Posting Your Comics on Reddit (Part 2)

Introduction

In my last blog I talked about the pros and cons (mostly the cons) when using Reddit to promote your comics. But I also wanted to pass on some of my musings about the reason that one of my comics performed so well.

Let’s start off by looking at my submissions:-

Date	Comic	Score	Views	Comments
16th Oct 2017	Mr Tea	2 (75% upvoted)	66	0
16th Oct 2017	Turning in your Grave	2 (100% upvoted)	89	0
16th Oct 2017	Young Love	4 (75% upvoted)	200	0
16th Oct 2017	Cooking the Books	3 (81% upvoted)	125	0
16th Oct 2017	Science Aphorism	2 (63% upvoted)	74	0
17th Oct 2017	Classic Jokes Revisited	3 (100% upvoted)	210	0
18th Oct 2017	The Gas is Greener	167 (90% upvoted)	3400	2
19th Oct 2017	Iwo Jima	98 (81% upvoted)	2700	4
20th Oct 2017	Halloween - Squash Mosh	20 (75% upvoted)	301	0
22nd Oct 2017	Sauce of Genius	6113 (85% upvoted)	57.2k	290

What does this tell me?

• If you look at the score, it shows that you nearly always get down-votes. The percentages look small, but when you start looking at Sauce of Genius, that’s a thousand people expressing their dislike. It reduced my score by a thousand, which impacts how easily it goes into (and stays on) the ‘hot’ page.
• Comments tend to track Score, it’s not until you get a cartoon on the ‘Rising’ or ‘Hot’ page that you attract the attention of those that feel the need to tell you something.

So, why did “Sauce of Genius” do so well?

The Sauce of Genius

That’s a great question, because I didn’t think it was better than say “The Gas is Greener”. It’s not a bad comic idea, it's drawn quite well and has the following attributes:-

• It’s relatable, everyone likes sauce.

This generated most of the positive comments, people talking about their favourites and what foods it's good for. Some even talked about alternatives they didn't like.

• I had altered the label of HP Sauce to read “Brown”. 

Loads of people needed to tell me it was actually called HP, completely missing the point of the joke. In the UK it's all known as brown sauce, I just chose that one because it was so recognisable. This also generates conversations about the UK and how HP was no longer available in the USA.

• Some of the statements are not true.

OK, here's where people started to really take issues. I took a lot of flak for Buffalo really being named after the place, and even my statement about Tabasco (which was true) was generally rubbished. Way to ruin a joke guys!!
Some asked if my intention was to be as inaccurate as possible, while others were amused that so many were getting hung-up on these details. (It certainly made me laugh)
Others started to get creative and came up with their own fake-sauce-facts. (very funny)
But generally I'm a bad person for doing zero research!

• One of the pictures appears to portray Thousand Island as a tropical island.

This one probably caused the most friction. Yes, it’s really up by New York, but I never said it wasn't. People seemed to be genuinely insulted by this one. It also generated a lot of discussion about New York and what Thousand Islands is really like.

Lessons Learnt

Although unintended, this comic was a little controversial. At first I was a bit embarrassed that people were finding obvious holes, but it soon started to feel like a joke on the readers when so many were taking it so seriously. It's one way to generate interest, but I imagine it could easily backfire if enough people down-vote it as soon as you post it. You also need thick skin and should resist the temptation to defend yourself.

That aside, I think mainly people could easily relate to it and understood the joke.

Something I'm still uncertain of is whether post images directly into Reddit is better than linking to a comic site.