Now that the cat's out of the bag, though, this week's update is about the project I mentioned last month in Tales From The Sellsword Skull, A Potential Podcast. Phase One is nearly complete, but I could use a little bit of help getting me over this last hurdle!
Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!
What is Phase One?
For those who are hearing this news for the first time, let me back up a bit. Since the beginning of this year I've been making little audio dramas for the Azukail Games YouTube channel (which, incidentally, you should totally subscribe to). These vignettes dramatize the introductory fiction for a lot of my RPG supplements, and they've sort of allowed me to explore and build up my skills for the past half a year or so. I've wanted to expand into longer-form projects, however, so I figured that it was time to bite the bullet and get the ball rolling on a bigger, more expansive series of audio dramas.
Phase One was monetizing them over on my Daily Motion channel, The Literary Mercenary.
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| Seriously, check it out if you haven't yet! |
To that end I've put together the 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories above, as well as Dead Man's Bluff, a weird Western short story from my collection The Rejects. My hope is that between these two videos I'll be able to pull the 1,000 views I need to monetize the channel. As of time of writing, the videos have a combined view count of 894, putting me 106 views out... not bad, all things considered!
But, you know, more views never hurts! And once I hit that 1k view mark, that's the end of Phase I, and I can move onto Phase II, which is populating the channel with more videos.
I have a couple of smaller projects in the works to flesh out the channel's early offerings (including a re-mastering of a Vampire: The Masquerade vignette from one of my supplements, as well as 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Warhammer 40K Edition), but after those smaller videos are out of the way I plan to make 9 more full-length short story videos for the channel. Some will be taken from The Rejects, but I've reached out to publishers I've worked with in the past to ask for their permission to dramatize some of the short stories I've put in other collections in the past.
Once I have a full 10 stories, that's when we get to Phase III, which is turning this beast into a genuine podcast! The initial 10 stories will act as season one, and while that's going out on various platforms, I'll be hard at work dramatizing season 2, which will be the Pathfinder adventure The Silver Raven Chronicles (the current works are listed below for those who are curious).
It's my hope that I'll have Phase I in the bag very soon, and that Phase II will be going smoothly by the end of the year. Phase III will take some work, but if I can get folks behind the project and sharing the videos around to help ensure that there's a budget for making more content, then I should be able to keep this going as long as people want to keep listening!
Why Am I Not Putting These on YouTube?
This is the most common question I've received so far, so I figured I'd take this opportunity to address the elephant in the room; why am I putting these videos up on Daily Motion instead of on YouTube? After all, YouTube is the biggest platform out there, so wouldn't it make more sense to use it?
Firstly, I can't. Secondly, even if I could, it would be a colossal pain in the ass to try.
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| Let me break it down for you. |
A lot of folks don't know what it takes to get monetized on YouTube as a content creator, so let me break it down for you. First, you need to have 1,000 subscribers to your channel. Then you need to have 4,000 hours of watched content in the past year (not total, just in the past 365 days). For perspective, that's 11.5 hours of watched content every day for an entire year... that's absurd. Worse, though, it means that unless you make something that goes really viral, or you already have a huge audience that will follow you onto the platform, you could be making content for YouTube for years before they share any of the money with you. Because make no mistake, the site is still putting ads on all your videos, it's just that they're keeping 100% of the revenue you generate and putting it in their own pockets.
However, even if I wanted to try to swing for the fences and get monetized on YouTube, I can't. YouTube pays via Google AdSense, which is a program I once used to monetize this very blog. It's also a program I was banned from going on 8 years ago for "suspicious traffic." I put it in quotes because I have no idea what that means, Google wouldn't explain it to me, and when I appealed I was denied with no additional information being given to me.
So, since I can't use their payment program, I can't actually get paid by YouTube at all. Even if I could, though, Daily Motion's monetization goal is something I've nearly managed in a little over a week, instead of making content for a year and a half and still not being anywhere near the finish line.
Now that you know this, though, make sure you subscribe to all the YouTubers out there whose content you like, and consider letting a playlist run in the background... they need all the help they can get!
Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!
That's all for this week's Business of Writing!
If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!
If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!
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