What reasons would make you drop your own comic / novel?

[MrOwl]

Royal Road

That's your problem, the majority of readers on that site are male, and they're the toxic type, think weebs that enjoy harem isekai, a lot of them are incels too, if you want people to enjoy your work the way you want, better post in another platform, what you did is the equivalent of posting fluff romance in a nsfw site.

[MrOwl]

I could see the lack of readership getting to me again, it really does weigh heavy on the artist mind when everyone around them seems to be bragging about hitting milestones and their reader base and you're just posting to a void.

If you want readership so much, just create a Romance / BL comic, put a lot of cliches in it, draw in a generic shoujo / yaoi artstyle, then enjoy your popularity, you're just giving people what they want, demand and supply.

[artemficta]

Lol the probability for success definitely increases doing that, also vertical scroll and color would have helped me out too XD But nah, I didn't go that route this time for varying other reasons. I just gotta suck up the lack of readership and be cool with it.

[MattRAuthor]

I haven't dropped a novel yet, but I almost did with one series. I'd been working on it for years and it was becoming a chore. I hated the characters and the plot but I was so close to finishing that I just powered through. Only time I've thought about dropping a project is when writing it starts to feel forced. Yeah writing is hard sometimes but I need to be enjoying what I'm writing at least a little bit

[NickRowler]

A mix of no one reading and lost of motivation. I do have some comics I would continue if it got a decent follow but as it is, it’s not worth the hassle.

[domisotto]

Yeah, they have a very narrow readership interests on RR, not as easy to pinpoint as I thought they would be. I wrote a King of Angst for that site, but I apparently overdid it on the dark and hard-boiled side. Still need to revamp that novel, I liked its bones, so it's an underwritten draft. I good test site for male/gaming demographics though.

[DiegoPalacios]

The other alternative is becoming a ghost and posessing an artist to finish the story, but the ethical and logistical implications are complex to say the least XD

[vothnthorvaldson]

Apparently, real world events. I almost dropped my comic because of Covid, because there is a eerily similar epidemic in my story, and I was afraid that the new, entirely different relation people have now with such diseases would alter the mood of my story too much. I did overcome that by tweaking my fictional disease to be less Covid-like, but it was a close call.

I'm also afraid of getting the wrong audience like what happened to you @lilithfairenwrites (this sounds awful, I'm sorry you had to go through that).
My specific worry are crazy BL fans. Not all BL fans, they are mostly fine. Just the crazy ones. I saw some LGBT stories getting comments demanding disgusting/illegal pairings, demeaning characters for not being toxic jerks.. and such, it terrified me enough to make me change my story a good deal (I'm actually going to put all the romance parts in a side comic to avoid possible 'contamination' of my main comic. At this point my main comic is too small and too much of a different genre to be a target AT all).

But the most probable reason I would drop my comic has nothing to do with audience, it would be a worsening of my back pain. Drawing is one of the activities that gives me pain.