How do you promote comic?

@darthmongoose Kate Holden
Tue, 31 Aug 2021 16:32:11 +0000

@darthmongoose wrote:

Well, I've managed to hit 1k subs, which is nothing huge, but doing all right. Here's what I've tried and how effective it was:

Advertising on the forums. This can be pretty effective and my approach was to make sure that there was a link to my comic in my forum bio (if you haven't done that yet, do it) and to avoid sub-for-sub threads, instead concentrating on threads that involve either talking about or sharing images or pages of the content of my comic. I also did stuff like reviews and helping people out, which would often result in people clicking my profile to see my work.

Joining discord communities. If they're with the right kind of people you vibe with, you'll get great support, make friends and get some engaged readers from this just by chatting about your work and having fun. Engaged readers are great because comments and likes will help you gain visibility on the site.

Social Media: Different comics are effective on different platforms. For me, Twitter works best, but for some people it's Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, Tumblr or even Facebook (no, really!) so try to have a presence on a few and test things out. I was relatively lucky on twitter that I've been in the UK comics scene a while, so benefitted from some signal boosts. I also have a decent twitter following for...uh... voicing a cartoon alien on youtube and making D&D jokes which helped!

Paid ads: For me so far, I've found ComicAd much cheaper and more effective for getting subs than Instagram, but I've heard running insta ads through Facebook Business can work better? I may experiment in the future.

Adding yourself to every list and wiki about webcomics you can find. Hey, it's worth a shot, right!? I have no idea how effective this was!

Banner Swap: I did a banner swap with some friends whose comics were of a similar level of readership and a similar kind of genre/audience. It was pretty effective, but partially because we were all around 800+ subs when we did it. Each of us gained somewhere around 30-50 subs from it.

As a general guideline, it's not just about WHERE you promote, you need to make sure your promo assets look good too. It doesn't matter if you spend $100 on a prime ad spot if your banner looks crappy, and having a polished looking cover and banner also helps you have a chance to get a staff pick, which is the absolute crown jewel, more effective than any of the other methods I've mentioned (I got staff pick at about 275 subs and it pushed me to just over 500), so if there's one big thing you can do for your comic, it's learn or pay for solid typography for your series logo and put effort into a good cover that reads well at small sizes.