On posting and gathering a following/getting noticed -
It really is a struggle/slow climb. From my brief experience the only thing to be done is to just give it 110% and grab whatever slack you can get.
My brief tapas history (as a creator) is:
Started uploading my comic the first weekend of October with a cover and 7 pages to start, have continued a weekly schedule of 1-2 pages from then on (with the occasional holiday extra). in this time ~4 months) I've managed to get 45 subs and ~3.2k views.
My break down:
The genre is Action/Fantasy and the plot is largely driven by character drama. My influences come largely from RPG video games and shonene anime/manga. So I'm definitely not working with one the most popular genres (SoL, Romance) but it's also not super niche.
My art's just okay. It's just a clean-ish anime/manga derivative style, full color (but many pages show my inexperience with digital tools. There's a lot of slop in the rendering, especially early on). I will say it's been rapidly improving as I continue along though. Even just 3-4 months of improvement has been insane.
Regarding the pacing, it's overall pretty fast. This is a one-shot intended to conclude around page 60, so even with 1-2 pages a week something tends to happen most pages. Potentially notable.
In regards to drawing in subs, I want to underline this statement:
I can attest the main reason I started reading her comic was because I had both noticed she had subbed to mine (and was in fact my first tipper xD) and I started noticing her contributions around the forums as well. So, one day when I got a chance I gave her series a read, enjoyed it, and subbed.
I did a quick tally, of my 45 subs, ~25 are people I'm either good friends with, or have interacted with often either on their comic, the forums, or various discord groups. Networking can go a long way.
As far as views go, it seems both baas and akhdas's series have relatively low view counts relative to their upload lengths? This leads me to wonder if enough advertising effort is going into getting eyes on those comics. Even though not many of those views translate into subs, I've been able to get a lot of people looking at my comic at least by putting a fair amount of effort into weekly advertising. I take an hour each sunday when I upload and plaster update notices all over to drive views. Facebook, twitter, instagram, reddit, etc. I manage to drive ~200 views a week somehow. I'm pretty happy with that given my sub base.
So yeah, I dunno. outside of anecdotes I can't offer much advice but simply hope that you both find your audiences in time @_@
@Rodimus13
Gah, yeah I don't even want to think about the headache of formatting my story for print eventually xD I have a head start, drawing in page format, but resizing things and touch up and quality control... bleghhhh. I hope the process goes relatively smoothly for the two of you! I'll be watching and taking notes xD
For my own mini rant/musing,
I'm nearing the halfway point in my story (page 30) and I'm already getting so sick and tired of the work flow I've chosen for this project xD when I was first starting out it seemed like the best of both worlds:
- my traditional lineart was faster and looked better than digital &
- coloring on the computer was more consistent, cheaper, and had more options than using markers.
however now as I've been doing much more digital art (and upgraded to a better tablet), I've started to dread the traditional phases of my work flow a little. The sketching takes longer since there are no move or resize tools in real life, inking is still easy but high stakes (and time consuming, having to wait for the ink to dry at times lest your hand drags through it and makes a huge smudge on the page that needs to be photoshopped out later), erasing the sketch is a separate phase that doesn't exist on the computer, & I'm working on large paper that requires 4 scans per page to capture the whole image. Just so many extra steps that eat time.
Now granted, there's nothing truly stopping me from switching to all digital during this project. But at this point I'm far enough along that I feel like I should wrap the project up in a consistent manner. Further, space consuming as it may be, I'm looking forward to having my completed stack of linework for this project at the end~
I'm 100% planning to move to all digital for sure during my next project.
That's not to say I dislike traditional tools now. Certainly not! Marker is still one of my favorite mediums to work in, and doing a christmas illustration for a friend in marker (the first marker piece I had done since last spring) was incredibly refreshing! Buuuuut comics are a medium that greatly appreciate efficiency, and I feel like my workflow for this project is lacking in that. And I'm just too stubborn to change so it's my own fault lol. At least it'll be over in a few months. Lesson learned! (I feel like the issue would be lessened if I were either doing all traditional and/or a shorter project. Even 60 pages feels like too long for this xD)