, good looking speechbubbles with a matching text, readability, fanservice, graphic design, keen marketing skills, that certain je nais se qious . You don't need all of them be successful, but i find popular comics have a lot of them, and it makes up for some of the things that they do lack.

also as an aside like i feel a lot people use the "well my comic isn't BL" as a common excuse to not more carefully examine the other reasons why their comic is not doing as well as they like. I mean external factors are always easier because it means its not my fault that my comic isn't doing well, but like, i can go into any comic book store and none of the comics will be BL and they seem to be selling fine, you know?

I have a whole host of reasons for my problems, including the fact that i'm not great at panelling, there is some janky composition, my colors are dull and tapastic desaturating my files by like 15 percent does not help. my characters are not drawn consistantly enough, i have trouble with persepective, boring character designs, not enough action shots, really terrible backgrounds, and much more.

to me, once i fix those problems to my satisfaction and make my comic as good as i believe it can be, maybe then i have an excuse to pin the blame on "my comic isn't BL"

sorry i went off topic but i have...feelings.

[Mari]

You put in perfect words my annoyance with the "my comic isn't BL" excuse, thanks!

[OliviaMerteli]

Drawing is just a part of making comic and (in my opinion) not the most important one. I will gladly read a comic with poor art and great story, I'll rapidly quit a comic with great art but poor writing. And I won't even talk about panelling dialogue, etc some explained it better than I could.

I'll just say one thing: I find it a little pretentious to judge your art work 4 time better than some other people. I'd like to know what criterias you use to estimâte things like that. Because I've never seen artists talk like that.

[JKNNKL]

JONJONJOMSKOMSKMOSKMOSKOM OMG i have been harboring this exact feel from like the moment i started reading forums anojajoma anytime someone complains about bl being more famous than them i just feel myself dehydrate from all the salt arghhh like if you wanna be all "omg i have too much Les Artistic Integrity and Les Deep Writing to write trashy BL" and then complain when u dont get subs then like ????? sorry but maybe your comic just isn't interesting lolololol i would rather read some fun and entertainign BL written by a genuine person than someone who blames the world for being not ~~~~deep~~ and ~~~englightened~~~~ enought to appreciate their ~~~~~true art~~~~~ ajsjkslsjslla sorry tapastic don't ban me account

[cleo_san]

Well... I personally would set my skill level at... upper middle, I guess, so there are many people better than me, but also many people worse than me =)

I actually read both XD I don't care much goos a person is drawing, as long as the story is catching, well thought through and I like the characters. =) A friend of mine draws really... not that good, nevertheless I love the story so I stick to it, even draw fanart. She's got good characters and - for her first story - a pretty good beginning. =)

As long as someone puts his/her heart and soul into a project, I don't care how many subs someone has O n the first view it might be frustrating but most of the time there are good reasons for that! =)

The only thing where I immediately click away is when I can't read the text (due to sloppy handwriting or small font)

[azureXtwilight]

Whoah, I guess some people just need to hakuna their tatas. I think no replies so far is saying BL is bad, it's just that it is a popular medium. Then again, the thread title is a little controversial in itself, since it seems like it's labeling that popular comics has mediocre art. That is not usually the case.

So to sum it up, and this topic has been repeated several times now, THERE IS NO FORMULA TO BECOME POPULAR.
Don't compare your work with others, it's just gonna make you feel worse and has less will to continue. Just focus on making your work even better. Remember, webcomic is not just about artwork, it's about storytelling as well. (And don't forget a lot of heart!)

[punkarsenic]

kinda confuses me, because art is my number 1 focus. usually it makes sense when you look at the sub / view ratio - having 100 subs and 30k views is not good, having 50 subs and 2k views is.

[Mari]

BL might be a popular medium, but if you were to research the trends of webcomic, monetary the most profitable genre is actually Het porn, not BL. And it's not that people were frustrated by the replies saying that BL is bad (which they were not), but that people seem keen to push any fault in their own work to the genre. Which is a very counter-productive way to view things first, and second it's implying that everything in BL is popular, which is another false statement. I read a lot of BL (manga and webcomics) and a fair amount of it is shit. But those that are shit usually don't end up being popular, for obvious reasons.

[JKNNKL]

pinjnhunuj edeseddr kooooookko gyggy

[azureXtwilight]

Don't compare your work with others, it's just gonna make you feel worse and has less will to continue. Just focus on making your work even better.

Yep, this is basically my summary.

[azureXtwilight]

Yeah, I understand that. I just find it's odd to rant on this particular one since no one is explicitly ranting about it. It would be more profitable to use that argument against some more explicitely BL-attacking posts.

(Don't post in that one though, it's pretty much dead. Necro-ing is probably against the rules somewhere)