Tapping into Tapas: An Author’s Insight into Digital Publishing

By: Jennifer de Guzman

Human creativity is vast; the traditional publishing industry is not. 

In that industry’s system, works flow through a series of increasingly fine-meshed screens: first literary agents, then editors, and finally publishers, who then decide whether your work is worth printing and putting on a schedule for release two years from now. At each level, fewer works sift through. Only the very finest make it through the final screen with a book in bookstores and libraries. 

I’m somewhere on the second screen at the moment with graphic novel The Queen of Smokey Mountain, which my agent sent out on submissions with the script and sample art (by the amazing Amanda Castillo) in July. However, my prose novel If I Never Saw the Sun hasn’t even gotten to the first screen after three years of querying agents. Like a lot of creators, I’ve been frustrated. I just want to get my work out there to be read, and read by more people that my personal website will reach. I’m the kind of creator that digital publishers with self-publishing options are looking to attract. 

One of those publishers is Tapas. Created in 2012, Tapas (formerly Comic Panda and Tapastic) digitally publishes comics, as well as prose fiction. Publishers Weekly reported in 2021 that overall Tapas’s content is 80% comics and 20% prose. (I contacted Tapas to ask the percentages specifically for their Community section, but they have not replied.) Besides the built-in audience on the site, Tapas’s Community section offers the potential for earning ad revenue once a work reaches 100 subscribers.

Although the company is based in Santa Clara, California, Tapas is owned by a South Korean media company, which is reflected in the site’s premium offerings. These seem to be dominated by translated Korean romantic fantasy comics (some of which have corporations listed as their author) that have titles that proclaim their content, like The “Giantess” Wants Love, The Archduke’s Magical Business Partner, and (my favorite) I’m the One Who Died but the Hero Went Crazy. (I also asked Tapas about the ratio of translated works to original English-language works on their site but have not received a reply.) 

However, a healthy stock of BL (boys’ love, featuring romantic relationships between men) works are among the most popular novels on Tapas, though, and since If I Never Saw the Sun fits into that category under that broadest definition, I thought it could find an audience there. After exploring the site, consulting with Sarah Neila Elkins, another author who has published on Tapas, I decided I would publish on Tapas Community. 

I wanted my book to stand out and look polished, so I commissioned a cover and spot illustrations from the artist Xyra Brittney. (Tapas does not allow AI-generated art, which I appreciate.) While I waited for the art to arrive, I divided my manuscript into the bite-sized episodes Tapas’ guidelines say work best. These are limited to 15,000 characters, but Tapas’s guidelines suggest that they should be fewer than 1000 words. With the art, I made promotion graphics and posted them on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, announcing a release date of November 18.

I wish I could say I meticulously planned my Tapas posting strategy and executed it perfectly, but I made a blunder early on that forced me to improvise and experiment. Tapas shows the number of views each work has, and on its interface, popularity is prominence. Views, likes, and subscriptions tend to increase exponentially: the more views you have, the more views you’ll get. On the first day I published IINSTS, it was viewed 583 times and 373 on the second day. An auspicious start. However, I wasn’t happy with how I divided the first chapter. Because of Tapas’s somewhat clunky and slow posting interface (there are few customizations for text, and you cannot edit the code to fix the formatting when it goes wrong—and it went wrong in a few places for me), it was easier to delete those episodes and repost them than edit them.

And that is how I learned that the views are tied to each episode, not the work as a whole. Nearly 1000 views vanished from my statistics. Not ideal. I had to figure out how to get more views on IINSTS if I wanted to gain momentum. By then, it was no longer at the top of the “Newest Series” sorting option, but I could keep it near the top of “Newest Episode” by updating often. I was too needy at first, posting a chapter a day, divided into two episodes published in the morning and afternoon. After looking at the posting strategies of successful novels on the platform, I decided to slow the rollout. 

Making that change was laborious; Tapas’ self-publishing interface is slow and doesn’t provide an optimum user experience, to say the least. After some hours, I set up my schedule to post one chapter a week, divided into three or four episodes. This way, subscribers wouldn’t be overwhelmed with material. You know, all those subscribers. By the end of two weeks, I had sixteen.

However, in the third week, the number of subscribers shot up by fifty-five. What happened? Every week, Tapas releases a list of “Staff Picks” highlighting twenty-four works published in their Community section. And that week, If I Never Saw the Sun was one of them. Momentum from that brief time in the sun carried somewhat into the next week, but then views, likes, and subscriptions (the key statistic) returned to baseline.

Tapas’s analytics are not very robust: There’s no way to know what episode a reader was on when they decided to subscribe, where they stopped reading and navigated away, or if an outside link brought them to the work. It’s up to authors to track their marketing actions and make inferences about the resulting traffic. I’ve begun promoting If I Never Saw the Sun on different social media sites each day so I can track how many views it gets and determine where to focus more of my efforts. I am now experimenting with the site’s genre categorizations. Last week, If I Never Saw the Sun was a boys’ love novel. This week, it is an LBGTQ+ one. Next week, I’ll change it again. 

These kind of analytics games can make an author despair, but I am hoping to learn more about positioning my work and myself as an author. What genre’s audience responds to it best? Where are my marketing efforts getting the most click-throughs? Tapas’s meager reports may give me only the broadest brushstrokes, but right now, they are all I have. Luckily, I’m a writer, and it’s part of my job to fill in the details.