Places to Promote your Comic/Novel and Your Take on there Effectiveness

[Lady_T_Musings]

Your website is lovely yoooo!

[Lady_T_Musings]

That's what's up and happy to be of help through my little bit of learned experiences

[Llyrel]

Aaaah, thank you!
And oh, I didn't know about comicctrl, sounds really nice! Though I have to admit that I'm super scared about building my own website with Wordpress, in part because I live in Europe and the GDPR laws are brutal, and in part because I have zero idea how to make a website from scratch I have a backup of my comic on a Wordpress.com blog, but alas, the place makes you pay for the very air you breathe and apparently you need a $300 a year subscription to be able to put certain html codes on there (including ComicAd codes, sadly), which is... pretty damn ridiculous D: I was kinda hoping to use Weebly instead (since it's cheaper), but... it doesn't seem to be as easy to customize as I remembered? ._.

Either way, I was originally going to focus my attention on Tapas too, but I have to admit that my experience with ComicAd so far has been pretty good and, although I'm aware that I may never have a whole lot of subscribers/commenters on CF, I'm definitely considering investing a bit more into it

[Lady_T_Musings]

Yeah, I was waiting for a long time for comicctrl to come out. So much so that I pushed the release of my comic back bc I wanted a CMS to manage the comic site that I could easily edit, but I had to just move forward and worry about gaming a site later as it just came out this year. It looks really good though! I loved GetGrawlix for a CMS, but the support for it stopped and it just faded into obscurity sadly. I really do not want to use WordPress for my comic site as it just felt to bogged down when I first tried, It may be better now, but I would prefer to work with a cms that's built for comics. That's a dang shame that they price gouge like that though :/. I don't have any experience with Weebly :/.

That's what's up though! I love that it has been working out for you. Facebook ads are pretty trash, but ComicAd seems to be a step in the right direction since Project Wonderful went under. I'm still a bit sour I wasn't making comics in those early days where I could have capitalized on using it :V

[samiluu]

thank you very much your work is lovely too, I love your style a lot!

[crowstories]

Yeah, I always do the "link in bio" thing, but I don't think anyone leaves their feed to look at my bio.

[TheGentleArtist]

In a Tapas discord made by users here on the forums; and only that server tbh XD.

[spadedigsbutts]

I've mostly used instagram the past year and though the algorithm sucks, I think I've gotten maybe 5 readers from it? Tbh Instagram seems better for promoting Patreon then Tapas I think I've had the most success being in comic servers on discord with other creators since while you're not getting a lot of new readers from the servers themselves, they'll often help form support networks to spread your work further than you could alone.

[Lady_T_Musings]

Thanks for sharing your experience. I hadn't really thought about using it to hype up my Patreon so that's pretty cool. I usually use it for art and advertising comic updates. Yeah, support networks really help get you out there :D!

[Caro]

I abandoned Tumblr years ago and I miss it all the time. It was the first place where I gained a substantial following (I think somewhere 20k) and I don’t think it would be the same if I went back.

Now I mainly only use Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is kinda new for me. I’ve had my twitter account for years but only ever tweeted like once every couple months until a few months ago I started a new strip that made my follower count explode (now at 20.5k!!) and I’ve managed to convert a lot of those new followers into book sales and patreon supporters so that’s neat!

I’ve also found I get a lot more serious job offers from Twitter. I think maybe its because people exchange dialogue on Twitter more than they do on IG??? Maybe????

I’ve historically been very on Instagram and it works great for me too (currently @ 70.3k) especially for pushing to Patreon.

I’m honestly just lucky to make compelling enough, very sharable strips that lead people to my other works. I don’t think I’d have quite the same level of success just with teasing my longer, more serious works.

[Lady_T_Musings]

That’s what’s up and congrats on your success!!!

Yeah I do miss old Tumblr, wasn’t a place like it, sigh.

Yeah lol Twitter was just a random thought deposit for years in my book too, but so much of Tumblr moved there and it’s mad different, but I admit that it has reach for sure.

Short and easily digestible bites are the thing that people really latch onto, so if you got something folks find a hoot and can keep it up, you got yourself a nice peace of of pie!

Congrats on the success again, and mayhaps someday you’ll be able to work on your more longer form comics with some audience that will transfer since you have a wide base. If that’s still something you’d like to do :).

[mcarrowolga]

Here's my collection of resources for comic/novel promotion.

• Comic promotion (list of resources)
  Novel promotion (list of resources)
  About ComicAd (ad network for indie creators)

• Earning money with webcomics/novels (list of resources)

• My own project that helps indie authors find new readers (for free):
  Comic roulette
  Novel roulette

[Yulek]

ohh that's an interesting thread!

has anyone tried one of those platforms yet? I don't have any experiences with them except like, hosting a game on itchio

Newgrounds

here's a random comic page that I just clicked on because it was right there.

Comic - Candies

there seem to be some good views possible (and you see the views as stats), and by linking, you can redirect to your main hosting sites. i guess??
generally, you don't have a comic space per se, but it does have an Art subcategory, and people go to Newgrounds FOR entertainment and content... like games and comics and music
not somuch for just illustrations like on insta or twitter, where you just scroll through the feed

Itch.io

Top comics

they have a whole sub category for comics (their main focus is games) with a pretty good tagging system from what I've seen, and you could make a pay wall yourself if you wanted, or ask for donations. it doesnt demand you to hit milestones as far as I'm aware.
a lot of people sell their comics as download for 2$.

idk if this is for downloads only, or if oyu can host the comic for regular updates.
you can notify ppl about your developer log, so I think you could notify your readers about updates as well!

again, this is a site where people come to specifically for content.

gumroad

https://gumroad.com/discover?category=comics

they also have a whole subcategory dedicated to comics.

it's really meant as a market place. you can sell pdfs of your sketchbook scans even.
so this might work best if you have finished volumes.

it does host a lot of nsfw, but also Gen works, it's pretty mixed. the prices are higher than on itch.io by a lot too.

for virtual indie publishing this might be neat? you can make an incentive by adding Gumroad only content to the downloads, like concept pages and illustrations.

---

again, I haven't tried any of them yet, so I'm curious if anyone has experence with them

[Caro]

Thank you!

I’m sure someone somewhere someday will make a phenomenal Tumblr replacement and I cannot wait for it.

Actually my most popular comic is actually a long form comic that I’ve been working on for a publisher for a year now but the strips always funnel in new readers and I get messages almost daily saying stuff like “I just read [comic]!!” So the new stuff manages to bump up all the old and in progress stuff too.

Actually all my current in progress works are longform. The strips I post on social media don’t actually take up that much time for me and I can usually bust out three pages (six panels each) in a day or two on my weekends.

[Caro]

omg I’ve been thinking a lot about newgrounds because I looked at it a few months ago and found a lot of the quality and style of the art extremely pleasant??? I was honestly really surprised.

Also I do digital releases of my books on gumroad and I experimented with releasing monthly issues (20 pgs for pay what u want). Monthly issues were actually reallllly cool I managed an extra $600 for those few months even with the pay what you want starting at $0.

Thats also something I reeeealllly like about gumroad. Pay what you want is really valuable for me because I despise paywalls.

[Yulek]

not with comics, but with pay what you want commissions, I've had some great experiences as well. people do actually want to value work

(I don't generally do them, only when I'm thinking about opening a new kind of com and I need example works and some practice before i can actually list them.... don't wanna tnak the market even more lol)

I'm honestly curious for the ink feature. just how ppl use it from a creators view.

Great to know that gumroad actually has potential!!

did you have to redirect traffic to gumroad, or did you make site-intern sales?

[Llyrel]

Yeah, I'm afraid you can only put stuff up for download on Itch.io

I was considering putting Volume 1 of my comic for sale on there once I was done with it and I even made a nice little profile page to promote it... but eventually ended up giving up on it because you need to provide a whole bunch of tax information which for me, as a non-US person and non-native English speaker were VERY confusing ._.'

Basically, you need to have a "foreign TIN" but it is unclear whether they'd be fine with a regular SSN code (which I could provide with no problem) or if they need a VAT identification number (which is solely for business owners and I'm not allowed to have due to my job... aka the same reason why I can't make a PayPal business account). So, to avoid troubles, I ended up scrapping it altogether and opted for Gumroad instead (which now for some reason won't show my profile pic anymore nor let me fix it, awesome). Haven't looked much into it or even bothered to promote it much yet, though. Heck, I didn't even know that you could search products on the site, I thought you could only link people to your own page!

...Anyway, the amount of pr0n on both Itch.io and Gumroad is pretty mind-blowing, lol.

[Lady_T_Musings]

Ty for sharing <3! these are pretty baller resources to check out and submit too!

[Lady_T_Musings]

Yoooo theses are some outside the box suggestions and I'm here for it!

I've known of these sites for years, but never thought to use them for comics, will Itch.io and newgrounds for sure! Yeah I'm totally interested to hear more from folks who have used these platforms for comics .

Ty for tagging in with this!

[Lady_T_Musings]

You and me both!

Lookit you with that long and short game in sight, I love it

I'd love to dabble in more shorts focused around the happenings and folks of my world not centered around the main story, but I'd have to quit my day job and have money coming in for that, bc that really would be an entire work day and a half juggling both XD.