Popular creators, what was your journey to success?

[CorgsCof]

People who have a lot of views, likes, subscribers, what helped you gain that popularity? How did you get there?

Did you have a strong social media presence before posting? Did someone shout you out and that helped get things rolling? Were you part of a group? Did you just have amazing story/art that just clicked with people? Was it because you were just plain awesome? All of the above?

I'm more interested in learning about your personal journey, then getting general tips on how to gain traction.

[drawnbyyannan]

I was going to answer this question but I'm not sure if I'm popular lol. What do you consider "popular"?

[CorgsCof]

Honestly, anyone with more than 100 subs or something. If you think you have achieved success, I just wanna hear your tale.

[rosenw_ltz]

I'm nowhere near huge, but I'm really happy with the number of people who've subscribed to my work so I'll take a shot at answering!

• I worked on script, characters, and plot for a few years while posting miscellaneous art on Instagram to get a feel for having an art account, and build relationships and interact with the community.
• I'd also been reading comics for several years before this, so I tried to see what worked for others and apply that to my art/writing.
• Then I built a reeeally big buffer before posting, and started to advertise on Insta before releasing. Character bios, comic art, covers, etc, and my friends shared a few of those promo posts. (I'm not super huge on there either, but I knew a few people who were interested in my work and they made it all worth it.)
• Now I can upload consistently at a comfortable pace, which helps retain readers. My current comic was a self-test to see what I could handle, and what I'll improve for my next work.

Also, I think I just got lucky with being featured in the rising stars section of Webtoon. Without this I highly doubt I'd be where I am I hope this was interesting to read!

[CityGeaArts]

The rising start thing really must've helped, so many people on webtoon

[emmaemeh2011]

My webtoon has 7k subscribers, it's not that much compared to others but I didn't think I'd ever have this many so I consider it a success
Most of these subs (like 90% ) are from the time webtoon featured it on The Rising stars section as well .
and no, I didn't have a huge following. I had less than 100 followers on IG when I started posting, lmao and to think I made an Art account to promote my webtoon now it's the opposite

[Caro]

I don’t have a comic on tapas because every time I think about doing it work stuff happens and now all of my current projects that aren’t for publishers are a little more adult oriented than I feel like Tapas would allow.

But outside of Tapas, I think I’d consider myself successful in that I’m able to fully support myself with my comics and get a lot of side work as a result of the comics I make. I’ve also done a featured Webtoon tho I wouldn’t necessarily count that as the most successful point of my career so far by a longshot.

I’ve done dozens of short comics/vignettes and even a couple of standalone graphic novels between 145-200ish pages, hundreds of strips, and most of it has never been online anywhere. I still pump out a ton of ideas for whole new things to stow away for later. I do not think I would be able to do what I do by only having one Big Idea. I had to fail a million times over before I realized the magnum opus I had in mind for when I improved a bit just actually wasn’t very good or interesting and I didn’t really have the vision to see it yet. But within a couple years of doing it and failing hard and as fast as I could I eventually got to the good stuff.

Without a doubt another big huge factor in my “success” (its a weird word to use because I’m still, like, a baby in this industry) is doing strips. I’m lucky in that everything I do is character based so my strips just end up being these kind of minute little condensed version of a story entirely carried by character’s personalities and dialogue and not just a solid punchline. To be honest, I actually suck at joke structure but I’m very good at dialogue and it carries the comics. This has been reallly REAAAALLY useful in funneling people into my more longform comics. I have never once paid for promotions on twitter or ig but people send my comics to their friends of their own accord or crop things for memes and all that. so my little game I play with myself in my strips is to try and make as many of the panels something kind of funny without context. Word of mouth is king.

I still feel like I’m constantly getting better and learning how make more spreadable work. I recently started a new little strip for fun a few weeks ago and went from 5k twitter followers to 18k after like two weeks and got a few job offers from it too. Which is funny because like three months ago I was in a not so great financial situation and thinking it was time to get a day job again. Now i’m in a better position than I’ve ever been in!

[Eiranyx]

I don't know if my current number is considered popular among all the featured in here, after all I just started 4 months ago and I admit I'm a bit wary of celebrating the numbers as well, but since you said anyone who has subs more than 100 I'm gonna share it anyways

• The first thing I will always say and I think is the most important that people tend to forget when it comes to success is that : YOU DEFINE YOUR SUCCESS -- yes, before I started, I had a picture of what success will look like for me and I will make sure to do what needs to be done to reach it.
• But even with that said Honestly, I didn't plan on making a webtoon or anything when I started, I just went and did it because I feel that 'it's time' that 'this will be it' -- maybe you could say I just followed my 'instinct' and went with it despite not knowing whether I'll be popular or not. but trust me when I say, follow your guts -- not necessarily all the time but trust in yourself first before going out there.
• And lastly Don't look for 'success' immediately, success is elusive when you keep on mindlessly chasing after it, it's a distraction to what 'you're supposed to be doing'. When I started my story, I kept in mind that If I keep on looking at the success of others and compared it to mine all the time then I won't be able to do my own stuff so as much as possible, while It's not bad to admire other people as I admired on other people's success, I never forget the work at hand, I use them as an inspiration and challenge myself to go beyond more than what I used to time to time. so yes I defined my success, and I will work towards it and trust in the process.

[djourner]

This thread gives me a bit more energy and hope for the future.
Thank you ^^

[emmaemeh2011]

just realized I have the shortest reply in the thread , so here I am again

• How It started: I've learnt from my previous works is that I should think simple, since I'm not very experienced...
  So that's what I did ,so instead of working from scratch I took some ideas from my previous works that never saw the day

• How i got the idea : I was planning on participating on the short story contest on webtoon , but never got the time to complete it , only made one episode when there were 4/5 required : I was going to talk about my experience as someone who is hard of hearing ( deaf in one ear) but now I made my MC the same ( in my ongoing webtoon " Invitation to the bus of Love") and even made a backstory about it so I think it turned out for the better

• The characters : All of their personalities and backstories are inspired from my previous works, esp one that I've worked on for years but I had to stop when my PC crashed and lost a lot of its material ( buffers and 3d BGs )

• The Art : I have an anime/ manga style . I made sure the thumbnail was good enough to attract ppl , though I think they might get slighly disappointed when they see the art on the actual chapters, since my Tablet has been dying and barely lets me do decent lineart TT TT

[ryoko]

[Crusoe]

I'm not a popular creator, but I really enjoy reading these stories of how y'all have gotten were you're now

[FritzC]

Idk if I qualify as a popular creator, but mine was just kinda random? I started posting my comic on tapas and Webtoon, I had just nuked and remade my twitter and had very few followers, I stopped using Instagram a long time ago, so I was just sorta posting into the void. I have another comic that has about 250 followers, but it had been on hiatus for a year.

Then one day, Im not sure how or why, but I got a spike of like 700 followers, and then the comic just sorta took off from there?
Not sure what happened. I'm kot twitter famous by any stretch of the imagination, neither am I Instagram famour or have any other social media with a big following 🤷🏼‍♂️ i just make comics

[Crusoe]

Might have been a tapas feature or something? I think I remember seeing your comic on the front page some time ago

[ISNEKO]

Years ago there was a thing called the Daily Snack. I don't know if it still exists or if it has changed since then, but one day they decided to start adding one comic and novel from the community to it as a spotlight. That meant that anyone who had the Tapas app and notifications on had your work thrust upon them.

They chose me three times in two weeks and I skyrocketed to well over 1k subs in one day. I've since had mental breakdowns and deleted most of my followers by deleting books, which didn't really matter as the vast majority of my subs were complete no-shows after their initial sub, but yeah.

Don't ever give up on your creating. Someday you might just get the crowd to finally see it.

[darthmongoose]

I have over 800 subs... which I don't consider particularly popular in the grand scheme of things, but by standards of these forums, that's seen as a big number.

Overall, my comic's growth has involved a lot of hard work and a number of factors, most of which are built on the foundations of years and years of grinding away. It was a mixture of posting regular updates to the best quality I can reasonably attain in art, visual storytelling, presentation/design and writing, advertising across social media; twitter, insta, tumblr and also setting up on places like TV Tropes, webcomics wiki etc. Making the most of my already having a small fanbase from both being in the past a national prize winning comic artist and published illustrator, but also modestly popular in fandoms like Dungeons & Dragons and...of course... Homestuck (because I've been one of the admin of Voxus, creators of Let's Read Homestuck for about like ten years, plus I did artwork on some of the official Homestuck albums). I also built connections with other comic creators and novelists on this site by talking to them, joining groups, that kind of thing, which helped for support, feedback, advertising strategy and getting seen by the right people.

Basically, I've built my skills and my base brick by brick over time, and I put a lot of work into making a comic with a level of polish high enough that Tapas featured it on the front page, but I'd already surpassed 250 subs on my own before that happened, and since that feature took me to about 550 subs, I've managed to claw my way up past 800 with raw effort. I intend to keep clawing my way up to a thousand and beyond.

[drawnbyyannan]

Well then here's my story!

I've loved visual storytelling from a young age and started getting into manga in middle school/high school. During this time I probably started at least seven different comics that were doomed from the start: I didn't know where I was going with the story or how it would end and I didn't have the art skills to pull off big, long, ambitious stories. For some reason, it's always the beginners that want to take on the most difficult projects.

In college, I finally took some actual art classes that drastically improved my art skills, but when I graduated and started working full time as a math teacher, I stopped drawing, almost altogether. Let me tell you, teaching public school is just so draining. When I finally switched to a more manageable work-life balance at a private school, I started drawing again.

My brother let me know about this thing called Webtoons, at the end of 2019, and I got excited about the idea that there are some people who actually do this full time and get paid a living wage for it. When the short story contest was announced, I immediately knew I wanted to enter and what story I wanted to tell. My grandmother had just passed away a year ago, and all the stories that came out of her passing were so fascinating I wanted to share it. My short story was my first foray into comics in years, but the combination of a variety of other experiences I've had since the last time I tried to make a comic is what helped me complete this one. For instance, in college, I wrote, directed, and acted in theater which I think helped me with the storytelling component. I started practicing art in a way I hadn't before by studying the fundamentals. Working full time in a very tiring job taught me the discipline to grind through when things stopped being fun. I think all of this is what helped me finish the short story and it ended up getting about 2k subscribers and an honorable mention. (The story is called 65 years.)

After that, I was so invested in this new form of storytelling - I loved having complete control over everything - that I started Lilah's Magic Shop. This time, I planned out the story in advance. It started getting traction immediately on Webtoons because it was selected for fresh picks, although I didn't get almost any attention on Tapas. The past couple of weeks have been really picking up though! After months of no features, in just the last couple of weeks on Webtoons Lilah's Magic Shop is listed under the Recommended Series and selected for the Spring Picks Collection, and on Tapas it was on Staff Picks and it's been featured under Women's History Month and it's gone from 400 to 1.1k subscribers so far.

I don't know if this is a healthy mindset to have, but I always believed that the cream will rise to the top. And if something isn't doing as well as I want it to, then I just need to work harder and get better at my skills. My ultimate goal is to do this for a living, and since I'm still not at that level, I know I need to keep practicing.

Whoo that ended up being way longer than I intended. But I'm glad you asked the question because I don't think I give myself enough credit sometimes.

[joannekwan]

The biggest factor for me was starting when I did.

I started posting my first webcomic here in April 2015, when Tapas had far fewer creators and series. I just posted an update every week and I could actually make it onto the first page of popular

I had a small following on tumblr, but I don't think many of those migrated here to sub, since I was posting Demon House there as well. I didn't even have an Instagram or twitter at the time. All of my growth was internal to Tapas.
It was the Popular page that really helped I think. The only 'feature' boost was DH's participation in two holiday collabs involving a great handful of wonderful creators at the time and Tapas decided to feature it collectively.
I also had a Daily Snack feature for one of my smaller comics I developed later.

Actually, my series with the most subs never had any features besides consistently landing on popular during the first half of its run.

But as the years passed it became harder to land the popular page. I just couldn't compete, my two biggest comics have ended and I'm in a lull. And now I wonder if I could ever reach that high again. I have another comic slated so I will try for sure.

[FritzC]

Maybe, ahaha that's so cool! I always miss when I'm on the front page, I only catch it when my friends tell me OTL

[ratscout]

Well, I'm not exactly popular. Like, at all. But I got a respectable 400 subscribers on my novel, which is pretty alright. So, before posting to this site, I really just wrote for fun, never expecting anything to come of it. I posted on Smashwords and Deviantart and had very little success there and I was fine with that. Ain't nobody got time to read these days, LOL.

My sisters suggested I try posting at Tapas since they had just opened up a novels section and I thought, "Eh, why not." I think within a week I got a staff-pick and like, 80 subs, and I was astonished! It was just a short story, but I threw up a couple of other short stories and one longer-form story, and they got one, too! Not huge gains by any means, but I was just shocked that anyone thought I was talented enough to be featured! After those first couple of features, I kinda stopped getting them (I think Tapas just had a change in focus of genres they wanted to feature), so I kind of hit a wall. I started going to the forum and posting there, and it created some buzz for my stories, but nothing too crazy. I also participated in the writer's camp which helped me gain some traction on my main story, Inheritance (it was featured in the writer's camp collection on the front page), but again, nothing huge. The story got a feature, too, which was the last one I have gotten to this date, LOL. After that, I hit another wall. I tried reading other people's stories, being active on the forum, doing free art for people, nothing really worked, and it was pretty frustrating. I started thinking that maybe the story was the problem, so I asked for critiques (opening a critique-for-critique thread), which were really, really, helpful in two ways. The first was that it helped me understand that the stuff I was writing probably just wasn't really appropriate for an online, webnovel format. A lot of the people gave it the critique that it was really slow, and webnovels are supposed to be really fast-paced. I realized that I didn't want to just change my style of writing to satisfy an online audience, and that the pace was good for a traditional-style novel, just not a webnovel, so I didn't just the pace, but I did take the other critiques into consideration. But the other thing opening this thread did was help the story trend. Like, right there, smack dab in the popular section of the front page, and it brought me a LOT of traction.

Not only that, but opening the thread got me a lot of long-time friends who consistently read my story. I opened a few more threads like that, and it had the same effect.

Long story short: The best way to gain a following--albeit small--is hard work. You have to read other people's work if you want them to read yours.