I was lucky enough to get New and Noteworthy within my first week of posting, so I shot up pretty quickly in subs. Since then it's been a steady decline though. I'm currently stalled out and have been for quite some time, so I can confirm that natural growth can be a bit of a slow crawl.
I think the best thing you can do is stay engaged with your current audience. Engagement is more important than sub count! I manage to get comments on every update, despite having a relatively slow paced introductory chapter, and I suspect it's in part thanks to the fact that I reply to nearly all of them. (The only time I don't reply is when I struggle for days to think of what to say and come up with nothing haha). I imagine new readers see me posting in the comments and it makes it feel like a less impersonal, more welcoming atmosphere. I hope so, anyway!
I started out about a year ago and I have 73 unique subscribers.
Personally, it fully depends on;
1. Time of year since there's ALL sorts of things.
2. Frequency of uploads.
3. Quality of uploads.
4. Overall interraction with the community.
If I didn't do #4, I'd have only 40 or so probably.
I was on Trending ONCE, but hey, I'm happy.
For my current series: https://tapas.io/series/Bad-Idea-League2, I started about 4 weeks ago, with 10 pages so far, and my current subscriber count is...
Six.
Before I got featured I had a decent climb of 10-15 subs per update, I think now I get about 20-30? But I also lose a couple every once in a while. I think the trick is to make every update have content and try to avoid “filler” pages because of the plot isn’t moving quick enough your readers might lose interest. That’s why “page-an-update” doesn’t always work.
Hey, my situation seems to be very different from other peoples posts. I used tapas back when it was still called tapstic so I already had some followers when i started my recent new webtoon however, I easily got several hundred followers a day maybe about 1000 a week because I was placed and the New and Noteworthy page. I find however that after it was taken down it is ridiculously ridiculously difficult to get followers on Tapastic. I have no idea what happened to the site. Back in 2013 it was so much easier and now even though I have nearly 5000 followers the number actually barely changes from week to week. I find that webtoons does a much better job of trafficking new readers to their discover comics. That could be an option for you. Overall, the sad truth is that Tapas is just really saturated with comics so unless you get a feature/advertisement from Tapas, it seems like you barely get any followers, even for people like me who have a higher amount of followers. Goodluck!
Yes, is normal. I have been here for 30 days I have 36 subs (who I love dearly) But daily updates have not be sufficient at all to have any traffic whatsoever. If it was not for the forum I would have 3 subs and 2 views. Looking at the stats some days I have like 2 views. I'm totally okay if people think my comic is garbage
and that is why the don't subscribe, But I'm worried that people apparently are not even aware we exist.
My subs journey has been long and torturous, haha.
I tend to do short-ish comics of about 50-70 pages, I've been doing that for four years or so. Unfortunately this means that I lose people along the way as I start a new comic. I started posting on Tapas a couple of years into comic-making, posting up two completed comics gradually over a few months and getting about 50 subs each on them.
Then I posted up some weird personal "about my life" style comics... and they got into Staff Picks, back when that was a thing. I got about 500 subs in a couple of days. I was delighted, but also heartbroken that it had happened on some little one-shots which frankly, i didn't like doing and which weren't my best work. I'm quite a private person and I'd decided that I didn't enjoy creating comics about my own life.
It was so tempting to keep making more, but I decided to stay true to my ART and keep creating my story comics, despite receiving fewer subs. Then when I posted my latest comic, Earth in a Pocket, it got into New and Noteworthy, although not on the front page of it. This resulting in about 200 new subs, so not as good as Staff Picks, but I felt happy that a comic I love ended up being featured somehow.
It's been slow going since then, though. Overall I had about 800 subs overall, on all my comics, and that's dropped to about 730 because that rate at which people have been unsubbing from my little one-shot personal comics is greater than the rate people have been subbing to my story comics.
I get two or three subs every update, about 10-12 a month.
Yes it is normal.
If you want to be famous, you have to draw what's trending, what people want to read, not what you love to. But if you just want to draw and share for other to read. Then you shouldn't care about how much subscriber you have at all.
20 people is enough people to fill up your house just to read your comic, don't you think?