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Am I itching correctly?

A topic by A.M. Radio created Jun 17, 2023 Views: 263 Replies: 4

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I’ve had this page up for a while and I’m slowly uploading my old catalogue of comics (from the smackjeeves days) in between work projects... It is linked to from my other sites as my main shop, already, and still does not seem to get much attention… like my ko-fi got more attention when it was up. (So maybe this might be a matter of people being unfamiliar with comics on itch?)

But I do not seem to getting any traction: Should I bother still posting old projects with the art quality like Stained Glass Hallways and the Devil’s Cake book 1? Or should I just focus on posting the new and better art quality projects? (Zoshi zine, Bells zine)

I need outside eyeballs on this for impressions, TY for checking the storefront and helping me out, it will be good if I can save some time on not pre-pressing projects that aren’t appealing art-wise to people…🙏

My page is here: https://la-engine.itch.io/ (Again ‘Devil’s Cake book 1 and Stained Glass Hallways have the older art styles in question… most everything else has the updates styles like ‘Bells’ and the ‘ Zoshi Zine’)

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redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

Do you expect to find new readers by existing on this platform? This does not even work for most games. And itch is focused on games. Same as with games, you need promotion outside of itch. Just existing here does not give you exposure to millions of potential readers. They will find you here, if they search for you or your stuff. But why should they.

That is my general observance about the topic.

Specific to your pages, I could not see if your stuff would interest me, or not. So I guess that is bad for getting new readers. But then I checked other pages in the comic genre. Why are they all so bland and non informative? This is compared to many game pages, of course. Is it because they do promote their stuff elsewhere and just host here for their readers to be able to buy it?

I do not know. But when comparing to game sites, I miss the demo versions. And the descriptions are quite short.

So take this as an outside eyeball, as I know that comics and other stuff exist here, but do not browse for them. :-) At least you have plenty tags, so people can easily find you by searching for their interests.

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A.M. Radio1 year ago

Okay cool, that helps, I was trying to figure out exactly THAT!!

Yes, itchio is a good place to sell indie comics right now, so we got our little niche growing, it’s just an unusual interface compared to the comic sites we dealt with in the past, so I needed a little guidance on the procedures.

Cool, it sounds like I straight up need to put something on the main page that is: I make’a dee comics! Here be comics- here be the sites you can find currently updating comics, etc. Exactly what I needed to borrow those eyeballs for, TYSM.
Yes, I try to put the little synopsis of what the books are about on each individual page- but I will review them, too, thinking from your perspective and see what edits I can do.

TY for saying! And happy to hear the tags are effective for filing the comics into the right search categories at least. For the folks rolling in like… NOT from my outside links and looking for indie comics in certain genres- they can at least still find my stuff via the tags.

And thanks for looking the books over even if they aren’t your cuppa tea. It sounds like my old art styles are not bothering anyone- so I’ll just get the back catalogue together and posted.

That helped a lot! 🙏✌️

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redonihunter1 year ago

The search on itch is kinda quirky. Has to do with the fact that the tags are dev chosen and made up at that. and the search for stuff and search for tags are different and the tag search is kinda hidden. But once you have some stuff you like, you can click the tags there. In the browse you see some screenshots and I believe you can chose a thumbnail for your project.

The comic specific things, I can not give much opinion, but if many comic artists come from similar sites, I can imagine that the distinct differences to game pages stem from that fact.

If you fear your art style or whatever would bother anyone ... I suggest you take a look at lots of games here. You are an artist. Most game devs are not, and it shows.

And maybe you misunderstood, while I do not read comics on itch in general, I could not figure out if your stuff would interest me - or not. That was a critique that I could not gather that information from the description. But than I had a look at other comic pages at random and saw that they seem all lacking in that regard. I am probably just used to reading game descriptions. But the description of a visual novel and of a graphic novel could have lots in common, I would assume.

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A.M. Radio1 year ago

Sorry for the late reply,

Thank you again, yeah- scrolling through a mass of tags to find the ones that describe your project is a new interface for me. For sure. But I do like an established limit of tags, because it does help organize all the projects for easier access and search.

This is all good advice, and especially thank you for pointing out the descriptions- apparently I did not realize the initial descriptions were displayed beneath the thumbnails- when I thought they would not matter at all…^^;. And now I can fix them!!

Thank you again for the advice and insight- my brain gets bogged down juggling projects, and Itchio was taking me for a spin with it’s interface.

makes much more sense switching my brain to a game dev’s perspective to interact with it 🙏

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