A lot of users ask us “How do you decide on who to promote to featured and premium?”, so I thought I would take a moment to explain to the best of my ability what we look for during our promotion process.
Our process:
All authors must begin at our site by creating an account and climbing up from member to featured, and then premium. Each step tests and confirms whether an author is suited for our site. It also gives our team the data necessary to determine how well our community and outside readers are engaging with a series.
Featured: To become featured, we are looking if you have done the basics towards proving you are taking your work seriously.
- We look for a minimum of 30 pages of content already on our site.
- Regular updates to your series.
- Maturity and commitment towards engaging with users. Too many series upload pages, stay quiet, and then disappear forever.
- A unique story and/or style that set you apart from your fellow authors and shows your originality and talent.
- External validation of your work and progress so far: Twitter followers, Deviantart views, Smackjeeves followers, Competition results, Blogger mentions, etc.
Premium: To become premium, we are now looking into the details of how you have been doing on our site and how well you are engaging existing users, attracting new readers, and showing consistency. The numbers in most cases speak for themselves at this point.
- Visibility in our traffic data of reader adoption both of existing site users and new users.
- Consistency in publishing the same top quality content that caught our attention in the first place.
- Consistency in engaging users through our site in sincere and interesting ways as well as other social media channels.
Some tips:
- Don’t spam! : Authors who put in the effort to engage and attract readers from outside our site have been the most successful. Going around asking every single new user on MangaMagazine to check out your series is annoying to users at best and from everything we have seen, a waste of your time. Constantly bugging people one at a time to read your series is simply annoying and is a negative sign for us when considering a series for promotion.
- Help yourself get noticed: Don’t just focus on MangaMagazine. We will help promote your series but this doesn’t mean you should not put in your own effort to stay in touch with your readers. In today’s digital age, you cannot just lock yourself up in your studio and draw. Readers want to feel like you are accessible, friendly, and care about what they think. This can only be done by consistently engaging readers through your own social presence such as Facebook, Twitter, Deviantart, Tumblr and so on.
- Be authentic and do what you enjoy: There is no one “right” way to build a fan base. Readers can tell whether you are enjoying what you are doing. Engage in the way you enjoy the most. This could be by posting illustrations that you draw in your free time or getting on the forums and starting discussions about what should happen next in your story.
I hope this lifts the curtain a little bit on our process. It is by no means a perfect science, but we try our best to be as objective and fair as we can.
If you have any thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below, or you can reach me through my profile: http://www.mangamagazine.net/authors-and-artists/Victor/detail-page/34
Your feedback is what helps us make this site better so don’t hold back!
Victor
