An Update...

I will stop banging on about the Crowley Kickstarter one day. But today is not that day.

We're a week into the campaign and we have currently raised more than £90,000, which is pretty incredible. It means we are definitely making Lovecraft Investigations: Crowley and are on our way to the first stretch goal - a brand new Mythos episode.

By hook or by crook, we're starting a Facebook campaign over the next few days. I am a little icky about engaging with Meta, but looking at the analytics on Kickstarter, it seems we have done a really great job of reaching the hardcore fans, but have been less successful at reaching the majority of listeners who like the show but haven't engaged beyond listening. I think there are a lot of those people and I suspect they don't even know that this campaign is happening.

Some of the more casual fans may also be thinking, as I have seen in a handful of passing comments, that they will wait for Crowley to be available for free. I totally get that, because we're used to the BBC making this stuff available, and we're used to listening to podcasts for free on whatever apps we use.

But that's not happening with Crowley.

The minimum pledge on the Kickstarter is £17, and that gets you access to a private RSS feed, which will deliver the show to your podcast app of choice, and an MP3 download of the show for those who want to own the downloads and listen offline. Just as if this was a graphic novel, or a board game, or anything else you might pre-buy on Kickstarter, Crowley will then go on sale for slightly more than the backers paid. It will not be made available for free, any more than the games or graphic novels are.

Making these shows is an expensive proposition, and there are royalties to pay to performers etc. I don't ever want to put advertising in our audio fiction, I don't want to stop the action at a crucial moment to sell you home security or a memory-foam mattress (or fucking hair restorer!), so we have to find a way to pay for the shows without any of that unwanted noise. The simplest solution is to make a really good quality product and sell it to customers who want it (along with related merch etc, which also helps finance production). There's a pleasing simplicity to succeeding or failing based on the quality of the output, and there's something equally pleasing about being able to immerse yourself in an audio world devoid of advertising and interruptions.

Further down the road, I hope we'll have a platform of our own; a pipeline for new shows that people can either subscribe to or buy as one-offs. That's a way away at the moment, but this Crowley experiment is a first step in that direction and it has been enormously encouraging.

Normal service will be resumed soon (not least because I need to get back to my day job at some point). In the meantime, anything you can do to spread the word about Crowley would be much appreciated.