Totally normal, I'm afraid.
Fresh is an unbiased ordered list of series by most recent update time. Many many people are updating all the time so it's not uncommon for a series to only be on the first few pages of Fresh for a few minutes.
Trending is a step up, every few minutes your series is ranked against all the others in terms of recent engagement (subs/likes/comments). Only expect to see your series here on days where you've gotten a sub or two and several likes/comments.
Popular is a step up but similar to trending, basically the series that manage to "Trend" for an extended period. This is very hard to accomplish, don't expect your series to show up here until it starts Trending often.
And staff picks is the hardest of all because the staff hand picks series for that list, so you both have to catch their attention and also compete against other works.
Jenny posted as I was typing this up, but yes! According to this thread, point #4:
you can only appear in fresh once per day (seems more or less accurate). Doing 1 update Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday is much better on this platform than doing all 3 on Monday (example, of course). Many people might spread that out and don Mon/Weds/Fri or something. (of course many of us can only manage 1 update per week as is )
That is indeed the reality of the system. Promoting your own work is the best way to go as a new creator There are a few recent threads on this topic if you'd like some promotion ideas:
My personal promotion routine each week when I update is:
- Post on instagram
- Post on Twitter
- Post on my Artist Facebook
- Share that to my personal FB page
- post on r/comics and r/webcomics
- hit the forum's "Post Your Latest Page -Month- 2018!" thread.