What's this? This is the big thread on how to get your works in front of an audience here on Tapas, taken from my Tapas guide that I've shared over on Discord a few times. As there are a few people here who are making there way over from other sites, I thought it might be good to just put up a thread with a few things that are different here on Tapas compared to other sites and some best practices for posting here! Enjoy!
General Advice
Chapters should be between 800-1300 words for peak engagement on the site. This may mean cutting scenes short, splitting chapters etc. Ideally, write with Tapas in mind. Tapas readers like things short and sweet.
Cliffhangers. Write them.
Romance is a huge seller. Fantasy is the most popular genre on the site, followed by BL.
Tapas is a visual website far more than other novels platforms are. Your cover/thumbnail/banner matters. Illustration does better than photographs for covers, people do better than typography.
Make sure that you write an authors note – and if you have a patreon link it everywhere (banner, ad, in the authors note, EVERYWHERE GUYS).
Don’t start new books unless you have to. Just don’t. Keep people coming back to the same page and call it a new ‘season’ of the book.
Be careful, once something is published there is no way to change the order of it. You cannot insert something earlier without going through and editing EVERYTHING after it to match. So ensure that anything you publish is what you want there forever.
The editor removes italics. It’s annoying. There’s no consistent workaround.
There is a way to insert images into chapters. You need to use firefox. If you google ‘tapas novel firefox insert images’ or something similar it’ll give you a step by step.
Just like the good old days of Myspace, there’s an autoplay for music that will play for desktop readers. Use it. I get so many comments from people who enjoy the music I’ve put to the chapters. Not only does it help setting the mood you want, Tapas readers are MUCH more media focused than other platforms. They want that multimedia experience and Tapas allows you to give them that so do it.
You can tag individual chapters which will help with SEO discoverability so do that if you want.
How to schedule your uploads
Play around with a set time either morning or evening and consistently stick to it using the post scheduler.
For the first month, try to update DAILY. If you can’t manage a month 10 days or 2 weeks will do. You need your work appearing on the fresh lists and the popular lists as much as possible during launch. After that, you can slow down and the subs you gained will carry you.
The less you upload per week, the more invisible you’ll become. Anything less than 3 updates a week, and you might not even grow. (But this can also work in your favour – a chapter that is 3000 on other platforms can be uploaded on your once a week schedule there, at the same time Tapas can have the first two parts of the chapter early with the finale launching simultaneously as a way to drive traffic from one profile to the other, but still keep your patreons happy that they have the content of the other chapters and the ending first).
The end of the week is better than the beginning of the week for numbers. Site traffic picks up on Thursday and tails off on Monday to repeat again. More creators upload at the end of the week but it can also mean that you struggle to be seen.
Consistency trumps quality. If you’ve got nothing to upload because of writer’s block, throw up something else instead. Fan art or a Q+A announcement or ANYTHING really. Don’t do it ALL THE TIME, but you aren’t going to be penalised from doing that but you will be penalised if you don’t post anything for a long time.
Hope this helps some newbies! Oldies, feel free to drop some knowledge below as well!