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jwabeasley
Feb 20
1

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!

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kyupol
Feb 20

This is the most important. Once upon a time I was on geocities with about 5 regular readers at most, cranking out comics that looked like this... :laughing:

moontokkym
Feb 20

I had the happy surprise of doing the opposite of this: I was extremely pessimistic about how well my comic would do, and I took that for inevitable realism.

I decided I wanted to have 10 pages ready before publishing anything, and that I expected Twitch numbers. (For those who don't know, the average view count for a twitch stream was at one point 1 viewer because of how many twitch streamers get no views on their streams at all, streaming for hours a day consistently with no one dropping in, it completely counteracts the popular streamers with tens of thousands).

I got incredibly lucky because I got picked up for the community feature pretty early, like 3-4 months in iirc, and that boosted me to around 20-30 subs which I didn't expect.

I knew that 20-30 people isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like a lot, which I think really helped. I was and still am drawing my comic like it's a poison that will kill me if I don't purge it onto the page, but having people actually read it at all is a magical feeling, and it's a real shame to see people have that feeling poisoned by the "not enough numbers" monster.

I think if you can be healthy about pessimism to the point where your expectations of reception are lower than they should and that doesn't demotivate you, hope for the best, think of the worst, expect nothing, and give your all,

wolflu66
Feb 20

Thanks for sharing, I think these are great suggestions for webcomic beginners.

Actually, I believe most people understand this requires patience, but still give up midway due to various factors.
I think what you said about setting expectations realistically low is true. This applies not just to traffic and subscriber numbers, but also to the comic itself.

On this forum, I often wonder how people can draw in ways and styles I've never imagined, or come up with story concepts that I find truly admirable. This mentality of over-identifying with others can sometimes become an obstacle. Perhaps others have similar thoughts when they look at my work?

Anyway, I hope my comic can go further and not be abandoned within ten episodes...
Thank you for sharing. And taking this opportunity to promote my work. :wink:

jwabeasley
Feb 20
moontokkym

@kyupol My 2011 foray into the medium was not much better. I had to drop it before page 6 because I didn't know how to manage my time right, lol. I'm thankful for the meager views I got of people that I would quickly let down.

@moontokkym I never got the community feature but I had a page reach the Reddit front page last year at about 6 months in, and that helped a lot. Getting an infusion of subscribers really helps keep the motivation up! I actually did 72 comic pages before I started posting to Tapas. It's been a useful backlog, the only issue being that responding to any feedback within the comic itself is actually a year delay.

jwabeasley
Feb 20
wolflu66

Well, @wolflu66, you can know that as far as I can tell, your comic is doing as well as it is possible for a community comic your age to do these days. You were wise to cotton onto forum engagement right away, it took me a year to start doing that.

moontokkym
Feb 20
jwabeasley

72 pages? That's absolutely nuts. The final page of book 1 of my comic is actually page 73, drawn two years after the first, and I would go crazy if I just published page 1 at that point, my characters are in such a different place by the end of book 1 too, even now when I reread my book to make sure I'm not misremembering a detail I feel like it's not the same person.
It's really cool you got to the first page of Reddit! I hope it stayed in the nicer circles of the site though, I've seen both really supportive people and the worst things you can put into words in comments on there.

Panpan
Feb 21

People tend to see how successful something is... without considering how long it took THEM to get that far. Most on the platform took years to get to where they are, unless they already had a following elsewhere that followed over to Tapas. It took me five years to get to where I am today. It took Turtleme TEN YEARS to go from novel to comic to anime.

Wanting instant engagement will lead to disappointment. Patience a virtue in this industry. And if it's been a long time and still not fast as someone would like, then there could be a number of factors — writing quality, art style, genre, and maybe it's just not the right story for Tapas (and would do better on other places).

Tapas does not owe us engagement. It's up to US as CREATORS and AUTHORS to stand out with our hard work. Keep drawing. Keep writing. Your style will improve (I cringe at my work from 5 years ago). I started at the beginning of the lockdowns with ZERO expectations. I was just curious, and readers ended up subbing pretty fast. After a few months, it clicked "hey maybe this could lead to something."

thepenmonster
Feb 21

This is where I part because the audience IS unreasonably comparing you to a pro with a team. And so are Tapas and Webtoon and whatever other comics company you can think of. And they are all expecting you to put in the same amount of work as, say, Oda did for One Piece. For free.

And since 99.9999% of comic artists in the Community tab are comics readers too they've internalized this madness. The unreasonable expectations are what fuels the entire machine. They want you to bleed for their pleasure. Creators need to stop agreeing to do so.

Shorter comics with longer update schedules will reduce a lot of the poor mental health we're always seeing.

It's a much needed change that will sadly never happen because all artists have a the heart of a labour scab. One creator says "enough", a dozen more will soft shoe up saying, "Yessuh Mastah"

clarissapattern
Feb 21

This is a good positive post for creators, I am a writer, and I think it's even harder for novels to find readers, but it's special when anyone engages in and understands your work, so that's what I live for :smiley:

jwabeasley
Feb 22
thepenmonster

Sure, but I think we're on the same page here.

I'm a one-man show! I know I can't compete on volume. I'm trying to compete with quality and originality - I know none of the manhwa webtoons are doing what I do. Even if they're in the same subgenre, the only thing they have that I don't is speed.

Us indie creators have to find other ways to compare. There are readers who go for indie webcomics - try and get them! The high-volume manhwa readers (I recently talked to a few) avoid community comics because they expect the artist to burn out, have poor writing/art, or otherwise not deliver. Prove them wrong and they'll come.

That said, if someone was starting fresh, I'd say short humor comics is the best way to go, not necessarily on Tapas but on the internet overall. There's heavy competition, but if you can do it well you will be seen.

jwabeasley
Feb 22
clarissapattern

Novels definitely have it harder. It takes less work to write a bad novel than it does to make a bad comic, so the barrier to entry is lower, and at the same time it's harder to assess quality quickly. And it takes more deliberate reader investment to get into! I respect y'all's persistence.

clarissapattern
Feb 22

That's a good point. It's a brilliant thing that so many people feel inspired to write and are proud enough of what they produce that they want to share it, but it does make it harder for readers to be willing to invest time to find what they want. Whereas comics feel a lot easier to cast your eye over and get an immediate feel for the work, and the barrier of people who can't draw can't make a comic means that it's already got a filter on it as an art medium.