The Patreon Letter - 30th March, 2018 (Patreon)

note: this is not at all my setup

Good morning, everyone! Jackson is in the final march of their school work, finish or bust, and thus for the next few weeks I'll be taking over most of the day to day work on the network while they crunch. Which means I'll be doing letters until probably the first weekend of May. 

So my apologies if you come explicitly for that hot Jackson content, and congrats if you prefer my navel-gazing nonsense. Either way, things will settle down in a few weeks, so please bear with it. The podcasts should, as always, continue uninterrupted. With that all said, let's begin today's letter!

--- State of the Podcast Network Thoughts ---

I've been thinking frequently lately about what it means to maintain a podcast network. We're slowly creeping up on the year anniversary of the patreon launching, and so far it's been a huge success for keeping us going in hard times. Certainly, without it I probably would have put everything on hiatus during my family troubles this year, if not quit entirely. Instead it helps me make ends meet, which is fantastic. 

That said, we are building an entire network off of the work of ostensibly two people. That isn't to minimize the work of Allen, Jen, Kaity, Molly, Ryan, or Six—in fact, we would have far fewer shows without their efforts—but more about just how thinly stretched me and Jackson have been especially as Jackson has had to step back during the last few months. 

Things have certainly slipped. Goof Zone is on what I believe to be a semi-permanent hiatus because of the emotional toll doing a mental health cast can take on the hosts. I've had a very hard time getting this movie podcast off the ground due to how busy I've been picking up Jackson's slack and prepping for them to be gone next month, and how busy the people I want to do that podcast with are. I'm working on it. I'm still working on a podcast idea me and Destiny would do, an idea I've had for over a year and still wastes away in the land of all ideas you don't have the energy for. 

When we think about expanding and improving the network I am left with the very real realization that there isn't much more we can do with the free time we have that we aren't already doing. Time is not infinite and it takes more of it than I'd like simply to prepare watching/playing/reading/living enough to have intelligent things to say when we gather for every show. It takes time to record. Most of the podcasts we do could not be put out more frequently, nor could we just spin up new shows with the time we have. 

As always, we could simply make better shows, which we hopefully always try to do. We spend so much time listening back to old shows and taking them apart for what worked and what didn't, what we need to do to improve. Thankfully I can do this during my day job with zero time cost, I'm stuck there anyway, but honestly there isn't that much more we can do on that front. Just being better critics and entertainers is a slow process, one that takes so much time for reading and consideration in quiet moments when you tear apart your work and build it back up. And even then, the fixes aren't really obvious or immediate. 

We could, of course, add new shows that don't involve me or Jackson. Our original conception for the network was something like this: a place where our friends or people who made interesting shows could be hosted on a network that would provide infrastructure for their back end without much effort and at no cost to them. I'm happy to have offered this to Fireside Friends, but we didn't go and do more of that since then and honestly we should have? When our hosting renews soon I intend to upgrade Abnormal Mapping to the level where we can just have infinite shows, and then bring people aboard. Podcasts are quietly a lot of money for a hobby, and being able to help people with that is something I feel we should be doing. 

One of the other options is goofier, sporadic, limited run shows. It's definitely under consideration. I have a kind of silly book-focused podcast that wouldn't run very long I want to start once everything else has settled down a bit. They'd be a tier of show that wouldn't quite be up to the standards of most of our shows, probably, but I suspect that most people listening and reading this aren't quite as absurdly critical of podcasts in quality and thematic coherence as I am. I have listened to too many podcasts for too long and I'm poisoned by knowing too clearly what I like and don't like to spend my time on. I do not recommend this as a life path, honestly, because it makes it hard to enjoy things. 

And all of leads to the bigger question, which is: should we do anything at all? We've been doing very well with the shows we've got, people seem to enjoy them a lot, and they will all continue on for years uninterrupted if nothing bad happens to us. I know many of the people who listen to our shows and read these letters listen to more than one of our shows and I assume if you follow everything we take up an alarming amount of your mental bandwidth. I'm something of an egotist, but even I don't presume to be interesting enough to fill up someone's entire day with shows me or Jackson make as a positive. We cannot and should not be someone's only source of entertainment. There just isn't enough we can do for that.

But, of course, there's always the question of growing the shows. I think our reach is as far as we can make it without something changing. There are small audiences for most of the things we make, unfortunately, and we don't exactly have a marketing budget (ha, what does that even look like for podcasts anyway??) to work with. The only way I can conceive to bring new people and expand our audience is to make new shows about new topics we don't already cover. That's a huge part of why I want to do this movie podcast, as much as it is wanting a chance to hang out with my film crit friends who I don't talk to nearly enough anymore now that I'm not a film person anymore.

There are no clear answers, and maybe the only true answer is that we should enjoy the small corner we have and the audience it brings. Everyone who is reading this regularly tells us how much you enjoy our shows, the work we do, the entertainment and thoughtfulness we provide. It does not go unnoticed. Being able to hang out with my friends and still offer people something worthwhile on the other end is a privilege I don't take lightly, even if it is a lot of work and horrendously underpaid labor. That's just making things online, 201X. 

So thank you for your support, as always, and especially thank you for listening to me ramble at length about where my head's at when it comes to the network right now. We're in a strange holding pattern for a few weeks where we have all of April's podcasts in the can and I can just sit on my butt and introspect. So introspect I shall. Next week I'll bring you something a little more relatable, but hopefully you don't mind this look behind the curtain. See you all next week!

- Em