Your Tips on “Work Smart, Not Harder” for comics

those front page opportunities really are one of the best ways to grow numbers early on. There are sometimes online events where big accounts retweet smaller accounts, like this week is a Webtoon canvas festival, other times Tapastry asks for people to do art for events and the winner may get hosted on the front page for a week. Keep an eye out for those things and put em on your calendar, they are always worth doing, even if you don't get chosen, because it will put you on their radar, at least.

As a "bigger" ( not that much but still) creator of this site,i can say i did saw some really good quality comics with such good style and story being not rewarded enough.
There is no miracle solution, i think luck has a big part to play in it.
the only advice i can say it's to update regulary ?

i wish you good luck tho

I think you should flesh out your summary a little more. I think it just needs a little more grounding in the actual story. What you have not is a good set up, but still feels like vague noises. For example, just a very small change:

Under normal circumstances, no way these two men would fall for each other. Until one day Toru attempts to blackmail his long time bully, and the balance of power and intimidation open up the door to an unexpected romance.

I'm also not sure the first episode needs a mature warning? I know technically he's filming something naughty, but it's vague enough, and you don't see anything adult. I don't know if that'd help or not, but not having the first episode be mature might help get some people started? That way they can see the fun tone of your comic, and they know what they're getting into.

I agree with what others have said, it looks like your comic is doing well! Periods of stagnation aren't that strange, it probably won't last. =)

But here is a place you can submit your comic and get a promotion. It's also a great place to find really amazing LGBT comics.

There are many factors to ongoing success. Yes, Luck is a part of it, yes technical skill, storytelling skill, professional mindset, and hard work are a part of it too. Please forgive the essay. see TLDR at the bottom and you can disregard me if that floats your boat. I know I have strong opinions.

Here's what I think:
You have one comic on Tapas atm. It has 17 pages. You have 1.4K+ subs.

I do not know how long you have been doing comics, practicing art and storytelling, etc. But Here's some perspective:

I can say that compared to when I started in 2015 with my first oneshot you are doing phenomenal. My oneshot I started comics with was 36 pages and sits presently at 600+ subs. I ain't salty about it cause it's been 6 years and I am successful enough to work on comics (mine and others) full time. But the point is, we all start somewhere.

When I first published my comic I had already been freelancing art commissions since 2011 AND I was completing my degree in Animation (I graduated in 2016 from uni with that degree), so I was studying art and visual storytelling as my focus. So that's where I'm coming from, I fully intended to make creating stories my career.

Tapas has more creators and hella more viewers in 2021 than in 2015. So you're already drawing from a larger audience pool, which is good. Rising tide raises all ships.

Now onto this:

Fantastic question.
This is where the whole Luck, hard work, skill stuff comes in.

In my experience and from all I've learnt and studied from watching other authors that have ongoing success, this is what I'm reasonably sure of:

You have to have a resilient mindset. What I mean by this is...successful people have conviction. They decide they will absolutely do a thing, and then go about the business of doing it.

No exceptions, no excuses, I either do this thing I intend to do or nothing at all. Burn the ships behind you and the only options left to you is victory or death, if you'll allow me a touch of drama. --but that's genuinely what it feels like in a career as a storyteller, for me.

To do that, you have to define your success.

Is success getting a bazillion subscribers? Well then you have to have a story that a bazillion people want to read.
You have to have the skill to tell a damn good story, have damn good art, and you damn well have a plan to finish it. 'cause good luck keeping those bazillion readers if you just drop the story or let it meander cause you didn't figure out the ending.

Is success having a genuine interaction with your readers? Leave comments and questions in your Author's note, reply to EVERY SINGLE COMMENT. Even if it's just to say thanks. Your interaction encourages readers to interact.
Readers may only ever know their own comment and your reply to them. Other readers will notice you take the effort to see the people that are there. I know mine do.
Never take the readers you already have for granted in the quest to get more. If new readers see you value the old readers they're more likely to stick 'round.

Is success completing a story and putting it out there for people to read? Finish the story and keep uploading until it's finished. Then move on to the next one.
I never assume that the story I'm working on is 'the big one' that'll get me 'famous'. The story I'm working on is the one that I am absolutely delighted with and I'm excited to finish cause I want to see how it ends.
This has been true of every comic I've finished (the ones that are dropped are stories I personally lost interest in--not because they didn't make the numbers I wanted.)

Once you figure out what success looks like to you, then you can figure out your priorities.

You only get better at making comics BY making comics. You only get better at a thing by diligently practicing that thing.

In literally any other trade, actually practicing that craft is what makes you better at it. It's the same with writing stories. Just because we've read and watched stories our entire lives doesn't make us qualified to be skilled at telling them. In the same way that listening to music doesn't make you qualified to play an instrument or compose a song.

It's important to be a good consumer of content, yes, but that's only part of it.

Good stories, well told, attract readers. < How to do this?

Study how good stories are told. In prose, stage, film, etc. Comics being such a mixed media means you need to find what works best for the type of story you want to tell. Knowing how to tell a story increases your chances of success.

Learning how to tell your particular story is the hard part. Cause each story operates on its own set of principles that doesn't carry over to the next one.

Get good at the art, your art. Becoming technically proficient at making art increases your chances of success. This means technically proficient at typesetting, bubbles, sound effects and compositional paneling too! It's not just the art within the panels.

It takes time. Like so much time. Like an unbearable amount of time to become GOOD at writing, to become GOOD at art, to become GOOD at putting your work out there and slogging through the grind of feeling like no one cares about your story but you. Everyone feels like they stagnate in making a long form comic at some point. Everyone. And on top of that No one has the same amount of time between when they start and when they start to find success.

It's in this period of time that a lot of people quit. They're not willing to complete as many stories as they can, to fail faster, to have bold opinions and put them in a narrative, to be honest with themselves in telling their truth through fiction, to hone their technical skills, in doing something every day for the purpose of improving--and most importantly to love the process.

You have to love the process. Not the numbers, not the likes or subs or comments, none of that (though they are nice and anyone who says they don't CARE about the numbers is lying. I'm just saying, don't make the numbers your PURPOSE for making the comic. Be honest with yourself.).

You have to love the very act of writing, drawing, coloring, typesetting, creating your comic.
If there's one baseline for success I've heard of in any field--is the moment you focus utterly on the process of creating the best possible story you personally can at the point you're at in your journey--THAT'S when things start to shift.

Luck matters a lot. You also get luckier the better you understand stories. You also get luckier the more content you create and put out there. You also get luckier as you hone your skills. You also get luckier if you work on your comic every day. You also get luckier if you do any kind of study or practice in storytelling.

This is because as you learn and do more, you recognize more opportunities. You create more opportunities with the more content you put out. You create chances that you didn't even realize you were creating. You create the chance to be noticed every time you post your content. You increase your chances of being noticed by posting improving content. Thus Posting your comic regularly is the primary method of marketing. Finish the dang story and THEN you can decide if it failed, but not in the process of doing so.

Luck is uncontrollable. Readers are uncontrollable. Algorithms, being noticed by the platform, etc are uncontrollable. Disregard them.

Focus on what you can control = the process. Of creation, of study, of consuming good content. That's what you personally control. It's the only thing you can control. And when you have a finished product that you believe people will enjoy, then you can worry about marketing, which is just putting it in places where people are likely to see it.

You can only sell a good product if you have a good product--and in comics that means finished stories. That has been my belief and it continues to be my belief. Showing that you can see through to the end of a story is a gigantic indicator of a reliable author. I'm always striving to be that. I've fallen short of it and all I can do is say that in the future, I'd do my best to only write stories I intend to finish and know I can finish.

Know that you're never going to "make it". There's never a point at which you're at the top of the comic making mountain and say "Ah yes, I've reached the pinnacle of success. I have all the readers possible. I no longer need to create stories." It's silly to me. You tell stories to tell stories. Once one story is done (if you want to do this for many years), then you have to tell the next one. There is no point in time that you just...decide you've had enough of success just cause you reached some magic number. Storytellers are never done. I'll reach my peak of storytelling when I die.

TL:DR: Sera has lots of strong opinions on the pathways to success that she'll repeat ad infinitum.
Disregard what you can't control, focus on what you can control. Find a way to love the process of creating good stories. Define your success and for goodness sake be honest with yourself. If it's to get a bazillion subs, then fine; now go out and master the way to tell a story that will EARN you the attention of a bazillion readers.

Aha I'm glad to hear it.

It's honestly a hodge podge of things that have inspired me / stuff I do and think about on the regular.

If it helps, fantastic. Take what works for you and discard the rest.

Under the drop down menu called Topic Controls I think you can bookmark this thread 8)

to make my work more fast i reuse same background this many times as I can. At first I draw full background and put it wherever it fits to that localisation or I blur it a little bit.
Sometimes I also reuse same lineart from previous chapters but I give a different shading and composition of scene, or different face expression and it looks like it's freshly drew
I make my own brushesh for exaple some flowers, patterns or I use those from clip studio assets it's really makes your work faster
I also use 3D models for interiors or buildings, I paint on them either way, to make them look, I did it all by myself, but it's way easier than do it from the sketch

@doublemelon I was using mostly sketchup models till ep 15, up from 16th I have models from blender, but only one hut and stuff inside it, other things and buildings are still from sketchup. And they're not flat casue as I said I paint over them, adding them shadows, light, more textures ect.

I heard somewhere that if your subs stat to stagnate that you should upload at a different time of day to try and get new eyes on it. Like if you normally post at 8am start posting at 9am And that guy had 30k readers
And like a lot of people have said your first episode being rated m probably doesn't help since the algorithm doesn't seem to like mature content.