I use several art sites, but I don't like linking them together because someone who follows me on four websites is going to wind up seeing the same images posted four times - the point of having an account on several different art sites is to try to cultivate audiences that you would only be able to get on each of the different sites. I have people who discovered my work through twitter, and people who discovered it through tumblr, and through FA, etc., who don't necessarily overlap from one site to the next. And in my mind, the point of each of these is to sort of act as 'funnels' to direct them all back to my comic - it is important to have a presence that isn't tied to someone else's site.

I am kind of spoiled by FA as far as watchers and comments go, but at the same time I kind of think that part of my success there is because I check FA almost daily and tend to upload stuff first there before I post it anywhere else. So having a lot of followers on FA sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Here's my numbers for the sites that I am on:

Pixiv - 29 (though I really have only been active there this week - I had 4 last week)

Weasyl - 54

Tumblr - 209

DeviantART - 231

Dawnchapel.com - 630 (average number RSS subscribers as reported by Feedburner, actual readership when the site is active is closer to 2000)

Twitter - 810

Furaffinity - 2700

So clearly FA's head and shoulders above all the other sites I use in terms of visibility. And visibility is important to me - I'm not talking about the highschool popularity pageant of furry social politics, those numbers are useful to me because they're a metric for determining how each of those websites can translate into dollars.

The temptation is there to place all the eggs in the one basket and ignore the other websites, but diversifying your audience is important when art is your business and visibility is the primary driving force of that business.

Anyway I think the original point of this journal was to talk about how to get people to see my stuff on DA, but getting my work out in front of people there is kind of like pulling teeth - there's a lot of submitting to groups and having to pay attention to groups and know each of those groups' rules, etc. and it just doesn't feel like there's a whole lot of payoff for the effort.

Whenever I post stuff to most of those websites, I can reliably count on getting one or two new followers as the image gets retweeted (on twitter) or reblogged (on tumblr) or is briefly visible on the frontpage (on FA, Weasyl, and Pixiv) or gets reposted by the person who commissioned it (on FA) or remains relevant on a keyword search (on Pixiv), but none of those are in effect on DA.

On DA, the truism is that you have to find a parade and march in front of it, where the parade in this case is the group you're submitting to, but for the most part it feels like people are going to watch the parades, rather than follow the individual floats they like.