Why isint my webcomic getting any traction even though I've been updating it for a year?

[HGohwell]

I'd disagree with this tbh. The tone statement actually contributed to making me interested OP's comic when I checked it out, while conversely I find an attempt to imply tone through a short few-words summary often end up sounding cliched. In fact, in general I find this format:

I think it's fine to say it, but it should also be reflected in the rest of the summary in some way. Nothing in the main summary gave me anything close to these vibes, partly because the main summary doesn't tell me much of anything. I think if the main portion of the summary was stronger, it wouldn't be an issue, but as it is, this feels like it's telling me more about the story than the actual summary and it's still not telling me much. I guess, more like clarification or confirmation, rather than the only real indication that's the tone. The tone of the summary should match the tone of the story in someway, after all.

kind of cliched and formulaic,

I know it's cliche and formulaic summary template, all templates are because they're reduced down the basics and oversimplified to give people an idea. That's why I called it "a very simple basic template", not "a template everyone should follow word for word", and why I said in the next paragraph to play around with the concept and see what works best for the specific story and the author. It is a basic, example template to get people thinking about describing their actual story rather than vague concepts, not a this is perfect for every story and situation and author and you should follow it word for word template. That's why I went into more details in the following paragraph rather than just dropping a basic template and saying follow it and everything will be fine. I think anyone who says just follow basic templates and anyone who thinks just following them will work is someone who needs a rethink. .

[conventurecomics]

I think your work is good. I also subbed to your comic. You'll imporve as a go stick with what style your comfortable with, and promote your comic more in the promotions topics. Hope this helps a bit. Sometimes its good to keep the early wroks in as your comic progresses over time.

[TheLemmaLlama]

Right, good point; when just a straightforward statement of your intended tone is the only thing in your pitch that tells the reader anything, that's kind of a problem ^^; Though I do still think that a pitch is too small of a space to Show (any tone you attempt to imply would feel one-note), and you're often better off Telling.

I think there's a reason why I often get into stories from reviews rather than promotional material from the creators and it's not because reviewers are supposed to be impartial; but because reviewers often describe the experience straight (this story gives X, Y, Z vibes) whereas creators tend to rely on stuff like 'she begins to suspect it's not all it seems ...' (so my brain goes 'okay, mysterious, but I don't feel the mystery anymore because I heard that turn of phrase a billion times'). I think that's inevitable because there are only so many ways to imply a mood through only a few sentences; cliches become cliches for a reason

I guess the template is good basis for combatting Vagueness, but doesn't help much for Interestingness since (imo, at least) many Goals, Problems and Solutions (in their pared down form necessary for summaries) are just as boring if not moreso than lost souls, post-apocalyptic worlds and cults. But you have a point that having the pitch be Well-Defined is important in and of itself; even if it contains interesting elements, if it doesn't seem to Fit Together in any particular way, it's just a bunch of words that our brains kind of gloss over. Even if a template-fitting summary doesn't grab our attention, we're at least not confused after reading it and needing to ponder what we just read and what it actually meant

[darthmongoose]

This is a well-drawn comic, and a lot of the things here that will put readers off picking it up aren't the comic itself so much as how you're presenting it.

The thing to always keep in mind about readers of modern webcomics is they're spoiled for choice, and you have mere seconds to convince them to read as they scroll through on their phone. You have to make it as easy as possible to understand what your comic's deal is.

So I feel kinda bad for bringing it up, because your cover is beautifully drawn, and your banner is also beautifully drawn, but they're not doing their job right now. The cover is a lovely illustration, but viewed at Tapas size (like the size of a postage stamp even on my PC screen, and most readers are on mobile), the dappled light effect, which is beautifully rendered, is making it really hard to make out what the cover depicts, because instead of bright chararacters on a dark background (or vice versa) that pops out, we have dark characters on a dark background with scattered patches of brightness that don't highlight anything in particular, and then the title is also low contrast and too similar in value to the background, so it's hard to see it.
Your cover is a lovely illustration, but it's not effective at telling a potential reader what the comic is or what it's called. A clearer cover designed to be very readable at the size the cover is displayed would likely help you get more readers.
Then there's the banner. The banner is a great illo, it's really cute....buuuut right now it's so different in style and vibe, and even has a totally different font from the cover, it doesn't reinforce reader expectation or set up a consistent "brand" with the one the cover does. If you can have your banner match your cover in style, vibe and general colour scheme, it really helps give a professional first impression and establish the tone the reader can expect. I'd recommend redoing the cover (I'm sorry! You should use the current cover for other promo stuff though and sell it as a print, it's really pretty!) and then using that as a basis for a new banner that matches the look/vibe (maybe just use part of the cover for the banner, that's what I did, it doesn't need tons of effort, just consistency). Make sure the cover and banner also match the look of the internal art. They can be a bit neater or more polished, but remember; your cover and banner are setting up expectations and it's disappointing if you set something up that the comic doesn't pay off.

I don't often suggest people go back and redo early episodes... but I'm making an exception here, because they don't need redrawing at all; the drawing is great and I can't stress that enough... but the text and formatting aren't doing it justice. If you have your original art, please consider re-formatting those old pages to have bigger panels, neater text and not to have black text on dark green speech bubbles; that's a pain to read, especially for neurodiverse people like me with light sensitivity who keep their brightness turned way down. Tapas has the option to edit uploaded pages. You could simply replace the images in those early episodes with ones that are easier to read, and it would give so much of a better first impression.

Just as a general mindset for building an audience on Tapas, I'd like to close with the following advice: You are a good artist, but people aren't going to read your comic even though it's hard to read just because your art is good. Your readers are your guests, and you need to be as welcoming to them as possible, never taking their time and attention for granted. Your comic should be as comfortably readable as possible, even for people reading on a phone, or people whose vision might not be the best. Your cover and banner and blurb should establish as clearly as possible what to expect from your comic. You're creating good stuff, you just need to present it in a way where it's easier to see how good it is and make it a comfortable reading experience.

[HGohwell]

but doesn't help much for Interestingness since (imo, at least) many Goals, Problems and Solutions (in their pared down form necessary for summaries) are just as boring if not moreso than lost souls, post-apocalyptic worlds and cult

I can definitely agree with this, but I do think this is more an issue of people not really getting or maybe not taking the time, to work on their summaries to manage both. In my experience around writers groups, a lot of people seem to treat writing a summary as a chore or the last thing to be done before they can finally share their work and often they're using their first draft or writing it as they're posting their work. And I think this often contributes to summaries being either confused, vague or paint by numbers, not helped of course by now many people wing it in serial fiction meaning they might not even know their plot and are relying on vagueness to cover for the lack of planning. I think sometimes if more people spend more time seriously thinking about their summaries they might be a better mix of both.

For instance, while not perfect by any means, I think one of my better summaries for one of my currently shelved peaces of work still follows rought the same template, because I generally have those things in mind.

At fourteen, A was saved from death by B, kicking off an unbreakable friendship.

At twenty-two, B reveals himself to be the rebel mole A has been hunting for and gets away with his attempted murder. As factional tensions within the rebels boil over into a civil war that threatens to engulf the kingdom, A is stuck working with B in search of a solution. And pehaps A can discover why the friend he thought he knew changed so much.

As I say, definitely not perfect, I feel like, hopefully, it does a good enough job saying here's A, here's why it matters that B did that, here's the over all problem and here's why it sucks. And I pondered over it for a while trying to get the right balance of explaining clearly vs not sounding cliche..

[TheLemmaLlama]

So use the template as a starting point, and edit the heck out of it. That makes sense XD Looking at your summary, I find it hard to pattern-match it to the template, but I guess that's what editing gets you; I can see it contains (most of) the elements specified in the template

Now that I think about it, I had issues with templates because:

• I tend to think of the elements (Goal, Problem, Solution etc) as one word answers, like I'm filling in a mad-libs worksheet. (That's just how my brain (has been trained to) react to templates :'D) But we're allowed to write down the full nuance of what the Goal/Problem/Solution is and pare it down later.
• My instinct is to keep all the elements and give the all equal space/attention, but an engaging description usually has some 'asymmetry'. Like, I can't identify a specific 'solution' in your description, but that gives room for the other elements to breathe and more words for you to describe them in a non-cliched way; whereas if I crammed all the elements into that small space and made sure the reader is Aware of each of them, I'll be limiting myself to cliches.

But the template is a solid starting block and it's easier to get something well-defined by chipping away at it than if you kind of just did whatever without a foundation, which is a good way to end up with something vague. I guess is what you're saying

[HGohwell]

Yeah, I think there's a specific way to use templates, just as there are ways to use things like reference images, you shouldn't just copy or trace over the reference image, but take it and learn from it and edit it. I think also some people have issues because things like Goal/Problem/Solution can be vey specifc to genres and the exact tersm could vary depending on your exact plot and genre. Problems can be replaced with things like Journey (like Pokemon, there's no realy Problem per say, it's a journey towards the Goal and the Solution is to go on the Journey). A lot of slice of life is less like to have a spefic Problem or Goal in a conventional sense, but more in personal character wants and needs and hang ups (Cyan wants to join the school band but she's too anxious to get any further than listening outside the door and then Solutions are simply to improve) or think about a lot of sports drama series where often the Problem is as simple as "there are other teams in the way" and the Solution is "train". I can definitely see how and why some people get caught up in checking points off of a list or just fillining in the blanks, like people do with character sheets, and I think it's important to remember they are supposed to just be tools and aids to start you off rather than the be all and end all of how you work.

So, yeah, I think templates like this should more akin to reference images than paint by numbers, somthing to think about and reference and edit rather than just fill in and call it a day. If it was that simple everyone would do it after all.

[VersusVII]

I've read the first pages and the dark speech bubbles with dark Text on dark background make them hard to distingue and read what's written in it.

And as other people said, promote it here on the forums, some readers or subscribers will arrive. About instagram or tiktok, I prefer the first one. I show in the IG stories some wips and choose a panel to promote the updates the day they went out.
On Facebook I found some groups about webtoon Creators, you can try spam your work there too.

[Flios]

Since everyone here has said why the comic hasn't gained any attention or barely any attention, I'll say something else. One of the options going forward with this story would be to take it off tapas first, then revamp the whole plot and redraw the first few chapters. There are a lot of people on the forums who want to read your comic and support you, but that's not the real point here.
You seem pretty frustrated and even a bit angry right now. That's something you should be careful of. If you continue being frustrated or angry, it can cause you to lose motivation to keep drawing or have a burnout.
One thing I would do is to take a break and then go back to your comic to take look at the storyline and fix it with a fresh mindset. The redraw of episodes wouldn't be too major, but just a few tweaks here and there to match the new story.
Hope this helps. I wish you the best of luck.

[finnlygoat]

Thank you, it was getting kind of frustrating and saddening seeing people say things over and over so harshly but this is genuinely helpful. thank you for saying it nicely and i like the points you've made in this. I'm almost done with the last few chapters of the first book and once I'm done with that i will probably revamp the first few chapters.

[system]

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