How Long Did It Take You To Gain A Significant Following...Or Not

[JRHoch]

I know the word "significant" varies from one person to the next, but I'm curious about how much time various creators gave their comics before deciding to move on to a new project.

I've read some excellent comics with over 20 posts that have under 50 subs. And I've seen other comics where someone posts a sketch or only a cover and they have dozens of subs before the story even starts. Does this all come down to having a lot of comics friends or followers on this platform or another platform--or is there something else I'm missing? Is heavy advertising involved? Because, obviously, exposure on the fresh tab isn't going to do it.

How many people started on Tapas or Webtoon with no following and no social media footprint, starting basically from zero, and hit 500 or a 1000 subs within 4 months?

Thanks in advance for sharing any insight you have.

[OttoGruenwald]

The Power of Stardust | Tapas

It took about a year for Power of Stardust to get to 100 subs. Judging by how many views I get per update (once every two weeks) I think most of my readership is off-tapas though.

The Trespasser and the Architects of Dreams | Tapas

My novel recently started, but it's slow to pick up steam with only 4 subs and 100 views. I think novels are just slower in general to pick up steam.

For people that started on tapas and webtoons with NO social media...I'm not sure you're going to find many people like that. I had a very small footprint when Power of Stardust first started but turned to social media in a few months when I saw growth was stagnant. Sure enough, my numbers picked up after I started using twitter and 4chan and mirroring on smackjeeves.

My advice is to network as much as possible. 4chan has a webcomics community on /co/. Get your irl friends to sub. Shill shill shill. Find a creator with similar works to your own and see if you can arrange mutual shout-outs and plugs.

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[Inspector_Spinda]

Conclusion? The key is GL. Lol

Seriously though. My first comic had crap art since I’d just started drawing. It was medieval fantasy. Can’t remember how many subs it got but less than 30 for 20 pages and tons of promotion. Second was about a necromancer and it was a similar situation. I remember one time I had two comics running and 79 subs. It took a lot of time on the forums.

My current comic I have 70 subs for the first two months and 4 more so far in this one ( I took a hiatus and gained no subs between)

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[JRHoch]

How many episodes did you post for the 1k subs?

[beta1042]

Well i was never gonna move on cause I just want to work on this comic and see it through to the end... but
On tapas it has always been pretty dead, maybe getting 0-5 subs an update, but also usually losing 0-2 subs an update too. On webtoon my comic started off ok, it got 100 subs in the first week, but then it suddenly stopped having as much growth and only got about 5-10 subs a week. That's when I started to branch out and make artist friends(around 3months in). They helped me polish my style a bit and many did cross promo with me and that's where I found the most help. With the nakama power i reached 500 subs in about 4mon and had steadyish growth from there. Eventually I started making the top 30 list on drama which also helped. And then when I was close to 7k subs webtoon noticed me and gave me a promo on discover.

[joannekwan]

I started Demon House here on Tap a bit over 4 years ago, with no significant following elsewhere (unless you count tumblr, where I had maybe 1k followers at the time? But I doubt too many migrated here for the comic). All of my subs for the comic were basically built from this site and I'm pretty sure I had 1k subs within the first couple of months of posting (without a feature or anything).

However I was lucky in that since I started 4 years ago, the site did not have as many creators as it does now, so it was easier to land near the top of the popular page and been seen overall.

[JRHoch]

It's easy to trick your brain to be happy creating BL; just draw girls with no breasts and narrow hips and give them boy names. You are good to go.

[Nerdicon]

You need only look @ my stuff to see I started Back in 2016 and then had an on and off upload relationship with Tapas. Mostly cause of external forces. Networking can help nab an audience same way interacting with other creators can. But I think truthfully and I know it may be a drive but - I am only projecting what I've thought in the past not yourself so take this with a grain of salt - looking at the numbers, the subs the views etc it doesn't help. Makes you think terribly because you know in your heart, I put so much work into this and this result doesn't feel worth it.

I've grown exponentially since I started back up in february and have had constant subscriber gains which waiver of course month by month. I know an artist called Slugbomb who's series Wyrm Guard has only had 11 people subbed and its a really good looking comic and has an interesting story.

Truth of the matter is for some we see the grind and others we only look at their success and ponder how? My advice, don't give a rats ass about it and no matter what number pops up you keep making your content because you enjoy it.

Take Jens rom Blue Life as an example. I'm sure you may have seen his comic regarding support from fans? In Summary, don't set big expectations for yourself cause anything you do you will hate and you won't see the support that's there for you. If you have a story to tell, tell it and share it and enjoy the little things.

If you focus on that success won't seem far away!

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[joannekwan]

Or even keep one of the girl names. I've seen a lot of BL where one of the guys has a name predominantly used for girls in real life. xD

[JRHoch]

contact" with the "duckie" and the "waka waka" until the "zapong

Never quite heard it described that way! But I thought you said Romance sells--that's not the same as porn. My comic has no contact" with the "duckie" and the "waka waka" until the "zapong

[KRWright]

I'm going to post here about novels, as the numbers can be a bit different for us, but we can also end up rising through the ranks/getting front page/popular more easily as well. I'm only going to count my non-short stories or non-hiatus works here.

• The Accidental Prince - 3100 subs - 71 episodes (Posted 1st November 2019 - was updated twice a day for nearly a month, then daily. Promoted by Tapas and won Writer's Camp. Without Tapas promotion I was at about 2200 subs.)
• Freedom's Pyre - 88 subs - 30 episodes - A little over a month (it was posted May 12th 2019 - after I won Writer's Camp and hasn't really taken off in the same explosive manner even though it updates daily. Meanwhile, on Wattpad it's racking up 200 reads a day and broke 50k reads on Friday.)
• The Mortician of Avalon - 74 subs - 1 episode (Posted 8th June - this one blew up from the teaser alone and I'm going to say that the thumbnail is working HARD for this one.)

I can't find a rhyme or reason for growth. Some things just capture the zeigeist I think.

[sweetbea]

More, like romance in general.

I can guarantee you this is how most people manage to gain a huge following out of nowhere, at least on Webtoon.

Webtoon is home to a large audience of teenage and adult women, making any sort of anime-esque romance comic an instant hit. In my personal experience, I uploaded a 7-panel episode of my first ever romance comic with godawful art a couple years ago (imagine terrible anime proportions with scribbley line art and color), and I got 800 subs within the first week. No advertising, no mention of it anywhere; it was just a stupid little comic I made for my friends, which I hadn't even told them about yet. I got a bunch of comments along the lines of "omg the mc is soooo cute!!!11!!" and "i ship so hardddd!"

I ultimately dropped it because I hadn't expected such a huge response, and I didn't want the internet's first impression of me to be a poorly-drawn romance with little to no substance. I always figured that my popularity sprung from the decent anime thumbnail for my comic which caught the eye of people on fresh and drew them into the first episode. As far as I knew, no one shared it on social media.

But yeah, fun times. All you need to get a huge following is to cater to the largest demographic on the website you're posting on. I most likely wouldn't have gotten such a response on Tapas (I didn't know of the site at the time), because the main demographic is split between indie comics and BL. I've come to believe that subs and popularity shouldn't be a factor in deciding if you should continue your comic, though. Despite the influx of subscribers I got, I didn't enjoy making episodes for that comic at all, and I most likely would've burnt out sooner or later.

Make something you love, not something that's popular.

[JRHoch]

"i ship so hardddd"

I'm going to drink some whiskey now!

[Maps]

I started posting my novel on Halloween And dropped like 40 chapters of it within that week (I was new to Tapas and didn’t think about how pacing could have been beneficial ). I’ve got 120 followers on there now. I noticed that once I changed my thumbnail from a quick generic art I did to one my two main characters, I started getting more subs.
I’ve posted 6 chapters to my comic (that I began posting in December) and I have like 190ish followers and still continue to gain them even though I post monthly on that. I think it’s mainly because it’s a BL and that’s such a popular genre on this site.

[graveweaver]

Just to provide a counterpoint on the previous claim that you need romance to gain a huge following out of nowhere, I uploaded my supernatural story (very very little romance) on webtoons and gained 50k subs in a month- At the time I had no significant following elsewhere. My comic is very different from most of the comics on webtoons, it's a supernatural thriller with a focus on the moral quandaries the main character must face because she's forced to be a murderer.

Create good content and people will read your work. Chasing clout with what is popular TBH just makes your story blend in with the 50000 other stories like it, yeah you'll get an influx of subs but people won't even remember your main character's name.

[JRHoch]

Thanks for the counterpoint! I's good to hear different views. My comic isn't like anything else, so blending in isn't my problem. However, I don't work in an anime style--and I think that certainly can be an obstacle to people who are used to a certain style of artwork and a certain type of story.

[joannekwan]

I don't work in an anime style--and I think that certainly can be an obstacle to people who are used to a certain style of artwork and a certain type of story.

OH god, I think that's definitely one of my obstacles in luring in more people to read my stories.