Thoughts on DeviantArt as an author platform
What do you get for 2.7 million views?
So, I’ve been posting my Monster Girl Evolution series to DeviantArt over the past few months, chapter by chapter, illustration by illustration. I reasoned that of all platforms, this was the most applicable: friendly and accommodating to algorithmic illustration, lots of interest in illustrated fiction, lots of interest in monster girls, lots of interest in magical girls, full of people who love the art style the books draw upon, and a place people post serialized fiction. A big question in my mind was what one would get by such a strategy.
Royal Road meta versus DeviantArt
The strategy on Royal Road is well known: write a meta (e.g. trope-heavy isekai or litRPG with some unique gimmick) story, get on Rising Stars, or don’t, post enormous numbers of chapters one day at a time, gradually increasing your story follower count—possibly aided by shoutout swaps and ads—until you reach thousands over hundreds of chapters, possibly direct people to your Patreon for advance chapters once you have several hundred followers, possibly eventually start stubbing pieces of your stories as Kindle Unlimited books, using your followers and particularly your Patreon audience to support the launches. While I find this approach tempting, the stories that do well in this approach are not ones I’m currently inspired to write. In particular, I like concise stories with a beginning, middle, and end, and usually recoil from stories that go on for hundreds of chapters without reaching a conclusion.
The strategy on DeviantArt is murkier, and the general focus looks to be more on amateur writing. The platform is plagued by scammers, who endlessly reply to Literature posts fake-offering paid cover art or comic adaptation using either language models or basic spambots to bait engagement, then attempt to move conversations off-platform. The model of selling advance chapter access is not common—I actually haven’t seen anyone on DeviantArt do it—and definitely not applicable to what I was doing, which was posting up a serialized version of illustrated books in the month before their Kindle Unlimited launches, edited/illustrated versions of chapters I’d already posted on Royal Road months before.
My thought was to just serialize the chapters, serialize the art, post book links, and see what happened via the algorithm showing it in people’s feeds. Possibly, this helped me at least on the book 1 launch, helping nudge it to #1 New Release a bit more, and #1 LitRPG on its free days. Over a couple months, I got just shy of 20,000 deviation views and 100 watchers. Then Friday, I made Daily Deviation, the closest thing to getting on Royal Road’s Rising Stars. Chapter 1 of The Empire Strikes went from thousands of DA views to 2.7 million as of today. What all did I get for it?
Daily Deviations
Daily deviations are chosen by volunteers after one is nominated, and gain great visibility for a short period. But my sense is that the visibility measured by views is simply the thumbnail showing up in people’s feeds, and because Daily Deviations are not as targeted as people’s regular feeds, the clickthrough and conversion rates are quite low. In fact, what I loved most about the Daily Deviation was the review that came with it, which gave me infinite happy fuzzies:
This is tied for favorite review of the series ever, up there with Ally Boo’s “AN ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT SATIRE” review that I quote at the top of my Amazon book blurb. It gave me so many warm fuzzies, and I’m especially happy with the praise of the art style, which wasn’t addressed by my Royal Road reviews that were for the unillustrated version. But of course, I was also curious about the numbers.
I glanced at the viewcount of my chapter 1 daily deviation a few times through the day; I saw 500,000, then 700,000, then 1.2 million, then 2.5 million the next morning. As of the evening of the day after we’re at 2.7 million, so the effect is mostly day-of, but spread throughout the day.
I got about 20 new favorites on the chapter and one person commenting on it, and then replying to my comment-reply. As ever, favorites are much lower friction than actually typing something.
I gained 6 watchers. So in terms of growth of long-term following, the immediate effect is small.
Chapter 2 is sitting at 3.3K views and Chapter 3 at 18.4k views, so the portion of views resulting in a read-through of a few chapters is pretty low. I didn’t check their viewcounts beforehand, but I suspect they didn’t go up by much. Chapter 3, which features the girls evolving, was historically the most popular chapter.
Chapter 1 on DeviantArt has Amazon links to both book 1 and book 2. Amazingly, I did not full-price sell a single book in the series that day, though I had sold a copy the day before; I instead sold some copies of The Lives of Velnin. However, I got 500 KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages, gotten when someone reads the book “free” via Kindle Unlimited) in the series on Friday, when I made Daily Deviation, and another 300 Saturday. This is consistent with the theory that people who are used to getting their fiction in the form of free serials (e.g. on Royal Road or DeviantArt) are unlikely to pay for it, but still will buy it with zero marginal cost via their Kindle Unlimited subscription.
Is it worth it?
Posting one’s work on any platform is an expenditure of time—clicking buttons, fiddling with formatting, scheduling submissions. I had no existing following on DeviantArt, but thought I should try it given the target demographic of this series. Did I sell enough more books to pay for the time investment? Well, no, but that’s not really the goal. A fairly well-known author once told me, “If you’re trying to make money selling books, stop. It’s not a good idea.”
For those of us who don’t rely on selling books to pay our bills, a lot of the value is in the art: showing others our artistic vision, and making people happy with it. While it is possible to leverage free online writing in ways that get one paid, given sufficient popularity, doing it for the love and having it appreciated pays in oodles of warm fuzzies.
One can only get a Daily Deviation once a year on Deviant Art, and it’s probably the biggest one-time bang a work can get on there without going insanely viral. KENP pay about a third of a cent per normalized page, so I likely only made two bucks in the short term from getting featured as one. But I made at least two people pretty happy.
Conclusion
Serializing your book to DeviantArt probably isn’t for you, unless you have an existing following there or you’re writing stuff which directly appeals to one of their subcultures. But if you are, it can be a source of big smiles and interesting readership, if nothing else.
Oh, and if you want to check out the books in question, here are some sponsored links:
Monster Girl Evolution: Tournament of the Smart comes out on Amazon June 11th. Please support the launch with Amazon ratings and reviews!
While I find this approach tempting, the stories that do well in this approach are not ones I’m currently inspired to write. In particular, I like concise stories with a beginning, middle, and end, and usually recoil from stories that go on for hundreds of chapters without reaching a conclusion.
I'm posting my first book on Royal Road in an attempt to see if anyone will read it.
Since I'm taking an already completed book and posting it chapter by chapter. It won't go on for hundreds of chapters, but only for the 30 or so it's already got.
I haven't even thought of deviant art for story telling purposes and I might have to look into it.
Cool - I will check out your profile. I'm on there as https://www.deviantart.com/adammettafusion