How much of Webcomic success is luck?

[Llyrel]

Just in case anyone's like me and is spooked by any mention of 'people can tell what your true intentions are .... ooooo~', I have a concrete litmus test for myself to tell if I'm just using people for self-promotion. Basically, I ask myself; if doing this thing is 100% guaranteed to give me no attention towards my comic whatsoever, would I still want to do it, even a little bit?

LOL! No worries, I think it's perfectly normal for a creator to want some attention on their comic! And I also have similar worries sometimes, so I have a similar litmus test for myself, lol

Tbh, when referring to "creators can tell when you're just using them" I'm mostly talking about not-so-subtle behaviors such as "follow-unfollow", spamming a creator's comment section/social media account/DMs with self-promo posts and basically treating the other person like your personal promotion/like machine rather than an actual human being. To me, that's not "building connections", that's just... sub4sub and spam XD

[Nen]

It's like 1% luck, 99% effort. I think the best way to think of the luck based aspect is through recommendations.

Say you don't work hard and there's not a lot of chapters or interesting art /story etc and your comic gets recommended by some popular person or even word of mouth. The people it is recommended to will glance, find it boring, and leave. You won't even know they existed, you'll just notice your numbers never go up anymore.

Whereas if you had a draw, something cool, interesting marketing that recontextualised your characters allowing the audience to connect to them from a fresh perspective for example. You'll find that every recommendation retains more people, who are staying cause there's a great backlog of content or Interesting character/story.

The luck just doesn't become valuable until the work is high quality enough for wider appeal in some way.