New User/Publisher Questions

[CrystalSeaDragon44]

Hello! I'm fairly new here, especially to publishing. I'm an aspiring artist and writer, and I created a new original comic for the upcoming Transgender Day of Remembrance, based of my written works elsewhere. However, as I've been looking at the rules and requirements, I'm left with some questions...

1. The comic I plan to post deals with some heavy themes. It's a little heady, about a genie (and former human) who travels to another world to visit the grave of an alternate self who died the day she received her powers (and thus was spared from the same fate). Nothing graphic, but I was wondering if the topic itself is too mature for the teen rating I usually strive for...

2. Speaking of, I usually do stories about transgender people being transformed by magic (the genie is transgender, my first character written). Right now, I have a few novel pieces on other sites I plan to bring over here one day, but I was wondering if this might be too mature... Keep in mind, I try to veer away from sexualized transformations, keeping them clothed and try to avoid going heavy on the details... Still, I know it's a potential minefield.

3. 920 px is the maximum width? How do I even fit anything in that size? I created this comic without knowing this, and the width is 2008 px. This is a sample, the "story cover." - oh wait, this is TOO BIG a file size, apparently. Is there some way to edit this without losing quality?

(Welp, having this happen means this is no longer going to be a Tapas exclusive debut as planned...)

Well, I still hope to use Tapas, but I'm now struggling to see how I can get my work over here... Not without problems...

[BoomerZ]

I will answer question 3. You won't have a problem as this is meant to be read on a phone. Usually I draw 3 times the size and reduce myself then upload. The quality is a little bad if you are reading it on a large monitor, but on a tablet or phone you will be fine. Tapas will resize it down to fit and cut it up if need be per file.

[CrystalSeaDragon44]

Ah, okay. That helps with that question (I hope). Looks like it'll be fingers crossed and hope for the best here!

That does leave the other two, and being new here, I don't want to overstep any bounds. Still, I don't think this comic - 10 total pages - shouldn't be a problem, but I'm just trying to make sure...

[CrystalSeaDragon44]

Nope, didn't work. All that effort to get the series set up, and it's the 920 px thing killing me...

[moontokkym]

Most phone galleries and computer galleries allow you to manually resize your image. It can seem quite strange if you're new to digital art but you'll get used to it really quickly (it's actually good professional practice to always make a reduced copy of your art when posting on the internet to make stuff like auto redbubble scraping more difficult, so you should really be doing this with every image you post to protect your stuff).

I'm on PC and my default image gallery offers a "resize image" option. Be aware that it's not the "crop" option, it's in the three dots drop down menu. I do it for every page I make as my pages are made to be printed and are far to big to go on tapas in their original format.

[CrystalSeaDragon44]

Thanks. I did eventually stumble onto the resize option on my program and was able to get things posted!

I also talked to another author/artist who uses the site, and she mentioned she uses it for everything she does too. I'll certainly make use of this in the future! Until now, I haven't needed it.

But it will certainly make my life easier knowing this in the future (and make my hard drive happy with me, with smaller pictures not taking up so much data).

That said... I should really get those last couple of pages done for my comic, considering I wanted to get the last pages up tomorrow... Nothing like pushing it to the last minute, am I right? XD

[moontokkym]

Great you managed to work it out!
Good luck for your last couple of pages! I hope you can finish them in time!

[irr11tauthor]

Without reading the story, none of this seems to mature to me. If there is anything sexual or graphic at any point, you can mark that one section mature. I have language, violence, and gender queer characters (which are not a mature topic. They are just people) all through my work, I just make the appropriate pages mature