Congrats on starting your webtoon! It's awesome to hear that this is your passion project, and I read through it and I really enjoy it so far! The setup in the introduction is intriguing and I love how you draw and color everything. As a fellow creator with a somewhat solid audience on my comic these days, I can give you a little advice for boosting readership, although I'll have to admit that from my own experience, and from seeing other webcomics as well, growing your audience can be a really long process that won't really happen overnight, you'll just have to keep tending to, and in time you'll see results. That doesn't mean though that there aren't certain things you can try to help boost it though!
- I think if there's anything I could say you could try to enhance with your comic right now, perhaps start with the cover image? Personally I think your current cover image is really nice, although I feel like the background could just be slightly darker just to make the character pop more, since right now it blends in too much. Other than that, it looks lovely! As time goes on, you can always try different cover pictures that speak to the audience you're trying to get, trying a different illustration that's dynamic, or just trying different ones during a course of time and seeing if any of them catch on to more people. (It's hard to kind of explain, but you can try to look at some of the really popular webtoons/comics and try to see what the story is telling just from the cover image. People will initially pick the comic based on the cover.) From my own experience, for the longest time I was wondering why my comic's growth was stagnating, and much to my surprise, I changed my comic's thumbnail and I saw a huge boost in readership. The previous one I'd used for at least two/three years or so haha, so sometimes changing it occasionally is good!
- I know that it looks like you're just asking about Webtoons specifically, but I'll still throw this tip out there just in case? I know it can seem a little time consuming, but I really recommend mirroring your comic on other comic platforms tbh. Tapas is one I recommend, it's where I have the most readers, although it did take me a reeeally long time to get there. I really like how Tapas will give notifications when someone comments/subscribes too. Tapas itself also uses an algorithm as far as I'm aware, so sometimes it's just really finicky, and if you're getting a lot of likes your comic is more likely to be seen. The only thing is they also do a lot of pushing of their premium comics, to a point where you kind of have to go through hoops to browse recently updated comics (I think most people just browse for the most popular/trending comics, which is curated by the algorithm). I'd also recommend Comic Fury, even though it's a pretty small site, it does have the ability to use your own customized comic site like Smackjeeves used to, and you can set up your own google analytics later on through that. I also find that there are people that will read comics on comic fury without an account, or at least even though I don't get any subscribers/comments, I still get some readers daily despite it. Sometimes you just never know which platform your comic will pick up on, so that's why I'm a huge fan of doing it when you're first starting out. In the beginning I was so focused on Smackjeeves and really hated Tapas/Webtoons at first, and initially my comic wasn't being seen at all and I wanted to stop at some point, but after continuing after a long time, it turns out that my comic is doing the best on Tapas right now which I really didn't expect. :'D
- I'm not sure what you're schedule is or how often you plan to update, but with Webtoons specifically it's just all a matter of how frequently you update because it boosts your chances of being seen. Since you work in color and you make long episodes, it's probably going to be difficult to update weekly, which is ideal, but updating at least twice a month should be a good schedule to build a readership IMO!
- You can add your comic on an aggregator! There are a ton of people who find new webcomics to read through Comic Rocket and Archive Binge, or also just want to keep all the comics they read in the same place.
- Once you get a chapter or two up, you can try to sign up for the Comic Tea Party book club. It's a really great and friendly discord review/book club discussion group that has a new comic to discuss weekly, I highly recommend it!
- Lastly, if you don't mind spending a little spare change, there's also the possibility of making ads for your webcomic. I'd recommend bidding on different Ads on Comic Ad Network, and the ads themselves can be free depending on some sites you decide to advertise on.
Whew, that was a lot haha, but I think that's really everything I can recommend that I've tried myself, and I hope it helps you out! As long as you keep making the webcomic and keep updating, the readership will at least grow naturally. Keep up the good work and I wish you the best of luck with your comic! 😊