It's just about one year since I started posting my cozy romance fantasy Etherwood here. When I first started, I did a good amount of searching for topics like this so that I could set my expectations appropriately, and learn from what does and doesn't work on Tapas.
What was the plan? What were my expectations?
I had three chapters complete (72 pages) before I started posting pages. The idea was to post the whole first chapter at once, since nobody wants to read a comic with less than 10 pages, then weekly updates from there on - 1 page per week is what I can reliably produce.
I would post my comics to r/comics a week after they came out on Tapas - and that was pretty much my whole advertising plan. I've never really had an online following and I'm terrible at social media, so that was about as far as I got with that.
I did not expect to make any money from Tapas at all (webcomics are not a good side gig if you're in it for the money!). I hoped to get 4 new subscribers every month on average, which would put me at 48 by the end of the year. You might think that's a bit low, but since it's a SFW slow burn romance comic, I'm at a disadvantage to fetish or humor comics in terms of sheer meme-ability. Etherwood is also a solo affair, so I have limited attention and time for marketing as well.
So how'd I do?
Well, I didn't miss any uploads! That's more than most comics can say. All the comics that started on the same day as me have gone on indefinite hiatus now. To that end, I'd recommend to newer webcomic artists to build a year's worth of backlog before going live. It helps to build the discipline of keeping up a regular comic, and you won't be discouraged by the lack of views common to new comics.
Here's the stats after a year:
Views were much better than I expected! One of my comic pages performed very well on Reddit in April, which was a nice boost. That burst of enthusiasm died down a bit, but lately I've had a more solid monthly distribution. Not much on comments - I find people are more likely to comment somewhere else than actually on Tapas. Most comments have been positive. I have fielded a number of "I never knew this existed," type comments, which means I need to find some better avenues to advertise, I think.
Every month has given me more than the 4 subscribers I expected. Some of my subscribers are only subscribed to Etherwood, so that's a win. I even made it past 100 subscribers, making me eligible for that mythical 'monetized' status, which netted me a whopping $0.20 this year. Don't go into webcomics for the money, folks. My Patreon also makes $5 a month, which is not bad. After all, none of that is from my mom!
I hope next year will be even better! We'll see next October. I've found that while there seems to be a lot of new comics every day, there are really very few that make it past 6 months. If you're a new comic maker, see if you can make it to that point without any hiatuses or missed uploads.
There are comics who did better than I did, but many more that did worse. I'm thrilled to have accomplished more than I expected. The comics that did better had a much more go-getter advertising plan, were team efforts, or both. I'd say I need a couple more comic pages to perform well before I can start consistently pulling strong numbers.
Did this help you? How did I compare to your comic?
You can see Etherwood here:
I'll also sub4sub if you're interested. Just comment below!
