I think now I can understand the whole point of this problem regarding Chapters X Episodes. I'll try to define some things and explain them. Please, note that these are a personal definition just to approach the point of the topic and I have no intention in trying to create any elite (like saying "you can't play with us because yours is not a webcomic"), neither I'm trying to determine what's right and what's wrong, OK?
Structure and analysis
From what I have seen, Tapastic was created with the intent to be a platform for webcomics. That being said, we can presume webcomics are a type of comic made to be published on the web especially considering the breaks between each new post (being the post a whole chapter, a single or a few pages, in which you can create tension and suspense between each other so the reader will be interested to see what's next) and the structure of vertical scrolling provided by default by every web browser.
Considering that, we can see some patterns among long-form webcomics, like that (1) long scroll seen in Fisheye Placebo and the (2) expectation for the next episode seen in Singmire Haze.
We can see that (1) is a structural characteristic, while (2) is one rather regarding the way the webcomic is written. Both patterns can and are usually used for long-form webcomics involving chronological events and a plot.
We can also see (3) short-form webcomics, mostly gag-a-day comics, that don't have neither long-scroll structure nor usually use the artifice of expectation for an upcoming episode, like Day by day, although some of them have some periods in which a plot and chronological events do occur (in some cases, they occur for a long time, or since the beginning), like in the GaMERCaT and Meet Sally!. This leads us to the slice of life + gag-a-day area and to be honest, it's hard for me to describe and deconstruct them due to the many possible variations they can assume. Maybe The GaMERCaT isn't even gag-a-day, I don't know. As that is not exactly the point of the post, let's get moving.
The whole point
Manga as we know them, have a different approach than webcomics have*. They have many pages by chapters, which leads the authors to want to publish them in a single episode on Tapastic, assuming that an episode means a chapter and in my opinion, this is the whole point of the problem.
For a creator, an episode can be whatever you want it to be. Just look at Singmire Haze and see how @noxfox names his episodes. What the reader sees is "Chapter 20 - page 1", "Chapter 20 - page 2", etc, all of this resumed in a 4-digit pattern: "20.1", "20.2". Also, you can interpret this the way you want: "chapter" can be called part, book or section, for example.
That being said, you have some options, already mentioned in previous posts:
- you can prepare and post a chapter as an episode with all of its pages once and for all, which would generate a single notification for your viewers, leading them to an episode worth of 30 pages, for example - depending on how many pages your chapters have;
- you can post a page in an episode and then update it later, which won't generate new notifications;
- and you can post a page per episode, which generates one notification per page/episode and, in my opinion, it's a good strategy if you don't want to wait one month (for example) to update your series.
This #3 kind of periodicity is used by Beyond the Western Deep and that webcomic doesn't have neither (1), (2) nor (3) characteristics (mentioned above, at Structure and analysis part). They simply write and draw a new page and post one per week, as if you had pulled all the sheets of a manga/comic book and decided to read one page per week and I don't think it's a bad approach. For the webcomic I'm working on, I'm writing it with the (2) approach (expectation for the next episode) in mind but for yours (and many others that face this Chapters X Episodes problem), using Beyond the Western Deep's publishing model doesn't seem to be a bad idea.
Something I'd like to add
There is already another topic discussing notification for new pages in episodes, right? I'm sorry I haven't read that. While writing this reply, something came to mind, so I apologize if this have already been suggested on that other topic.
Maybe what's lacking on Tapastic (and causing all this problem) is a function to group the episodes in chapters. Currently the publishing sctructure is this:
Series > Episodes
And it could be changed to this:
Series > Chapters > Episodes
So creators could have, for example:
Series > Chapter 1 > Episode 1
Series > Chapter 1 > Episode 2
Series > Chapter 1 > Episode 3
Series > Chapter 2 > Episode 4
Series > Chapter 2 > Episode 5
...
Honestly, that would be just a formality. Each episode could assume better the function of a page now and the division in chapters would make the life of creators a bit easier as they wouldn't need to keep using that chapter.episode numbers nomenclature, as used by Singmire Haze and Ark, for example.
I think that'd be fantastic!
*note: above I wrote
Manga as we know them, have a different approach than webcomics have*.
I made this statement to sepparate both things, so it'd be easier to understand what I was trying to explain. but honestly, in my opinion, we can call webcomic anything we want. Beyond the Western Deep doesn't follow the webcomic's patterns I listed, yet it is a webcomic.