I do promotion on Discord with various groups I'm a part of, which sorta counts I guess, but mainly it's all Twitter. And Twitter is famously terrible with conversion rates, so it's basically a losing battle with your time.
I try not to pay money on advertising since I'm not making any real money off my stories in the first place, but it's always tempting.
Teach us your ways! Facebook is so dead for me that I quit my account like 8 years back. But even still, if there were more reading blogs nowadays, like there used to be, back when blogging was more vogue, that would really help creators out a ton.
But other than that, I've been honestly thinking about getting back into not only reading, but sharing what I'm reading with other people on my timeline, to try and attract readers into my twitter space who like my taste. Like I forget sometimes that one of the skills of being a creative is just straight up having good taste. Right now, most of my twitter space is other creatives, who are awesome, and when I advertise there, I do get views from it. But, they're also also very busy, and can't read as much.
But obviously that all takes a lot of time.
And one last thing--is that Spotify on that list?
Personally, I've grown accustom to using Instagram because I've had it for so long. Also, I just started a discord. I have no idea if it's going to work out, but there's a first time for everything.
I don't really use facebook as much as I planned for my Talking Chalk persona, and I recently quitted all my personal social media because of stuff, but from my experience, most of these groups come from memes, to independent business helping each other.
It's pretty much searching for something like that on facebook with the groups filter, ask to join the group, and then see what rules they have. It's pretty much as if you made these forums into a facebook page.
I put spotify there as I have some ex-classmates from university that have their own podcast there using the encore app (I think that's the name). I thought it might be of use for novelists.
Pretty much Instagram and Twitter; mostly Instagram but currently planning on making my own blog/website to have just to promote certain things I’m working on, including Rewrite.
Just currently I’m trying to find a suitable hosting platform to have a blog on that won’t kill the pockets lol.
Plus feel having a blog that I purely own will allow me to give hindsight and info that’s more in depth than what I’m able to say on Instagram or even the Tapas Wall, don’t get me started on Facebook...
You stole the words right out of my mouth. It's hard to stay optimistic now days...but I just keep doing the thing because I'm a slave to capitalism.
Do you write in Spanish? The problem I see is that the things I use to prommote my work within the Spanish community don´t work with the English community.
The Spanish community uses facebook a lot, at least wattpad writers. They share promotional memes (which is the thing that works best), pictures of their characters and pieces of chapters. Though, for my experience, just putting a synopsis or a text is the worst you can do, because people in that community is also hella lazy and they´re not gonna read unless there´s only a couple of lines and sound funny or interesting somehow.
Anyway, memes is what works for me. Though lately also worked simply wondering something like: "Would anybody like to read a story about a man who got trapped inside the worst novel he read?".
Anyway, I also got twitter, goodreads and ig, but I barely do anything with those. I just focus on facebook because that´s where most of my readers are.
I feel very lucky my interests are visual so I tend to do pretty well on Instagram and Twitter. I honestly try not to put in too much time into any platform tho because I’m definitely prone to overuse so I allow myself a max of 15-30 minutes on them a day and thats usually just chitchatting with friends and making sure I don’t miss important DMs. My actual posts tho I schedule so I don’t fall down the trap of just watching the numbers all day. I also actively avoid promoting my stuff in places I use for casual chatting like forums and discords.
I’ve thought about streaming and youtube before but its one of those things where I don’t really watch youtube at all so it feels disingenuous for me to try to make content for a medium I don’t personally care about.
My partner and I have started podcasts on and off for YEARS but we’re gearing up to do it properly in the next few months and they want to go the whole nine yards with it: twitch, youtube, podcast. Which is great if I don’t have to touch it!
Just twitter and not much. Basically, I just post whatever I am interested in, and if someone checks my profile and choses to check out my books, good stuff. Sometimes I plop a chapter update premade, but meh, nobody likes and retweets them anyway, so why bother?
Instagram, I found to be too stressful, because people load tons of 'stories; and you have to click through them all, and I have seen nothing in addition to the likes I get from the friends I have here anyway.
In general I tend to rely a lot on Instagram, but it doesn't attract a lot of people 
. I also use Twitter, but very rarely and, initially I also used Discord but later stopped. Guess I really need to push myself a bit more out there.
Yeah, even IG hashtags aren't that good really.
If anything, they give you 20 more views and 4 likes depending on how many (and how good) hashtags you use.
I've seen good reception from promoting (actually paying to IG) posts, but I've seen far better reception when I promote to Latin American countires rather than when I promote it to english-speaking ones, so I can guess it's harder to get attention from those places, and even more for novelists.
Blogs are a double-edged sword actually.
I first made my blog because I didn't know sites like Tapas and Webtoons could be accessed by normal people to publish their works, so I published mine there until a friend told me I could use Tapas.
Then my blog was kind of redundant until I posted updates regarding the redraws/soft-reboot of the series and the character profiles.
But they give you good insights on where do you get more visitors from, and how many actually click to your links:
I'd say it's good to have one, but (even if I done otherwise) shouldn't be the main site one promotes for their comic.
Another thing that could be of help is learning about SEO and SEM.
I haven't researched as much of it yet, but in simple words it helps your site to get more traffic through search engines and other means.
Fortunately for my comic, "The Memorable Bittersweet Days" it such and odd thing to search and has little to none similar searches that my tapas/webtoons links are the first results:
But that can't be said about "Shelter of the Chalk":
Of course it changes depending of one's region though.
With your blog Chalk how much do you pay for it to keep it up and if so do you think the money that’s being paid is worth the traffic your getting to keep it up?
For the blog itself, I haven't used any money, but I did for instagram paid promotion.
So far I've paid something around $400 MXN (which is roughly $20 USD) in two months and thanks to it I've got around 15 registered followers more.
You can choose if you want your promotion to be to get more profile views, more messages or more visitors to your website (the one you put in your bio). I always choose for more visitors except for a $20 MXN promotion I made for the Ask Salamon event.
It really works better when targeting people from latin-america than when targeting english-speakers, and so far, I've got 100 or so visitors thanks to the promotions, but only 20 clicks to the actual links to the comic (whether it be via webtoons or tapas).
I'd recommend to give it a try with a quantity of money that you can afford, but linking directly to an episode you want people to read at the time.
Next time I will only promote when using a link to either tapas or webtoons, and leave the blog links for other instances.
Another thing I forgot to mention.
You can choose whether you want to Instagram to target an audience automatically, or target it by yourself specifying age range, countries to reach to, and interests of the people you like to reach ("anime and manga fandom" "Dragon ball super" "Marvel studios").
The first will take your current country as priority, which helped me get more people to read the spanish version, but not as much for the English version. But if you target a specified audience, make sure to put as many interests as possible to get a better reception. I've put like 20 or 30 interests for my specified audience and been experimenting on how many reach it has when aiming for Latin-American countires, and when aiming for English-speaking ones, or both at the same time.
