Use buffer pages more often to move the story along or not?

@UzukiCheverie Uzuki Cheverie
Fri, 05 Aug 2016 07:10:35 +0000

@UzukiCheverie wrote:

Seconding people's points about not rushing your buffer. You never know what kind of emergency you could run into, whether it's sudden artist block or having to take a week off due to sickness, whatever. I feel it's better to wait for your buffer to post on its own prepared schedule than post it all at once and run into unexpected delays later (though it can be super tough to be patient for so long from a creator's side . o .)

If you do increase your update schedule, I'd say only add one more update in each week. So if you do one update a week, maybe make it two. But don't suddenly switch to 3-4 updates a week if you don't have the buffer to support you that long until you're able to get more content ready.

That being said...

marygold:

Seriously though, I'm only on my pilot chapter and it's been more than a year. And I'm approaching 80 pages. I think I have serious pacing problems.

Look into this. If it's been more than a year and you're 80 pages in but still on the pilot/prologue, then you're probably going to lose more readers who don't want to wait that long for any sort of payoff than readers who don't want to wait for updates. If you haven't introduced any sort of hook yet or gotten the plot moving at this point in time, then you should take a look at how you do your pacing and decide how much is too much. I know it can be counter-productive to rush it, but if it's taking you that long to get to any sort of climax that early in the story when you need to hook your readers from the get-go for any sort of dedicated readership, and if you're genuinely concerned over it, then it's worth sitting down and mulling over for a bit. Really think and decide on what's necessary and don't create more pacing than is necessary - establishing shots, emotional reactions are all fine, but if you do them too much they can be just as detrimental as rushing your story (it just gets tiring).

EDIT: I just checked out your comic and saw that you mainly update by 1-2 page batches. This can definitely make it feel like your story is progressing a lot slower than it should be (I used to do 1 page updates back when I was in school and it was all I could do at the time). That being said, if you still feel like you're having pacing issues, maybe sit down and triple check what is and isn't necessary for your pilot.