Which one do you spend more time at/work harder on? Promoting your comic or actually making your comic?

I find that promoting my comic is more involved and time consuming than actually making it. The internet leg work is a lot in it's self, searching for top webcomic and review sites, creating banners and link images, staying active and up to date on so many forums...and then there's the actual leg work where I go out and pimp my comic at cons or posting flyers around on college bulletin boards and stuff.

I royally suck at promoting my comic, so a lot of times, I don't even bother and just focus on making it. I do what I can (which admittedly isn't much).

I'm admittedly not so hot at promoting my comic, but I just started, so I figure, not such a huge deal now since there's isn't a TON for people to read... But its definitely a concern for the future. Writing and drawing my comic will always come first, though, putting out a solid comic on time is my number one priority, otherwise, i would have nothing to promote!

I spend more time and effort on the comic itself, but I do have several friends who try to advertise it for me. It really depends upon your priorities, being noticed or actually having a good comic.

I spend more time on creating it, simply because it is so time consuming. My promotion of it is restrained to posting on the DD forum and a link in my sig on other boards - I'm so up to my elbows in countless projects that there's simply no time for anything more involved than that.

Also, promoting it isn't all that important for me. At least not right now. Morphic is my playground, where I fiddle and experiment and turn things this way and that to see if they work or not - I'm teaching myself how to do comics, and that's the most important function of it right now.

I promote WHILE i create it. Literally.

I get into the 'zone' when i realize both of those things attract new readers- but I actually spend more time than either of those tweaking the web design on my comic or finding new art techniques.

Promoting is useless if what you're trying to offer is sub-par or can't hold their interest.. so take time to improve other factors too.

My comics have always been more about reactions from the community and my own antics. I promote werewolf at every chance I get, just like I used to promote exciting new interesting stories. I had fun making comics and being a part of the community here. I missed this place.

I only get a couple of hours day to work on comics so I spend most of my free time creating comics, and just use what little extra time I develop to work on promotion. I'm a pretty crappy promoter though, since I haven't had much time to create anything but the most basic of advertisements. As such, I could probably have a lot larger audience than I do, but I just don't have time to do all the promotion stuff I should.

I don't have time to promote. I have to squeeze in any spare moment I have just to draw and edit. I just sorta *hope* people who would enjoy my story can find it. -- I signed up to all the top list and stuff about a year ago, but I haven't really done anything since then. I haven't even made new link banners in months.

I like joining community projects too (which is sort of like promotion), but I haven't had time to get involved in those things lately.

...Yeah, I don't really promote that much. I don't know how, and I don't see the point. I do comics for fun, to entertain my friends and hopefully others. I think I have a fear of becoming popular though - I've seen what happens when you get popular.

Would be nice to have more readers, though.

I think creating the comic is waaaay more important than promoting it. If you spend more time promoting the comic than making your comic great, you need to reevaluate your plan. If you spend a lot of time on your comic, it'll show, and in return promote itself.
I suggest the only promoting you need to do is posting your comic on many different webcomic sites like this. And conventions help too.

If you want a rather tiny casual fan base that's takes awhile to get follow this advice.

If you want a large fanbase in a short amount of time do what I and Marine said.
I'm not insulting Liz's advice at all- but that's what's going to happen, and for some that's exactly what they want

My own comic wouldn't have more than 3000 hits if i had the 'it'll come to me' arrogance- and it doesn't matter how amazing your webcomic is, if people don't know where it is they're not going to read it. I took time promoting mine and thinking of unique ways to do it- and it payed off instantly. The results after 6 months; 3-6k hits a day, going to hit my 1mil pageview soon, awesome fanbase that i love, and only a 50 page archive since i don't update much. (aw I suppose that's bragging, I'm just proud of it)

But like this thread shows, some do not want that- and that's just fine-
The point was to say that the 'my comics great and will promote itself for my huge instant fanbase' is naively false.

They are both equally as important.