Staff pick is just that, a personal pick. It's our best guess that new series tend to show up more often than old series because staff likely monitors new series. First off they want to make sure a new series isn't too violent/racy/vulgar. Next it's much easier to check in on 40 new series each day than it is to on 600 new updates of old series. Yes, that's the "average" day on Tapas/tic. 40 new series, 600 updates. Pretty mind blowing eh? So if they see a new series pop up that shows a lot of promise it gets a Staff Pick (SP) and maybe even a Daily Snack (DS) too.
If getting a SP or a DS is important to you, here are our recommendations. Rather than posting the cover and then a few pages on day one, doing each page as a separate episode, you are better off waiting until you have 5-7 pages plus the cover, then post the cover as one episode and pages 1-5 or 1-7 as the next episode. This is especially true for long form comics because we've never seen a DS that picks a single long form comic page. The DS is all about "share-ability".
Tapastic has a "growth" and a "content" department and they work hand in hand each day to get more traffic coming to the site daily. This is of course good for everyone because it means more readers for all. Comics that are shared are more likely to get noticed on social media and get more eyes on them. At the end of the day its all about "impressions". Twitter watches what is getting retweeted and liked and pushes those things. With webcomics its numbers game. Popularity begets popularity. Some readers won't care to read until 1000s others are reading you already. So as creators you need to make at least one episode available that fits into the mold of being sharable.
Gag-a-days are easily shareable. Long form are hard to share because a single page pulled form a long story loses a lot of its punch. However if you put multiple long form pages together then you have something more easily sharable so its much more likely to get a DS. Which is why we recommend every long from at least have one episode that would fit as a DS. Yes you are going to earn less ad revenue by linking 5-7 pages together than having them separately, but the massive subscriber boost from a DS is going to far outweigh the revenue loss.
On the other hand please don't have every episode be 5-7 pages because it takes many mobile users a long time to load that much data. Readers are going to give up on waiting. Remember the Tapas side of things are people with just a few minutes to give. Make sure things load quickly for them.
Having a SP is about having a great cover and an eye catching icon. No, really it is. Staff want the best stuff on the homepage. The only things they can control though are the spotlight and SP. Popular and Trending are controlled by readers. Often you only get one chance to impress a new reader so staff strives to make the homepage look high quality so they pick high quality stuff.
