Lately in the forums, I've seen posts from people who do not feel like they are doing as well as they should be here on Tapas, and may be getting discouraged.
Invariably, when I check on these people, they are doing just fine! They are performing decently or even excellently for a community comic on this site.
Look, I know it's hard. Don't get discouraged if your comic is not instantly in the millions of views. The first 10 updates are a very difficult bar for a solo comic creator to clear. This has been true since the early days of the internet, and I've seen it over and over. Comics are hard. They take a lot of work to make, and doing the work is the unavoidable barrier to entry for this medium. . If you do a page a week, then by the time you have 10 pages, you've been working steadily for two and a half months!
But your readers don't know (and don't care tbh) about the work you put in. What they see is a comic with less than a dozen updates - is that a story worth reading? Is it worth investing their emotions in? Is this author/artist going to leave me dangling in the breeze? Will they go on hiatus forever just as things were getting started?
Most webcomics die around or before that point. The vast majority, even.
I know it feels like a meager return for your work to have 19 subscribers and a couple hundred views after two months of production effort, to say nothing of the likely years you spent developing your comic before you even started writing a page.
How can we fight that feeling of discouragement? How can we persevere to get our comic over that initial hump - to get a year of regular updates in, to get to that point of success? I have some advice.
1. Set your expectations realistically low. For my comic Etherwood, I hoped to get a subscriber a week initially. And there were some months where I averaged that. After all, I was brand new to internet advertising, I'm a social media Neanderthal, and I had no base going in. If you set your expectations low, you'll be pleasantly surprised if you perform better, rather than being disappointed that you aren't an overnight sensation.
2. Find your comic 'peers' to compare against. Look to your left and right. Take a note of which comics in your genre started around the same time as you. Find a couple at a similar quality level to yours that started within a month of you. Note them down, keep track of them. If they perform better than you, find out what they're doing that you could also do. (It probably has little to do with your actual comic pages). All of the comic peers I started with died before a year was out.
3. Focus on the craft. How can you make your comic the best version of itself that it can be? Are you giving it your best effort?
4. Keep a disciplined production schedule. When willpower falters, discipline makes it easier to keep going. Try to avoid those hiatuses. See if you can finish out your first year without taking one. I know as a reader, I usually wouldn't bother getting into a comic that has less than a year's worth of posts and is already on hiatus.
5. Always be learning! Look at those comics that rocketed up right past you, not with jealousy, but with curiosity. What did they do that you could emulate? Is there anything you can gain? Be happy for others' success. More readers for them is more webcomic readers in general, we're not in a zero sum game here.
And finally, if you're an indie webcomic working in your spare time, don't compare yourself against professionally produced and marketed comics, including the entire Tapas "comics" section. You're not a team of full-timers, you don't have corporate backing - there's no reasonable comparison to that.
How is your comic performing vs expectations? Do you have any more tips or ideas I should have included?
Would you like an unbiased outsider's opinion on how your community comic is doing? Post it below, I'll give an honest appraisal!
