We started posting a novel series back when Tapas staff had much more focus on the textual side of things. In January 2017 they rolled out a 30-Day Writing Challenge for writers to produce 30 400 word episodes, one each day, and the submit it at the end of the month for a possible contract.
We had an illustrated novel (light novel) from 2016 in progress at the time that we decided to pick back up for that month.
Unfortunately the contest pretty much fizzled out and they never declared any winners. The top prize was $500 and a publishing contract on Tapas. It's our suspicion that the prize was just too small to really grab any major interest, unlike the annual contests that Writer's Digest does that gives away an $8,000 prize.
Had Tapas been willing to risk more of an advance ($5,000) and do some advertising they would have likely gained much more author and reader interest. Their hope was probably to take a big bite out of Wattpad pie but they hedged their bets so much that they never got out of the starting gate. The contest wasn't advertised beyond Tapas and the prize was too small to make it into the word-of-mouth circles.
Currently the Tapas novel readership is mostly comic book readers from when Tapas was Tapastic. It's our assumption that Tapas wanted to double its size by adding novels but the plan wasn't fully developed and ultimately under executed.
As far as we know everyone received a rejection letter from Tapas about three weeks after the contest ended. It was a semi-form rejection in two fonts. Font one was the form portion, font two was what the judge decided to write in. Since the industry standard is a form rejection it was a step up above the usual. We were told that our story was not a fit for Tapas which is understandable since Tapas' top sellers are romance, fantasy and LGTB for the single female aged 18-25 demographic. The rejection letter mentioned that Tapas would allow anyone to publish for free at some point in 2017 as a sort of consolation.
Around May 2017 the free novel side opened up and we started publishing our contest entry in a serial format, one episode a day for ~30 days. It got some immediate attention because we already had several thousand comic side readers but that fizzled out very quickly. Near the end of the month we received some devastating personal news and stopped updating, instead posting a hiatus notice. Unfortunately staff decided to "Staff Pick" the novel right at that time. Sadly whomever did it decided to link to the hiatus notice rather than the first episode. Because of that, the hiatus notice got 600+ reads and the rest of the novel got no interest.
After we got past our mourning period we resumed posting the rest of the contest entry and then stopped thereafter. We were willing to continue to write and post if there was a huge demand but the novel received very little interest overall. Given that we are busy with two comic projects already, plus working a full time job, it was simply too much to continue. At some point we will resume and finish the story but not until Fall 2019.
As far as we know there was one contest entry that "made it". The Boy Princess was rejected but started posting to Tapas and gained enough readership that it was eventually promoted to premium.
With the announcement of the Creator Incubator program it appears that Tapas is shifting its focus back into comics. Hopefully they return to novels at some point and finish implementing all they said they were going to (like adding the ability to post images) but for now that appears to be on ice. Tapas doesn't have a lot of staff and contrary to what some think, adding things like web tipping or web coin purchases is a huge deal and takes months to implement. Doing stuff for the novel side, which appears to generate very little revenue, makes no sense when they have more important and bigger revenue generating things to accomplish first.
At some point in time Tapas will finish up the back end stuff and start promoting the app and driving up readership in earnest. Novels that are already established on the app will have a huge early bird advantage over new arrivals so posting to Tapas now makes plenty of sense.
That said, does your novel specifically need to be a Tapas only series? Why not consider posting to multiple locations to get multiple eyes on it?
