I hear lamentations like this all the time. Everyone wants some attention for their comic. If they didn’t then they wouldn’t have published it in the first place. Having recently gained more popularity then I ever expected I find it my responsibility to spread that popularity, to give other comics more visibility through links and in this case through some valuable advice.

It’s really very simple. Send people fan art. Send them guest comics. They may not have even heard of you before but on the chance that they like your work or their readers find your work interesting you will get an instant flood of readers and a decent percentage of that flood (I’ve often heard 10%) will stay. There aren’t any particular rules as to what to send, though you should be familiar with the comic you’re sending fan art to and keep it about the same general rating as the regular comic. Sending someone pictures of their characters naked when they have a G-rated comic might be, let’s just say, “problematic”.

Guest strips are even better than fan art because it’s an opportunity for a whole new crowd to not only see your style but to see how you write as well. I know there are several instances when I saw a guest comic and was so impressed that I started reading that artist’s comic just from the one joke they wrote for someone else. Guest strips can be tough though, as you have to write for other people’s characters and incorporate your humor, so be careful. I recommend waiting until you come up with a really good joke for that particular set of characters before sending off the guest strip.

Cameos are the other side of the coin. This is where you link to other people, but since you’re putting them or their character in your comic you need to ask their permission before doing so. This not only benefits them with hits from your site, but it’s likely they’ll gain an interest in your comic if they like how they’ve been cameoed. Of course if you’re cameoing them to insult them, this may not work as well. If you’re planning on insulting them it’s also likely you won’t be asking them for permission so it’s not so much a cameo as a mean-spirited jab, and I would recommend avoiding those unless you’re trying to start a fight.

No story like this would be complete without some really boring statistics so I shall present a few for your morbid entertainment. The easiest examples are, of course, from my own experience, the first of which was when I sent Irregular Webcomic ( http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/ ) a fan art/guest strip. This is a perfect example as IW is the only other regular—ironic isn’t it—Lego based webcomic, so my submitting something worked very well. Oddly enough the creator of IW had never heard of my comic before, even though we both started around the same time. It was years before I heard about his comic, so it really isn’t that strange. In any case, I gained a great deal of traffic from him adding that to his fan art gallery, but the big boost came when he, after reading my archive, plugged my comic on his main page, in a comic similar to the one I’d sent him. I received 2000 hits that day and afterwards my readership jumped 10 fold. Suffice to say when the paramedics left I was feeling no pain.

More recently when I sent The n00b ( http://www.thenoobcomic.com/ ) a fan art/guest comic for a one year anniversary (which by the way are great times to send people art because they’re more likely to post - watch for these kinds of announcements) I gained about 500 extra hits that particular day but overall gained 50 new readers, which follows the 10% rule.

So there you have one of the more ironic truths of publishing a webcomic. To get more readers to come to your comic you’ve got to produce things for someone else. Make fan art and guest comics for a few interested parties and soon you’ll have people making guest comics and fan art for you and you’ll be spreading around the readers you’ve acquired and introducing them to a whole variety of webcomics they might not have stumbled across otherwise!

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