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

[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!

[ble]

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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.

[Wumbl]

A couple of years for me! It's been a very steady slope for me, until this year when things started to really pick up.
I have a pretty respectable following on here and on WebToon now, though. I never thought there would be several hundred people reading my stuff when I started out.

[SketchbookKid]

I've been uploading my comic Serenade Song here for 3 going on 4 years, and I'm currently sitting at 131 subs. It's been a slow build to that number as the fantasy genre is pretty packed. I also publish on webtoons(2 years over there i think?) with a 397 sub count. I guess its not that significant in number, nothing close to the thousands, but a smaller collective of people reading is nice as well. Though i am interested in gaining more of a following, i'm happy anyone is reading my story.

[graveweaver]

Yeah, I think art style has a really big factor for the success of a Webtoon unfortunately Anime is obviously king, I don't know if I'd classify the korean style as "anime" per se (like lookism and true beauty) but those are also supreme.
This of course doesn't mean off-styles can't be popular, I'd say a lot of the successful webtoons (im just looking at webtoons here because its the only platform im active on atm) have cartoon styles. However I don't see much success with, like, realistic western styles (like superheroes and stuff) which is unfortunate.

[skicoak]

However I don't see much success with, like, realistic western styles (like superheroes and stuff) which is unfortunate.

Seconded.

This seems to be the biggest hurdle we keep running into on Oddly Vanilla. Even though we don't do a lot of "superheroes" per se, We keep running into this style resistance, sometimes even with other creators.

[GesuGesu]

I'd say I'm mid-tier in following count since I average around the upper hundreds (~600+) on most platforms, but on Tapas and Webtoons especially, I somehow jumped to the thousands fairly easily. I guess I'm better suited for comics?

---

And when I say these number averages, here's my evidence and explanations for how each got to where it is today.

eg) Deviantart. Deviantart is a weird place since you can literally BUY followers. I did. I had spare DA points, so I traded them on a bot called DAhub where people would get DA points for following me.Out of my followers, I think only about 300 are true followers.

Twitter: around 400 of my followers came in the first year. That's about 57% of my total followers that came in the initial year! The rest trickled in over the next 4-5 years.
And yes, followers don't come quickly. It did take me YEARS to get to this point.

I would think I'm also fairly mid-level on YouTube, although I didn't manage to gain subs until midway to late in my youtube career. The early beginnings of youtube for me was about 30-60 subs. Only when I joined a community and shared my videos more often did I gain a bit more traction.

As for Tapas, I originally posted a parody/comedy series, and it gained about 700 subscribers on its own. After that, I posted my popular BL work, and the numbers jumped to the 1000s quite quickly! The fans also found my older works through this newer, popular one, so my subs just skyrocketed

My total sub count is at 7.9k, spread out over about 6 ish series. Getting to almost 8k took me... 3-4 years? No rush, people. It came slowly over time, since even the goddamn gay cats webcomic wouldn't have gotten me this much within a month.

Webtoons was a bit trickier since I originally just reposted my Tapas series over to Webtoons all at once, but it barely gained traction (about 300 subs). Later I talked to a popular webtoon series creator and they said that timing mattered, so I deleted and re-uploaded the exact same series, but now I would do it weekly, upload on a weekday between 4-6pm PST, and the subs definitely went up. That was a fun discovery.

---

I can't even say that my "luck" is good because luck can't work out so many times over multiple platforms. I want to believe that I gained whatever following I have through my own hard work and efforts.

[kimketli]

This thread is pretty insightful Awesome!

[EPrescott]

I took 3-4 novels (each requires anywhere between 25-30 parts) and a bunch of consistent update to reach a total of 60 subs.

I'm lucky to be featured in the Staff Picks a few times now, and I've learned the trick to be featured. I'm not a superb writer, below-average. Since I'm quite anti-social and never venture out to make permanent friends, these features are the sole drive of subs for me. Otherwise, my subs drop flat.

I think the most important thing to "pop" out on Tapas is knowing the right person and also hope you can gain one of those readers that will tireless advocate for your work. I wasn't lucky to gain a vocal reader yet, but my subs are silent readers and they left votes on my works, which I am grateful for, nonetheless.

In addition, constant update (anything between daily to weekly are the most optimistic) and formatting is important. Aim for around 1,000 per chapter.

Writing about either BL or GL would also seriously reel in readers for you. Romance is a hit-or-miss/hope-for-the-best, while Fantasy/Paranormal is a crowded genre sector to claw up to the "famous" rank. Mystery and BL are goddamn difficult to get into, but once you've establish yourself there, people will follow you from sky to earth.

Slice of Life is a hard genre to nail, unless your book is also BL or GL or Seriously Great Romance.

Although, an end note, I think the most important thing to remember is just don't care and just be your best. Tapas seriously has so many feature opportunity. As long as you got the format in their optimist scope and update frequently, the Staff will take note of you.