Here we go...
I didn’t say that. In context, I was explaining that featured doesn’t always work the way you’d set it up to seen and that there are other things that work better for niche works than featuring. Like Jesus Christ, I’m a novelist on a webcomics site. Do you really believe I don’t know what it’s like to be the underdog or how hard it is to get attention?
Stop putting words in my mouth, stop twisting them to mean something you want me to have said and didn’t, in fact say.
Yup, there are only two swim lines for novels. I get it, I'm not going to ask for 50/50 because this site is far from 50/50. 
I can attest to this working really well as one of the authors KR here gave a shout-out to. I started posting on Tapas again after years of having just been a reader (and after having posted a horrific webcomic in 2014, lol)
What built the foundation of the platform I have here now, was that shout-out. We write the same genre and they knew their fans would be excited to read my work. That in terms got my works up on those trending charts. And that got the attention of the staff who've now featured both of the novels I have on my profile.
And while the feature did help one of the novels with a good push, I don't think that's what really did it. It's tapping into a niche audience who're crazy dedicated to that niche. It's networking with other authors/creators in that niche and share readers. We've done it on other platforms as well, and that shit works.
And this is not to say there isn't a visibility issue on Tapas. I don't know the struggle of comic creators since I haven't been one for the last 6 years. But as a novel author, networking really works wonders if you do it right.
Again, I will repeat that the point is ANY advantage is better than NO advantage.
The underselling of that advantage, by anyone who has received it, is completely tone deaf to the rest of us.
Until a bunch of people start lining up and testifying they LOST subscribers by being featured then my point, and the logic, stands.
We're not talking about something that exists in a vacuum though.
The wide majority of the creators involved in these discussions are doing all those other things as well. Everyone is trying to work the other angles too.
It's the underselling of being featured or front page visibility as a positive in potential gains that rubs me the wrong way...always has.
@skicoak I don't see anyone underselling the feature in this thread though?
Oh...it's in here too but it's prevalent in any discussion on the theme.
It's sometimes in the sentences where people add a "but " after talking about their gains from being featured so they can re-qualify what really matters .
Or telling us about how it "backfired" when something like 50% of the new subscribers eventually unsubscribed.. a gain of 50% is STILL a gain.
Does everyone who does it recognize how it sounds to the rest if us? Probably not.
Is it nefarious ? Nope.
It's just tone deaf.
@skicoak I don't know, man. I think a lot of people think a feature will be the golden ticket and after that there's no longer any work needed. The grind is done and you now have thousands of people tuning in for every update.
Telling people about their own experiences with how the feature worked for them doesn't seem tone deaf to me. It seems more like you don't like what they have to say - that maybe the feature isn't the be-all end-all to everything that is Tapas. And that chasing something you have zero control over isn't productive.
You're "guessing", and incorrectly, as to what I mean.
I keep repeating it....if something gains our group's comic even one additional subscriber then it's an advantage. I don't need advantages to be "golden tickets" or "be-all end-all" to continue to seek them in any form they take. Most of us understand that... It's insulting to think "a lot of people" don't understand that.
And while I have zero control of the process (and most likely HURT our chances by being vocal about it) I do have a voice that reflects my own and other's opinions about it.
@skicoak And as you have a voice - so does everyone else. People are allowed to talk about their experiences. It's kind of what this whole thread turned into.
I've observed how some people talk about getting featured - on several platforms too - and it's often put on a pedestal. And when it finally happens to some of these creators, they're majorly underwhelmed because... Well, a feature won't make everyone. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink. People being open about their experiences with the feature - and how it might've not been as great as they expected - could potentially help some people curb their enthusiasm and take control over things they actually do have control over: their works and their promotional plans.
Maybe these comments seem tone-deaf to you, but maybe they're also helping other people take control over what's controllable and actually encouraging them. After all, this whole thread isn't just for you.
The initial comment you quoted of mine was about how networking has helped me more than the feature did. Also across platforms. If that's tone-deaf to you then... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ok. Why does Tapas owe you an advantage over another creator though? There’s another way of looking at it. And I mean “general you” here not you specifically. Like, hell, I wanna be in the spotlight front and centre week after week please. Every week, KR show, all the time. 24/7. But that offers nothing to Tapas’ business plan and y’all would be sick of queer novels pretty fast. I’m not keeping the lights on with my content, there are other creators who are certainly paying salaries and server costs and overheads far more than I am.
But because I’ve has a variety of works featured in a variety of ways from main page spotlight to trope list feature to push promos, I can tell you that you can’t build a business plan around it without taking Tapas’ bottom line into account. That’s not to say ANYONE is unworthy of a feature, and I’m incredibly grateful to the team at Tapas for standing behind my work so strongly, but the initial subscribers I get are all people who trust me and my brand and my work.
You should be more concerned about visibility, filtering, networking and discoverability than what Tapas features on its front page. Otherwise you’re just shouting into the Void and hoping it calls back.
There's a saying that goes: "God helps those who help themselves", which I don't always agree with because it tends to get thrown around by libertarians and people who disagree with free healthcare, but I think in this case, it's relevant.
Tapas has no responsibility to promote your comic. Even if you're a really nice person, even if you regularly post on the forum, even if you pay for premium content. Platforms are not your friends. From their perspective, promoting a comic that isn't premium is really only worth it if it has at least already managed to hit that 100 sub target and enabled ads. More views = more ad revenue = mutual benefit.
They're giving me free hosting with a reasonably short URL. They're giving me the chance to be seen in a list of comics. To me, that's an okay deal, even without the chance to be featured. And they let me keep all the IP to my comic. Is it weighted in their favour? OF COURSE IT IS, they're the ones paying for everything! If I don't like it, I'll have to peddle my comics elsewhere, like pay for hosting and build a wordpress site like I had back in the day and take visibility into my own hands. In my case, I've looked at my options and decided "this one works for me", but Tapas is no more my friend than my bank is. It's a business, they're offering me a deal and I'm okay with the terms compared to the other options.
Whether or not Tapas features you, the biggest factor in your comic's popularity is YOU. It's painful to hear, but it's true. If you aren't making your best effort to make your comic popular, why should Tapas try to force people to be interested in it? You have to be honest with yourself about whether your comic is a personal piece of art for your own enjoyment or a product you're selling, because saying and acting like it's the former, but expecting a queue of customers anyway isn't realistic. It's a nice daydream to indulge in where I just draw and write whatever I like in whatever format I like without a single artistic compromise to my vision and it gets 10k subs and a feature and then Netflix comes up and is like "Hey Kate, Rebecca Sugar was so impressed by your comic, she wants to head making it into an animated series with animation by Studio Trigger"... That is not going to happen. (Even though I deserve it for being such a flawless human being, obviously.)
Any choices you have made to make your comic less accessible and less relevant to the audience here are your responsibility. You have to own them and be at peace with the fact that yes, if you have made a choice for artistic integrity or indulging your own personal favourite styles or themes rather than catering to what the audience here are into, it's very likely that the audience will not want to look at what you're making.
You made a product that they're not interested in? You didn't market it strongly with an eyecatching thumbnail or a clear description? And you want Tapas to invest space in their shop window as what... a favour? Because you're nice? I've pitched to publishers before and been rejected. I don't then tell those publishers that they ought to publish me because I've always supported their products and been an active part of their fandom. Tapas doesn't owe me a feature any more than Marvel owes me a gig as penciller on Runaways (Marvel did send me a script and have me do pencil samplers for Runaways once. It didn't work out. It sucks... but like... yeah Kris Anka is awesome, I'd be lying if I said I thought I'd have done a better job).
I chose to make a comic in one of the smallest genres on Tapas, to work for print first, to not pace it in the style of a Tapas comic (which is setting up the premise within the first 3 updates) to not make the main character a hot bishounen, and to draw with a style and colour palette that don't fit in... right, I made a bunch of decisions that will negatively impact the popularity of my comic, and I know that, and I take responsibility for that. My plan to get my comic noticed has never factored any expectation of any sort of feature from Tapas, because I know I made these choices, so the responsibility to prove I can engage people despite that and to bring in an audience is on my shoulders.
But even with these barriers, I sailed past 100 subs within 30 pages without doing any "sub for sub" stuff, without needing a feature. I did that by doing my best to market the crap out of what I have with the resources at my disposal. I made sure I had an eyecatching thumbnail, a strong description, very readable pages, a story that keeps supplying action, tension and drama. I give back to the community by giving in-depth critiques that I put a lot of effort into. I have actively made changes to how I describe my comic and the pacing and length of updates based on feedback to make it more appealing to Tapas readers.
I've been a woman in comics long enough to know that life is unfair and I can't rely on companies or publishers to do anything for me. I've always had to build my own audience and make my own doors. A long-shot advantage like asking a company to feature my work for nothing more than charity is low on my list of "viable advantages" and I'm much more likely to use advantages I have actual control over like making changes to my comic, marketing on other sites etc.
This is basically what Stephen King just out his foot in with the whole Woody Allen autobiography. Publishers have a right to say no. That’s what freedom of speech and free markets are meant to be about. (And as a socialist myself, I never thought I’d be saying that).
This was such a hard lesson for teen-me to learn. No one owes me shit. Especially not internet platforms.
And this I had to learn as a grown-ass woman. Platforms will always think of their own it interests first and what fits into their audience. If you're super duper niche, they'll most likely not feature you because who will they feature you to? If they don't have the audiennce for it then... What's the point? Both for the creator, the userbase and the site, there wouldn't be a point in it.
I think there's some misunderstanding going on in this thread. I don't think anyone is expecting Tapas to put their series on the front page consistently, but I think some people do wish they would help us out and promote us a LITTLE bit.
Like I have seen people say "I suddenly gained so many subs!" and it's because they showed up in trending or whatever for a day. I don't think one day of "Hey, here's a little push" would hurt anyone.
I do get that there will be a spike and then a decrease and possibly some negativity involved with it, but the point still stands that if I gain 50 subs from a promotion and then lose 45 of those subs, I am still at 5 people more than where I was. For the smaller creators, 5 subs is pretty huge. It's the difference between 95 and 100 which means being able to turn on ad revenue. At the smaller levels, the difference of value in each subscriber is much bigger. Losing 1 subs when you're at 30 vs losing 1 sub at 30k (though for the record, of course neither is good. It will always hurt to lose sub, but the value of the sub is different).
I also get that having a good story helps immensely. We all want to write a good story, but there is a glass ceiling of sorts between good story and number of subs. I also think it's important that someone can write a GOOD story but that doesn't mean it's what people WANT to read. We all know BL comics generally do better or have an "easier" time and we know it's because a large amount of people want to read and actively search for BL. Meanwhile, people are not actively searching out scifi comics in the same way.
That's something I discovered with my current story. I put a lot of thought, writing and rewriting in my story to make it good and I was feeling pretty confident about it. I also wrote a story that I myself wanted to read. Naturally I thought others would want to read it too. Now I realize, that isn't really the case. 
So that is something I will keep in mind for when I write my next comic. Before I write my comic, I will take a look at trends and see how I can fit in while being different and that's definitely something a lot of us could benefit from to help make a successful comic.
I'd like to add that one of the issue small creators can have (and I mean any type - even people like me who have zero ambition to make money and not a extremely huge ambition as an artist in general), is that we may be small, but we are numerous AND we make, as a community, Tapas' model work.
How many times did I read things like 'Tapas, oh no, it's not free, I can't pay' or 'there is also Tapas if you have money to read' etc. I, as well as a lot of other creators (small or big, but small are more numerous and may have more time), am there in other comic-related places, non-comic related places, other languages places etc, telling people that not all Tapas is paying, that there are ways to read the paying comics without a credit card if we're patient etc.
But still, the general idea in people's mind is that they can't read free on Tapas, so they don't even come.
I may only have a very small, non professional comic, but I can (and do) bring people to Tapas by educating people about Tapas. My role is very small because I'm very introverted, but someone with a good online presence could do lots more, for part irrespective of the size or quality of their comic/novel.
Obviously, having small creators feeling not compensated for their advertising role (among other things) is not conducive to enthusiasm for advertising more... Which is bad for every single creator, big or small.
The question should be 'how and on what criteria can we help small comics be visible when there are so many of them', not 'does it really worth doing it when there are more popular comics out there that we could profit from'. Small comics are a part of a healthy Tapas system. Each only does a small part of the job, but as a whole we are very important.
I'm sure everyone know that, but I think it's easy to forget when looking at a few bigger titles, comparing, etc. We should not forget there are different roles to play to make the system work, and that every role filled should bring a minimum of incentive.
This is a bit off the off-topic topic, but I still despise that way of thinking and I will never not say so.
However, I've already done a ton of rants about how harmful it is to imply that people who haven't made it simply haven't tried (enough), so I won't go into it now.
INSTEAD,
I think @skicoak's point wasn't that Tapas owes us something for being here and trying our hardest to make our comics/novels...just that a little extra visibility (a) would go a long way for us little guys and (b) really wouldn't cost Tapas as much as people are implying it would. '_' I find it really odd to think that a week or two of spotlight for a non-premium work might somehow be a legitimate threat to their bottom line.
Case in point: me. ^^; I did absolutely nothing to deserve getting Staff Picked outside of writing one random little story as well as I could. NOTHING. I didn't advertise, I didn't aim for any "mass audience", even my thumbnail was just a colorful nondescript blob. It was basically the opposite of everything people say is "deserving" of spotlight.
And yet, someone on the Tapas team took the time out to read my story and grant it that little bit of exposure. And it had a noticeable effect...maybe not for me as an author, but to this day, that novel is the only one that still gets more than 1 or 2 views a week. Two YEARS after it was finished.
...So yeah, I can kinda see why people downplaying that would be offensive. This stuff is real, folks; if advertising didn't work, companies all over the world wouldn't sink billions of dollars into it every year.
And most importantly, Tapas didn't get ANYTHING from me in return for that. I mean, sure, my novel got a huge view and sub boost at the time, but nothing even remotely comparable to that enjoyed by their premium works. I didn't do anything for their bottom line that a 2$ donation couldn't have accomplished.
But they still let me have that. And there's no reason why they couldn't do it for more people, more effectively. Sure, there are plenty of reasons why they might not want to, or that they don't even have to, but it's...not really unreasonable to ask.
Never said it did. Considering I didn't post anything in it until 100+ posts had already occurred ... It's pretty faulty math to imply differently.
What Tapas SHOULD owe us, as the smaller creators on the site, is to stop removing potential avenues of visibility in favor of more retail space. That's the argument occurring in multiple threads in these forums. It's been brought up in THIS thread and folks minimizing the advantage of being featured isn't an answer for those concerns.
How many times do I have to repeat this....everyone is concerned about those as well. Nobody is looking at being featured as the ONLY thing to focus on. This is one thing... Having issues with it doesn't preclude the existence of others.
^This.
Instead there's an influx of people who think they're imbuing life lessons by underselling their advantages and saying Tapas doesn't "owe" us anything.
Two mathematical points...
One....Our group's title's subscriber list has a sizeable ratio of people we brought here to Tapas. This is likely true of EVERY creator here. Tapas then gets to pimp to them. That's a symbiotic relationship... Not a one sided affair.
Two...the ratio of people who check out our title to the subscriber amount is high. It doesn't tell me diddly to insist that opportunities to get more people to check it out the title are tied to factors other than visibility. I can understand it's not for everyone... but the less opportunities we have to reach those that it is for... is a NEGATIVE.
I think one thing everyone is forgetting is that all these bigger creators who are coming here to tell you one thing, were once smaller creators themselves. You can say we don’t understand, or that we don’t get it, but we do because we were exactly where you all are once.
We can do nothing but share our advice and experiences and our points of view from a different angle. You don’t have to listen at the end of the day.
But then also, this is backing up the other points made further up the thread about why Premium or “successful” creators are rarely here. Any advice or difference of perspective is seen as an attack.