Is someone actually reading my Novel on Tapas?

[arjunindica]

Hello everyone, I have recently joined Tapas and I am enjoying it a lot. But something is struck in my mind from few days.
I have started writing a novel on Tapas around 2 months ago. But in recent days my views are getting a sudden jump. I don't know why, while my subscriber count remains same as that of two months i.e. 6 subscribers. Now the views are going to touch 500. So I want to ask you all guys is this a glitch or this is how the algorithm works ? I want to know what exactly is happening ?

[Kelheor]

Did you do more promotion recently? Here, discord, reddit? Maybe more updates?
I don't know how much views you had before, but maybe your novel was hanging in the Fresh longer than usual and more people stumbled upon it. Can't say if you were promoted on Community front page, since the sub count hasn't changed.

[moontokkym]

That seems relatively normal to me. Some people are going to check out your book and not subscribe, especially if you've published more chapters recently that'll have pushed you closer to the top of the "new" tab in your category. Plus, if you have multiple chapters out and someone reads all of them but forgets to subscribe / decides not to then that counts 1 person as however many chapters you have's number of views.

Plus some people are just ghost readers, they don't like or subscribe, if you've talked about it to friends or family who don't have a tapas account, their views will be counted if they looked at it on a web browser. It's not uncommon to see a total number of views that are 100x or even 1000x higher than subscriber count.

[arjunindica]

No, I have not done the promotion recently but I have scheduled my upcoming chapter twice a week

[arjunindica]

Yeah, now it makes sense. Thanks for the information

[Drippy]

Would you know if you were promoted on the front page? That sounds like quite an accomplishment but I remember reading somewhere that there isn't really a way to know if you are promoted. How do you promote on reddit. I've only promoted on the forums here.

[Kelheor]

@Drippy you can't really, they won't notify you about it. You can only judge by a much bigger spike of views/subscribers. Sometimes people find out about it days later when looking at impressions on dashboard or other comic friends telling them. Usually if you see people subscribing, you can go and check out the front page. But as @moontokkym said, it's not abnormal to just gain some views here and there without any promotion.
Sorry, can't say anything about promoting novels, but usually you just find a suitable subreddit to post something there and add a link if the subreddit is allowing it. For comics the couple of big ones are r/webtoons and r/comics

[moontokkym]

You're not told lol, my first ever post on the forums was asking where my subscriber jumps were coming from and I was told I was most likely boosted but I don't go on the front page very often so I never noticed out of the minimum 2 times it happened, possibly 3. I only noticed there was something happening because for 5 days my phone was blowing up with new subscriber notifications, like 10+ per day and then going back to the usual couple of subs per week. Even then if my comic was bigger I might not notice a jump like that. It really depends on your size.

[Katzalcoatl]

From what I have read (take it with a grain of salt since it is not hands on experience) but subredits for novel promotions are not well received. On the other hand, posting your novel chapters is well received.

It may be due to the fact that people spam links and you can get downvoted without any reason.

@arjunindica as a fun fact, most viewers in any format do not subscribe nor interact with your work. They just watch. You can see such statistics especially on sites like facebook. A video can have over 7M views with almost no comments and around 48k likes. This also happens in youtube.

As a general tip you should try to use the like/view ratio as a guide to know which episodes were more successful and why. Don't become obssesed with it. Just try to use it as a guide to improve future chapters.

P.S. I use likes as a reference since they are most likely the people who will keep reading for the long run. Few exceptions here and there.

[Kelheor]

"Posting your chapters" where, on subreddits? also where are they not well-received? I mean promoting novels on comics subreddits definitely doesn't sound like a great idea, but I suppose better places to do that exist
First things first - finding a place and reading the rules. I am not big fan of Reddit, but for promo it's not worse than any other.

[Katzalcoatl]

From what I read and from what I have been told by other novel authors (grain of salt not my own experience). I probably shouldn't have said not well received and instead I should have said that they don't help in promotion (for novels).
According to some authors I spoke to, posting links for novels doesn't really do anything and if your account is mostly created to just post that link it can get you a shadowban.

You should have other type of posts to prevent such a shadow ban. If I recall correctly your promotional posts should not pass 20% of your regular posts depending on the amount of times you post. At least that is what a handful of novel authors have told me. Wether the shadow ban is true or not I cannot confirm nor deny that.

Without taking that into consideration they did tell me that self promoting a novel on reddit with links to different sites doesn't really bring any traffic or any new readers. Instead redditers prefer to read oneshots or follow certain stories created under a new subreddit.

A fellow novel author who is actually super successful posts their story on reddit and on RoyalRoad. I haven't asked them the details on how they self promote in reddit but I can pretty much guess their huge fanbase from Royal Road helped them promote their subreddit dedicated to posting the chapters of their novel.

Again this is not my experience. I did decide against self promoting on reddit (as a novel author) after asking several authors and finding out the reasons mentioned above. I won't post my novel on reddit since I am skeptical that every novel will have some form of success by posting full chapters in the existing subreddits. The author that is doing it is pretty much a unicorn. But I do know that posting oneshot novels on the right subreddit is well received (in general terms probably depends on the story) by the community.

P.S. The subreddit that the author I mentioned uses is r/HFY. They have a relative good success success posting each chapter in Humanity, Fuck Yeah! subreddit.

[Drippy]

I'll try posting here

[arjunindica]

Thanks, I thought it was strange that only views were getting in number. I now know the reason. I will just publish the chapters and the rest I will leave it to the readers