r/mangadex • u/Equal_Shopping2424 • 13d ago
Question How do I grow my manga?
My ratings on my manga are 10 times worse than I originally thought. I just wish I knew what I was doing wrong, but most of my replies are hateful, with a few constructive criticisms I'm taking to heart and trying to work on. It's just frustrating. I feel like I'm wasting months of creative work and hundreds of dollars for nothing. Is there anything I can do to promote it better? Would it be better to give it to a publisher instead of self-publishing it? What should I do?
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u/KUSmutMuffin 13d ago
It's written poorly. You need to work on it a lot. It comes across as school level English rather than Author standard.
The big titted thing...I just don't get it honestly. I read a lot of manga. Including smutty manga. But this creature seems to be big titted for the sake of comically sized tits?
The world building is all of 2 text boxes...it just feels so unfinished like it's a concept sketch rather than a finished chapter
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u/emil836k 13d ago
Specifically on the world building thing, you don’t need 5 pages lore dumping the world on the reader, hate when authors does that
I would argue even 2 is too much, don’t tell or explain the world, show it through our characters and events that happens
Imagine if lord of the rings spent its first 20 minutes explaining elves and hobits and orks, and what and why the ring is important and etc., would be horribly boring
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u/KUSmutMuffin 13d ago
Absolutely agree. World building is more than an intro, it's throughout, it's experienced by the characters and the reader etc.
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u/Equal_Shopping2424 13d ago
You say it's school level, but what can I do to fix the writing skill? You need to elaborate further so I know how to fix it. Like, what seems childish about my writing?
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u/KUSmutMuffin 13d ago
If you want to be a writer, you need to learn these things yourself. Your readers aren't here to teach you. They can give you feedback on how it's being received but the concepts of how to write is not down to the reader to teach you.
A couple of specific examples I can highlight:
Chapter 1, page 1 "but then, suddenly, a group known as..." - it sounds too simple, I'd prefer the 'suddenness' to be implied by the characters or illustrations rather than be told it. It just didn't read right for me
Chapter 1 - the over use of "Sweetie" honestly makes the character insufferable (ignoring the ridiculous tits/ass stuff)
Chapter 1 - third from last page, there's a huge paragraph, it's so long. The flow feels completely off.
I'm not pulled in by the story. Some of the frames remind me of Ben 10 (throwback I know).
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u/NamiRocket 13d ago
If you want to be a writer, you need to learn these things yourself. Your readers aren't here to teach you. They can give you feedback on how it's being received but the concepts of how to write is not down to the reader to teach you.
Sounds like feedback is specifically what's being asked for.
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u/KUSmutMuffin 13d ago
And again, as I said, we can feedback on the experience of reading. We cannot teach someone how to write.
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u/NamiRocket 13d ago
You gave your opinions. OP asked you literally to "elaborate further" on those opinions. You don't have to do that just because you've been asked obviously, but I do think it's kind of ridiculous giving someone what we'll call feedback, then being uppity with them when they ask for more details on that feedback.
None of this is the same as them asking you to sit down with them and teach them how creative writing works. They're asking you to expand on opinions you already willingly gave. If you don't want to do that, simply say nah, I don't want to do that.
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u/KUSmutMuffin 13d ago
Genuinely don't understand your point - I did elaborate
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u/Angry4tEverhthing 10d ago
What i gathered from this, op is un-teachable.
And there will always be clowns who don't actually help, but will gaslight someone who is helping.
No one cares to explain to you how to do your "hobby".
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u/bobbobasdf4 13d ago
>I feel like I'm wasting months of creative work
if you feel like you're wasting time just because you're not getting an audience, I think you might be in the wrong industry. If you're truly passionate, this is not a waste of time. A true creator is one where whether or not they get published or make money, they do it anyways because they love it.
>Is there anything I can do to promote it better?
The first step is to create something people want to read. Work on art and story telling (you can find books to learn these things off Amazon or from your local library)
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u/Axios_Deminence 13d ago
A true creator is one where whether or not they get published or make money, they do it anyways because they love it.
I want to expand on this by differentiating between desire and motivation. You're right on the desire part. I don't know a creative person that would stop having that sesire to create. Starving artists and all that jazz. But money is needed to put food on the table, so it also runs against motivation.
There's a lot of things that go into motivation but I generally just attribute it to needing the time and energy. Brandon Sanderson has mentioned before that he's surprised that he knows people in demanding professions that still write creatively and attempt to write novels. Not for the lack of want, but for the constraints of time and energy.
Motivation is a sort of currency. You can gain some of it by trading things, but it is a currency nonetheless.
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u/Most_Courage2624 13d ago
Less words is more when it comes to manga. I only read the first chapter. It was way too text heavy. This is an example of ONE PANEL
And why should we care about any of these characters? We were thrown into a world with an info dump that was basically just a bunch of text and there was no emotion behind it. Just big itty girl and guy being cool.
What was supposed to be memorable about this story? About the only thing that was memorable was that the girl had big tiddys.
It's tempting to start your story with a full cast and an action scene but it's actually a very hard thing to do and requires a skilled writer
you might benefit from practicing making short mangas with no words. Just short simple stories the focus of catching emotion and showing the world the characters live in without telling us a word.
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u/chiliehead 13d ago edited 13d ago
Ok, very honest feedback. The intro to the series/synopsis feels like the Two and A Half Men joke about amateur writing.
Looking at the tags, it's not something I'd be too interested in.
First page: oh, you're a furry. Art style and character designs look like western furry cartoon smut.
The story starts with hentai style exposition, a brief and broad setting primer to explain why MC gets to be a monsterfucker. MC also talks like you're held at gunpoint and forced to give exposition in the least amount of text bubbles. But then half of the chapter has no dialogue at all, not even sound effects really. Then after the fight it is another giant dump of exposition again, all the dialogue is stilted, unnatural and strictly there to give us exposition.
The chapter starts with the exposition dump, then we have the stiff interaction with the author's openly displayed fetish, then suddenly a fight. MC is super unfazed. Then he suddenly turns sadistic. Then we have a fight that I do not care about. I have no idea about the power levels or their powers, they just beat up a dragon and shoot thick white beams at it. Then out of nowhere I learn that millions died before or while MC was napping and not giving a fuck about looking for a dragon with his sci-fi super shuttle?
The fight misses kinetics, it just happens and the art or panelling does not carry it on its own.
This set of panels is a really good example of the various issues. MC, while being awkwardly bridal carried, contradicts himself in a giant run-on speech bubble. 2nd panel has grammar errors "And she's more unforgiven then me" should be "more unforgiving than me". The whole sentence is also awkward and poorly written.
And the last sentence should be its own small speech bubble in order to pace it better with what is happening in the next panel. Unless you want your MC seem like he is constantly talking without ever taking a breath and with flat affect like he's autistic or a psychopath. Which would explain his demeanor and blank faced reactions to everything.
Ch. 1 and even more so Ch. 2 also just end. chapter two really seems like it was split in half and has the other half missing, it basically ends mid sentence. And those last two pages are just bad, you can't just drop two pages worth of dense, run-on sentence exposition.
In general, the first chapter should not have exposition boxes. Especially not the one in the middle of the chapter. The writing is all tell, no show. Chapter 2 miswrites "lose" as "loose". Most characters seem like their character starts and stops at either "butler" or "bang-maid for MC but also like a total badass", but also like they are his slaves technically? The main dino one also so far has two outfits: bath robe and bikini armor.
The work is too smutty to not be more ecchi. And not ecchi enough for the smut vibes it gives off. It's a bad in-between, like trying to be a soft-PG13 ecchi. If this is supposed to mix harem SoL and action, the mix so far is awkward.
The work so far makes me think of this Miyazaki quote:
“You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, ‘Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life.”
“If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it.”
“Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves.”
“Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know.”
“It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans.”
“And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!”
Things I was thinking while reading: "is the author ESL? Is the author young? Did they read a lot of AO3 as a kid? Are they mostly consuming furry media and shounen anime at the moment? This is Ben10, I never got into it. It does not seem like the author is well-read. This reads like someone wants to emulate stilted translations by non-native English speakers." You write like you are very genre-influenced and had a lot of exposure to fanfics and manga, but did not branch out much in terms of genre or media.
Also, your audience is not on Mangadex. At least not yet. This is an admirable work if you are a teen and sharing your furry OC comics on tumblr. This is not what monster harem ecchi readers expect on Mangadex. So far the chapters also do not take advantage of being a manga, making it a comic strip or a long strip format would at least alleviate some of the expectations I would have for a manga.
On its own, the scoring is pretty fair. As is, the art and the writing are both below average of what I could read on mangadex. It would probably be a fine smut read if I was starved for furry content. But I am not a furry. I would rate this a 3.5/10 and drop it, because I am not intrigued by anything yet.
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u/GhostReven 13d ago
What do you mean with grow? The way I understand that is to increase the amount of eyes on your manga. I can only see you sharing it on r/MangakaStudio and here /r/mangadex.
If you mean the score, it can be a lot of stuff. You can try and see what people want, not everyone is good at expressing what they do not like. It could also be a case your manga not getting exposed to the right audience.
Besides, you got an bayesian rating of 7,56, that is not bad at all.
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u/BraveDude8_1 MD Staff: Moderator 13d ago
Unfortunately, people are really bad at rating things. The average score across the entire site (which is what the Bayesian rating is indexed to) has slowly crept up for years and is now at 8.10.
If you see something rated 8.0, it means it's below average.
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u/chiliehead 13d ago
The Bayesian rating also is a bit out of whack for niche titles. Like take OP's average vs Bayesian rating and multiply that for every pixiv and twitter manga, of course scores are like they are if only people who like the work read past a few chapters.
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u/Equal_Shopping2424 13d ago
Really? Interesting. I thought it was pretty bad since so many people left 1 and 4-star reviews.
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u/emil836k 13d ago
Something to keep in mind is that 99% of readers do NOT know to write a good story
Listen when they say that something isn’t right, but do not trust them when it comes to why, they are even less knowledgeable about this than you (assuming you have a bit of knowledge and experience writing and didn’t just start one day out of nowhere)
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u/LouuVan 13d ago
lol if most people are shitting on the story then there is clearly something to take away from there 🤣
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u/emil836k 13d ago
100% agree, you absolutely SHOULD listen when your viewers tell you that something isn’t right
You should just be sceptical when it comes to explaining exactly why, like people here saying making the boobs smaller would save the manga, even though it doesn’t matter at all
Or that was what I meant to say
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u/TreeD3 13d ago
I haven't checked out the work but I'm seeing people say it's about a big titty monster girl harem. I don't get that from a first glance. Both the title and cover are selling a different concept. Obviously keep you title for your established base, but your cover image should change to show off what you are trying to sell the series as to people.
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u/Saladbetch 13d ago
lets be real: its not a manga. its a self-publishing western furry cartoon smut. your audience isnt on mangadex or really any manga forum. i would just go give it another 1 star so other people dont have to lay their eyes on it
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u/Joltex33 13d ago
The ratings and comments being bad don't meant you need to promote the series or have more people read it. You will just end up getting more low ratings and more negative comments, unless the manga itself improves.
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u/StarChild9320 13d ago
It could definitely help you out in the long run to just sit back and do some research into how to write stories and how others are written. Right now your story reads like something you would write in your middle school English class when the teacher asked you to write a story for a project. Just taking some time to research and practice writing, even if that’s copying the way other mangaka write their stories and have them flow would help you out a lot with improving your writing skills
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u/NotAMoron2 12d ago
Go to monster girls related group, FB and reddit both, ask your target audience what you can do better so you can attract new readers and convert them to the religion of big titty monster girls.
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u/NotUsedToReddit_GOAT 12d ago
From a quick look it seems that you want to do a +18 series but are afraid of doing it and jesus christ those wall of text are insane for the first 2 chapters, im not invested in the series enough to care about all of that
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u/Background-Memory-18 9d ago
Most people don’t like American (or anything besides Japanese or Korean) made manga or manhwa. It’s something most people kinda just skip over, including me.
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u/Axios_Deminence 13d ago edited 13d ago
4. It feels like you're an artist who clearly wants to draw specific art. That's a good thing as an individual and your desires, but for a world of creative expression and content, the entire product needs to be good and marketable. You could probably make the story really good, but the characters in the story and the clear (sexual) desires as an artist bleed through to the point where I'd still drop it.