Disclaimer: I want to be crystal clear about this, this article is not discussing anything having to do with the artwork or the artist. The artist is a phenomenal person and I would love to work with them again. I recommend anyone to check them out. 

My idea

About a month before the release of “Sophie the Witch” I contacted a manga artist to draw a manga based on a scene from the story. I thought if I could get some of the story in front of people, that would be more effective than reading a synopsis or any promotional material I could write or have drawn for me. The experiment was exciting and I was interested in how it would turn out. Who knows? Maybe I would stumble upon a new way that I could promote my stories. I decided to release it exclusively through Twitter as that’s where I put most of my effort into.

Problems

Well, if you read the title you already know that didn’t happen. So what happened? Things started off promising, 11 retweets and 18 likes! For me those are big numbers! But some problems arose from the start.

• I should have started by commissioning a title page. It was weird to have to backtrack and re-release the first page to maintain the numerical order. 
• There was about a two week gap between the announcement and the release. My expectation was that I would release the pages as the artist drew them but I wasn’t aware that the artist doesn’t work on one page at a time. Instead, preferring to complete the entire work all at once. I still don’t fully understand how that works but I trust their process whatever it may be. I believe by the time I got around to releasing the manga a lot of the momentum may have been gone.

Takeaways

• Commission the work with a title page.
• Make sure the work is completely done before announcing it’s release.

The remaining pages only managed to attract on average 2 retweets and 6 likes. Which was a bit underwhelming. There are a few things I could think of for this but without any direct feedback from anyone I can’t really say for sure. So these are my out loud guesses:

• To state the obvious, maybe the story just wasn’t interesting to anyone? I’m still a new writer, maybe people could pickup on my inexperience in storytelling and the story came off as bland or uninteresting.
• Maybe there wasn’t anything in the image that really grabbed anyone’s attention? I know very few people are going to stop to read it and most people are just going to glance at it. Maybe there is something I can do to help turn that glance into a read?
• Maybe the story was too out of context to make sense? I think maybe the jokes would have landed better if you understood the characters. I didn’t have the time or budget to get that in depth with it. Likewise, I didn’t have the time to write a completely new narrative for it.
• Perhaps releasing them one day at a time caused it to lose its context in everyone’s mind? It’s hard to enjoy a manga when you forget how the last page ended. Though I’ve seen other people do this and not have any issues. But I think that maybe it was because they already had a dedicated audience.
• Maybe I just don’t have the reach yet for something like this to be really successful? I’m still a very small creator. Maybe it was just way to early to try something like this?

Was it worth it?

No. To put it in the simplest possible terms, no. While I can’t map downloads to where people came from, it would seem that my best estimation is the manga maybe gained me 5 extra downloads. I’m grateful for that, but definitely not worth the around $200 I spent on it. 

Who would benefit from it?

While it didn’t work for me, there are people I can imagine who would be able to benefit from it.

• Pre-release: Creators with a dedicated following who want to drum up some hype for an upcoming project. Possibly for a crowdfunded project. A freebie to get people on board with the story and the characters without the need to put out a demo. 
• Post-release: Creators who may want to expand upon their already published work without needing to create a follow up visual novel. Or anyone who may want to try to go after anyone who may be on the fence about downloading their project. 

I hope that was informative. My main takeaway from this is if you want to try to market your visual novel this way, wait until you have a following, make sure it has some eye-catching scenes, and make sure the story will make sense to people who are unfamiliar with your Visual Novel.