Sub for sub in terms of gaining readership is basically useless. I do think making connections with other creators on here is very good, but it's better to join a discord server or something.
Pretty much the only creator connections I've made from promotional threads were threads for really hyperspecific content (like, post your gay werewolf medieval fantasy comics!) where there was already going to be an automatic connection.
I actually disagree, true you gain in numbers, and not so much on readers, but a small percentage turn out actually to be readers. and it helps your work to be trendy or popular where actual readers can find you easier. Numbers are useless for your satisfaction as an author, but they help you to reach your end game.
I agree. The whole pointlessness of it aside, I don't want dead subs, and I don't want people who don't enjoy my work to some degree. I can understand that sub for sub is tempting, especially when you're starting out and have very few followers, but it's a temptation that I believe writers and artists should avoid.
I'm sort of for read-for-read though, because when I do it (rarely), I make sure to make it clear that no one owes the other person a sub or a follow. Read-for-read for the purpose of critique is okay, and if they want to continue reading because they like it, that's cool.
I want to start with: I get why people sub for sub. I've said it a lot of times before and I'll say it again, I am NOT a fan of that progress bar on the Tapas dashboard, and that's as somebody who climbed past it within my first few months. I think it's horrible to place a big burden of expectation of what is "succeeding" onto developing artists who should be working on having fun, keeping going to build their stamina for outputting pages and making friends. My first ever webcomic had like... maybe 30 readers tops (probably less) and I'd have felt really demoralised if that was shown as less than a third of the progress bar permanently stuck mostly unfilled. I hate that bar and I can see why it would push anyone to want to gather subs, because hell, I was definitely not immune to it.
I'm friends with a number of people whose comics have thousands of subs, so I completely get what it's like to look at the numbers and to feel like you're underperforming, and game-ifying that feeling is really kinda thoughtless on Tapas' part, especially now the site has removed or reduced the effectiveness of many of the means for works to get discovered (like pretty much removing Trending, moving Staff Picks halfway down the app, changing the Popular algorithm to focus on recent likes....).
The reason I will always, always say "don't do sub for sub" is that it undermines your ability to see if your marketing is working. If you can't drop a picture of your comic, or the cover and blurb for your novel in a place and see an uptick in people checking out and subbing to your series, it could mean one of three things:
You need to choose better marketing material, make a better banner, thumbnail, cover and/or blurb. Maybe this one doesn't read well at a distance because it's not high contrast enough or too busy, Maybe the image itself doesn't look interesting enough and needs to focus on something more visually interesting. For example, my banner used to be just the logotype title of the series on a white background. It had low clicks when I posted it around. I changed the banner to also include the characters from the cover and the clicks and subs from posting it went up, because it was more visually interesting and made it clearer what the comic contains in terms of art style and tone.
You're posting your marketing material in the wrong place for the audience you want. Some comics do great on twitter, others better on insta and some do best on Reddit. Just overall we know from interviews that Tapas' readerbase skews heavily female aged 18-24, so if your work is aimed outside of that bracket, you'll naturally have to lower your expectations for what "performing well" looks like and see if there are better places to host your work. Some comics do better on webtoon, for example.
This is the unpleasant one... Your work might... actually... still have some room for improvement (owch). Try the first two bulletpoints first, please! But if a work is really struggling, it might be that there are issues with things like readability or pacing.
The key thing to look for here, whether your readers came from sub-for-sub or organically, is actually comments. Are people reliably commenting on your episodes about what the characters are doing and what's happening in the plot? Are they speculating about what will happen next? If your comments are like that, you know the readers you do have are engaged, so it's probably more the case that you need to look into how and where you're advertising so you can find more engaged readers.
If you're almost never getting comments and the ones you get (especially ones that aren't from your BFFs who you regularly talk to about your characters on discord or similar, their comments can draw on external elaboration of details you might be omitting in your actual comic or novel) are vague and reference surface elements like a particular panel... that's where you should start to ask the question: "Are people actually struggling to follow and get engaged with this comic? Are there problems with the art or text readability, or maybe I didn't establish the characters clearly enough, or maybe the pacing is dragging and there isn't enough for readers to talk about?"
on a sub to sub I actually find little masterpieces. Is a good way of the promo. The community of tapas is awesome. And I might not read your work right away but eventually, I will. Plus I do Collab works, and sometimes, I check who would have interest in my sub to participate such as (Tapas)bits.
On one of the tread I discover this masterpiece:
That I can't stress enough how good it is.
I would never find it, if the author was not just trying to how its number
I said it before and I'll say it again. Sub for sub is a toxic way to build your story and audience... Because, well let's be honest, there's nobody there to support you with that.
IF that's all you do. From a marketing standpoint however, and when you have a plan, it can work. Think major companies who buy followers. Is it scummy? Yeah, i don't think buying followers is a good thing, neither am I forgiving them for it, but it does work. In a sense, sub for sub is a much more innocent version of that. It's just us petty creators inflating our numbers somewhat in the smallest way possible.
Sub for sub is bad for you when that's all you do, BUT if you can balance it with healthy read for reads in the beginning, and exchanging feedback, promotion, etc... Sub for sub is really just a small exchange in it all. Is a reader going to mind that a writer did a big "no-no" sub for sub with another creator? No. The sub number is always false because even readers who subscribes are very likely to ignore your story for a huge chunk of time until they forget or unsub themselves.
But from a psychological stand point, having an inflated number of subscribers helps, because then a new reader is more likely to subscribe if there is already a big group there. It's the mob mentality. This is why it is also smart to do read for reads/feedback for feedback with other creators because they can leave comments on your story. That encourages a reader to leave a comment too, because again, they won't feel like they are stepping on territory nobody else did. They wanna feel hidden but be supportive too.
I disagree with the toxic because you always end up checking who you subbed, and numbers go up and down and up again.I think is a good way to help each other, to get a better ranking, and actually get readers.
I call it toxic in the beginning to point out that yes it can be, and usually is toxic. However, when done right, it can be helpful... Most of my comment is actually saying the opposite of it being toxic... Just read the full comment...
The only reason sub-for-sub happens on these forums is because people are aiming for that 250 milestone so they can make some money (ink) on their novels/comics. THAT is honestly the only reason it keeps on happening.
I am highly amused one might think it is the quality of the art or novel, while more often than not it's about competing with the algorithm, who updates the fastest so they can be seen in trending. It's dance of numbers, rarely true interest.
I should know, my novel hit high numbers but I cannot for the life of me understand why (or how haha!) that happened. Why did y'all sub if you're never going to read my work? I'm still trying to solve that mystery.
I do agree that some of those subs will never touch your work, but others eventually will. For example when I did the project (tapas)bits I read works that are far away from my personnel taste, and followed the same back. I was following since it was easier to bookmark what and how i read it. btw submissions are still open if anyone wants to join XD
Well in that case I can say that I disagree with your point. Always checking numbers is actually the part that I would call toxic. And actual sub for sub doesn't help in rankings unless you get like a really big amount really fast. In this sense, likes, comments, reads are much more important than the superficial sub count. My point was to say that sub count helps for the uninitiated to subscribe too, but in a sense, that doesn't help in itself with engagement. It's a combination of all these factors that are necessary... And man, am i starting to feel like I sound like my marketing teacher from high school 
Anyways, Tl:Dr, if you're doing sub for sub, don't let that be the only thing you are doing. Balance it and don't overdo it. Reads>likes>subscribers>comments, but even more important are cover>writing>story for a good base to promote. It's tiring but it's best to keep all of these in mind and not be focused on one thing only. Well, all of this, IF your goal is to have big numbers. Writing just for the fun of it is also a very valid way to express yourself on these platforms. In my case, I would say it's a combination of the two. I love writing but I'm also a freak into marketing, so I like to see what I can do with my story, while also engaging with my second favorite hobby and helping it reach more people.
That is not what i said. Check about (Tapas)bits and you better have a notion why I follow everyone whiteout discrimination
Views matter more than subs for me.
Sub means you have to be an already established user of the platform. And people CBA with that, making a new account learning how to navigate etc. People might only want to see what you have and for that, making an account is too much of a hassle.
Talk to your audience on social media.
Important note for anyone reading this thread who isn't aware:
Subs are only useful for unlocking the ability to have ads, and for unlocking the ability to get ink donations and then to withdraw revenue IF you accumulate at least $25 of combined ads and ink earnings.
Subs do not impact your position in the popular ranking, which is determined by your number of likes within the past few days. (and from my observation, this is simply your total likes, not likes relative to following).
In other words, inactive followers, while not necessarily harmful to your work, are not helpful either. The only way sub for sub may help boost your readers would be because it may function as publicity the same as posting your work anywhere on the forums, so some of the people who see it might actually be engaged readers (but this can be achieved by posting on any promo thread on the forum) OR because of the "pennies in the hat" phenomenon where a work with more subs will be perceived as more popular so more people will give it a shot... however, in this latter case, it's important to note that on the rankings, your sub number isn't displayed, only your number of likes, lessening the impact of having more subs on how likely a person is to click the work.
Just reading through what you said. And legit need to ask, what if you get high page views but literally 1 to zero comments? (Mostly zero) is it that the audience just dont like to speak up? Or would you think said readers just arent from this particular platform? (Ie: from twitter or something) and just dont comment or literally ghost you. Lol
As always your knowledge is very informative!
Hmmmmm.... This one is tricky because there are a few possibilities:
Your audience are quite happily reading, they're just not really commenting, possibly because they're not regular Tapas users (which isn't improbable with your comic, it's not typical Tapas fare in style or content). Maybe try putting a (small!) banner at the bottom of an episode reminding the audience that likes and comments help the visibility of your work, or asking the audience a question relevant to what's happening in the comic. There's a reason youtubers are always saying "Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe!" which is that this really does increase the number of people who do that.
On comics that update page-by-page particularly it can be the case that not enough worth talking about is happening on pages to really talk about. For example, if on one page the characters are talking about a thing, and then the next page they're still talking about the same thing, or on one page they're in a fight and the next the same fight is still ongoing, and there hasn't been a joke punchline, a big change or escalation to the scenario or a surprise or revelation, people might not have a lot to comment on even if they are quite happily reading. If they're not giving likes, again it might be good to remind them to please give likes.
Maybe your readers don't even have Tapas accounts, they're following the comic the old fashioned way. An odd situation, but there are definitely readers of my comic who just get notified of updates via my twitter. It's pretty hard to convince them to make an account on the app/site to give me likes, they prefer to just like or retweet the tweet announcements.
Worst case scenario: You have people who click your updates out of a sense of obligation because they're friends, family or part of a read-for-read arrangement, but they're not enjoying themselves reading it and feel no desire to carefully read or engage with the work, or are struggling to follow it or tuned out. There are some comics I read like this, and it's like.... I don't enjoy the comic or I can't really follow or care about what's happening, but I appreciate the creator's effort. Again, try reminding these people in a polite and positive way that it'd really help you out if they could maybe create and account and sub and tap that little heart on pages. Even people who are following because they respect the work you're putting in but the comic isn't their bag (which is fine! That's pretty much how my sister feels about my comic!) might give comments and likes if they understand it's important to you.
It might be all of the above except 4 to a degree. My family doesnt want anything to do with what i do as far as im aware lol.
So it might be the other reasons. Doubt alot of other artists follow my work but itd be cool if they did ! Lol
Thanks. Ill try and apply those techniques and see what works lol
PS: they give likes each update. Just dont comment. Perhaps my story really isnt that interesting ^^"
