When making a traditional-format comic, how do episodes work?

@Rhonder Rhonder
Fri, 19 Mar 2021 18:05:18 +0000

@Rhonder wrote:

As you've already noticed, updating pages into a single episode over time is undesirable due to how updates and also the notification system work. Not only does it take the reader back to the top of the episode, but "update" notifications also function differently than "new episode" notifications- they don't put your series back in fresh and show up under the bell notifications rather than the bookmark notifications. Since updates are usually small edits, not everyone pays attention to those every time an author does one. This may lead to confusion when a reader gets a notification for the next chapter and realizes they're several pages behind.

To the problem at hand, there's no right or wrong way to format your episodes, it's kinda up to you and how you think it's best to present your comic. A lot of hobbyist comic artists do just post 1 or maybe 2 pages per episode because that's as much as they can make regularly and they want to take advantage of the visibility that weekly posting gets you. On the flip side, for story heavy comics episodes that short sometimes lead to an unsatisfactory reading experience.

You could also consider posting longer episodes, but less frequently. For example if you posted every other week instead of every week you could reach that 2-4 page range, perhaps (and that amount lands in my preferred reading range, personally). The trade off is less "Fresh" visibility though.

It's up to you to weigh the pros and cons and decide what's best for your comic I did a 1-page-per-week traditional format comic first, ended up being dissatisfied with the update length, and so my new current project instead only posts monthly, but with about 3-5 pages of content (vertical scroll, but if you count the panels it's about that much).