This comic did not do well on Reddit, which I mention because it’s essentially the only place I self-promote. I’d love to branch out. Facebook is off the table, formerly because of how expensive they made it for indy creators to reach people, and recently because of revelations about the company in the news. I’m terrible at Twitter and its shadow-clone, Counter Social. And I feel like an unwelcome intruder on forums where I try to mention my own work. So if you like these comics, show a friend — it helps Zach and I a lot.
I’m never sure what to do about Reddit. Occasionally, something explodes and gets a ton of attention, and that always feels great. Most of the time, though, my work gets a few upvotes or a few downvotes, and then sinks into obscurity.
And usually when this happens, there’s some hateful comment left behind. My hypothesis about this is that I found someone who hates the comic before I found someone who doesn’t, and early upvotes on the Reddit platform are exponentially more valuable than later upvotes, but I’m not sure how to avoid my content bumping into people who gatekeep at the new and rising sections of the site who also happen to be spiritually allergic to me.
And since I can’t avoid them, I wish I was better at dealing with them. I’ve been writing since I was wee, and soliciting agents and editors for about as long, so I grew thick skin fairly quickly. That skin is naturally pretty thin, so learning to cope with critique — first solicited, then unsolicited — has been a big personal accomplishment. And I’ve learned that for solicited critique that I dislike, the polite thing to do is thank the person for their time, and if applicable, talk briefly about what I’ll brew over. And for unsolicited critique, the polite thing to do is to pretend it doesn’t exist. I’m incapable of the latter, and this invariably leads to my trying to explain my writing or Zach’s art to some hostile faceless creature online. It’s fruitless, 9 times out of 10, and I wish I could find some better way of interacting with those sorts of hostile comments.
5 Comments
Just this- the best way to deal with reddit may be hit and run: post and never look back. After all reddit is and forever will be…reddit.
Love your work!
Yeah mean, your work is really cool, maybe you should open an instagram, a lot of indy creator are on them and it’s easy to grow on it.
Btw, if you’re looking to translate your work in other languages to reach even more people I could be interested to do it for the french language ;).
Keep going guys, you’re amazing
I’ll look into instagram! Thanks for the suggestion.
And yeah, I’d be more than happy to work with you on a french translation. Shoot me an e-mail — bartholomewklick @ gmail
This is way late given it looks like this comic was posted ~15 months ago, but your commentary/blog/words-thing(/I have no idea what it’s called) made it seem like posting a comment/reply here would be appropriate. I actually found this through reddit. Somebody posted a recent Thieves Can’t in some comment thread. I think I’d seen a few before but I worked my way from there back to Ramen Empire and it’s been wonderful. I noticed that the archive ends shortly hereafter. I hope you’ve had success in whatever projects you’ve been working on. What spurred my initial desire to comment though was that I love the Spaceman Spiff homage here! Thanks for making this.
Hey, sorry for not seeing this. Glad you like it!
I am much easier to reach on the Thieves Can’t FB page or via reddit.com/r/thievescant