Cartoon Gravity 32
Today's is a newsletter of many parts...
My Week
Last weekend I finally finished a TV pilot I've been working on and sent it off to my US reps to see what they can do with it, and I started writing a new movie script, which I'm excited about. I've also been working on a wiki-style knowledge base called "The Attic" for the Pleasant Green site, and yesterday I launched a new serialised story over there called "De Kliek".
Yesterday I finally succumbed to the geniuses over at Galen Leather and ordered one of these:
It could have been worse, I could have gone for the first edition Book of Thoth, from Kenneth Anger's personal libray, signed by Aleister Crowley.
Kickstarter
We have entered the final week of the Kickstarter for Lovecraft Investigations: Crowley. As a first attempt at crowdfunding, this has been a wild ride - target hit in the first 24 hours, first stretch goal hit etc etc. If you've been helping out, if you've been spreading the word, if you have pledged; thank you very much.
The whole thing wraps up at midday (UK time) on Saturday 30 May. If you are still on the fence about pledging (I get it, there are a lot of things to spend money on right now), then the one thing I think is worth reiterating is that Crowley will not be available for free (outside, potentially, of libraries). The entry level pledge of £17 gets you access to the feed and MP3 downloads of the show to keep forever. You will be able to obtain these after we launch the show next year, but that Kickstarter price is the cheapest it's ever going to be.
On Reach...
Which leads me neatly on to my main topic. There has been a reasonable amount of debate on the Cartoon Gravity Club, and elsewhere, about my decision to charge for Crowley in perpetuity. This is not from people who don't want to pay for it, but from people who want to share the thing they like (namely The Lovecraft Investigations, and related shows) with the widest possible audience. I get that, and I appreciate the sentiment. But let me tell you why I don't care...
The conventional wisdom has it that you create something and you want it to get out to the most amount of people; you want to sell as many tickets/records/books as you can. Of course you do. I would like to sell the most downloads of Crowley that I can.
In podcasting, though, you traditionally give your show away for free in order to get the biggest possible audience and thus attract advertising, in which instance the product stops being the podcast you're making and becomes the audience that you gather, and the data/attention that they provide. That works great for lots of people but it's not a model I am drawn to because I don't want advertising bookending or interrupting my shows, and I don't want my audience to become fodder for mattress salesmen and miracle hair-growth hucksters.
That sounds like I'm throwing shade on the people who adopt this model, but I really don't mean to; shows cost money to make and people need to be paid and the advertising model allows a lot of creators to get their stuff out there and make a living. My preference to not have advertising is entirely personal.
The reality, though, is that audio fiction, particularly the way we do it, is expensive to make, and that money has to come from somewhere. Giving it away for free might increase the audience but, absent advertising, it's not sustainable.
Not everyone can afford a paid subscription or a paid download, and I get that. But not everyone can afford to buy books and records, and that has never been a cogent argument for why bands and novelists should give their work away. Music streaming has done untold damage to the independent music scene and podcasting is in danger of going off the same cliff.
The major podcast platforms now advise that you need to make shows for a year or more to gather an audience big enough to even start the conversation about advertising placement. We obviously have an audience that would attract advertisers already, but how is an independent podcaster supposed to accomplish that? Podcasting can be cheap, but it's not free. And so the best way to get your show off the ground is to sell it, along with a lot of the ancillary rights, to a podcasting company who will give you a budget in return for a cut of the proceeds and, crucially, a measure of creative control. That's the same model that the TV and film industries use. It's not terrible, but it is limiting and, over time, these companies and their shareholders become risk-averse and start churning out carbon copies of proven hits and not much else. And advertising itself is volatile; subject to political machinations, market forces, currency markets etc.
I deal with this stuff on a daily basis in my main job, working in TV and film. I don't have a burning desire to replicate it in my audio fiction work.
And so where we have arrived, or circled back to, is the idea of creating work for an audience that likes it enough to want to pay for it. That audience is going to be smaller, but more invested. The process is more like a conversation than a sales pitch, and I love that. I enjoy the interaction with listeners, I enjoy having a direct connection to the audience without the middlemen of sales and marketing and distribution. That is one of the unique possibilities of the medium and the technology, and I'm in no rush to ditch it in favour of a TV model, or to start pandering to the whims of advertisers.
Do I think more people would enjoy these shows than currently know about them? I certainly hope so. And I'd love to tell those people about what we're doing. But previous attempts to do that via advertising have proved both comically disastrous and soul-destroying. So instead I have this to say to the fans who want to share their enthusiasm with a broader base: don't like, repost.
At time of writing, 1300 people have pledged to the Kickstarter, which is incredible. If each one of those people raved about the show to five friends, and one or two of those friends decided to give the shows a listen (most seasons of the original Lovecraft Investigations are free to access, and will continue to be, under the BBC license, for some time), we would start to see significant audience growth.
So if, instead of clicking "like" on a social media post about something you like, you clicked "repost" (even if you only have a handful of followers), more and more people would get to hear about it. That's how we grow, slowly but organically. And it's how we keep the conversation going.
The bottom line is I would rather make these shows for a small but sustainable audience who really want to be there than for a much bigger audience who could take them or leave them. I think going for the biggest possible audience is a mistake, because most of us are not Taylor Swift; her audience is both huge and hugely invested. The rest of us have to pick one or the other, and I choose invested.
Cartoon Gravity Pro
Talking of investing, there are going to be some changes around here over the next week or so. The Development Hell subscription is going to be rebranded to Cartoon Gravity Pro (still workshopping the name), so that it's a little bit clearer what people are subscribing to. Pro members will get the longer form pieces, and maybe some short fiction too, and I'm thinking more about podcasting and other stuff that can be behind the paywall.
There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that the current system seems to be confusing the hell out of everyone, understandably, and Development Hell feels like it's ONLY for people who are invested in the ins and outs of writing. While I definitely want to keep that aspect, I would like to broaden the base so that it's an affordable and worthwhile subscription for people who want to show their appreciation, support the work, contribute to the upkeep of the joint, and enjoy a few perks along the way. Again, quality over quantity.
I don't have a Patreon, and I don't much like the idea, but it would be great to make this place a little more sustainable and to be able to afford to devote more time to building it out.
Sunday Supplement
The things that either caught my eye this week, or that I dredged up from the archive...
Why I decided to go for broke and write a movie trilogy | Creative Boom
This Lower Manhattan Restaurant Doubles as an Immersive Black-and-White Sketchbook — Colossal
After More Than Half a Century, a One-of-a-Kind Chinese Typewriter Emerges from Obscurity — Colossal
Warren Ellis sent me this link, because he's a bastard who knows how to mess with my mind: Notsu To-Do List Cards and Case Review — The Pen Addict
We've also been discussing, in the Cartoon Gravity Club, the issue of RSS readers (I'm a fan). This article proved helpful: The Best RSS Reader Apps in 2025 | Lifehacker
This clip was doing the rounds, after George Wendt's death, and I think it might be one of the shows very best gags:
And finally, a couple of other Kickstarters that I think Pleasant Green fans might take to:
Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley — Kickstarter - I'm writing a Pleasant Green-inspired scenario for this, and I think it's going to be awesome.
The Eden Book Society - I love what these guys are doing and we are talking about cooking up some kind of collaboration in the future.
That's it. Have a great long weekend.
Fuck it. Send.