I publish my comics on separate websites, and here are a few interesting facts that the counter and comment section have told me over the years.

1. On average, a reader spends 10-15 seconds viewing a comic page. Yep, your 5-8 (or more) hours of work on a page are converted into mere seconds of viewing. So be kinder to yourselves, colleagues: the tiny flaws in drawing that we scold ourselves so harshly for will most likely never be noticed by anyone. People care more about the story.

2. Most English-speaking readers check each new page and usually comment. Most Russian-speaking readers, on the other hand, visit very rarely, only when several dozen pages have accumulated, or even wait for the comic to finish. And they almost never leave comments; I eventually removed the comment section from the Russian site to avoid staring into the void every day. So maintaining a purely Russian-language webcomic is harder: both traffic and motivation suffer. It's better to have an English version, if only for your own motivation: when you regularly see positive feedback from readers, the chance of abandoning the comic without finishing the story is lower.

3. You'll laugh, but promoting a standalone comic site turned out to be much easier than finding an audience on aggregators (like Webtoon and Tapas). You'd think the audience of comic lovers is already there, and you don't need to bother with a website, but no. The sad thing is that all that huge audience on aggregators revolves around popular names; it's hard for a newcomer to break through, and there's a struggle for crumbs of attention. People even pay for ads to build their audience on aggregators, and it doesn't always help. It's actually much simpler and more effective to make your own site and wait for people from search engines. A standalone site, if well-made, is respected more by search engines than a faceless page on an aggregator.

4. The audience of Russian-language webcomics is generally much younger than that of English-language ones. For example, the English version of Gifts of Wandering Ice has many readers well over 50 (and even over 70). In our country, people of that age, if they know about the existence of comics and webcomics, deeply despise them and consider them low-grade literature. There are probably exceptions, but I haven't come across any yet. My oldest Russian-speaking readers are about my age (35-40), but even they can be counted on one hand. So if you want to tell a serious story aimed at adults, like hard sci-fi, be sure to make an English version.

5. And the strangest fact for dessert. Having many pages in a comic is, it turns out, bad. Yes, there are people who enjoy long stories, but most, upon learning that my "Gifts" has four books and 1200+ pages, start saying nasty things without even looking at the comic: in their opinion, such a large story cannot possibly be good and is not worth attention, and the author should be ashamed of it. They don't explain why, of course; at most they say that large volumes are only permissible for famous works, and for indie authors it's an absolute minus. Surprisingly, there are many such people both here and abroad. And this reaction is instinctive, intense, and not even understood by those reacting, so it's impossible to fight. Alas, I found out about this too late; I have no way out, I need to finish the story because I love it and I'm curious where it will lead.


#useful