Can the world survive a benevolent god? An audio drama where each episode is a prayer, some prayers are granted, and a granted prayer can upend the world. Written by @merelymatt and produced by @wirelesstheatre for @foggyoutline. 🎨 Dionysis Livanis.
Buy us a cuppa and help us make more like this! https://ko-fi-com/foggyoutline
The series premiere of I Need A Miracle is out now. Search for I Need A Miracle in podcast apps or head to foggyoutline.com/ineedamiracle for all the ways to listen.
Starring David Holt as Michel Kildress, the Artist
Written by @merelymatt
Directed by Robert Valentine
Recorded by Stephen H at Jukebox Studios
With broadcast assistance from Teresa Milewski
Sound design by Sarah Buchynski
Music by Katharine Seaton
Produced by Sarah Golding for @wirelesstheatre and @foggyoutline
I'm glad you asked @brutusfeels! So, I'm going to explain this is a very long-winded way, which I'm sorry for OOP, but I've honestly wanted an excuse to go through this, so I'm taking it!
How to Make Money from Podcasts
As I've explained in a previous post, Podcasting is a medium that is actually quite old in Internet terms, and as such it kinda grew up before the platforms consolidated, and due to the very nature of the technology, it constantly resists attempts by the tech industry to rebuild it in the image of Spotify or YouTube - the simple nature of the technology was just never built for moats.
What this means, of course, is that there's no Creator Partnership system for podcasts - you have to actively work to get money in this ecosystem, and there's four basic ways that Podcasts try to do that in the current age:
Selling Ad Space - Yup, you either get contacted directly by a company, or work through an Podcast Ad Service, but either way, you're generally selling 1-2 ads per episode where you, the talent, are reading the ad, usually with some kind of promo code so that the client company can track whether you've directly contributed to sales afterwards. In general, you get paid based on your listenership (which you basically monitor via episode downloads), and there's either Pre-Roll, Mid-Roll, or Post-Roll advertising, with Mid-Roll ads giving the best rates, followed by Pre-Roll, followed by Post-Roll.
Campaign Crowdfunding - By this, I mean raising money via a platform like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Seed&Spark, or any of the other many platforms that let you set a target and a deadline, and you then bust your arse off for a month or so to get everyone you know to contribute. If you already have work out there, you're also going to try and rope in as many fans of your previous work as well to contribute.
Subscription Crowdfunding - This is the Patreon-style route (there are other platforms that work similarly - Apple has a Subscription system, so does YouTube). In this system, You make a thing, and during that thing, you ask your listeners to support your podcast by subscribing to your Patreon-service, and depending on how you set this up, you either receive income per-episode or per-month.
A Secret Fourth Option that we'll discuss at the end :)
So, plenty of options, right? Let's go through the problems with each of these for audio fiction:
Advertising
The first and most obvious problem, as the OOP notes, is that audio fiction tends to require focused listening - there's usually an attempt to get you to "buy in" to the story, and that buy-in can hit a brick wall when it comes to do a mid-roll. A lot of Audio Fiction producers try to solve this problem by only doing Pre- or Post-roll ads, but of course, that's leaves money on the table. Some producers (including me with Seabrooke!) try to set up their audio fiction so that you can leave in-character space for ad reads during the show, and while this can help, it's still often not ideal.
The second problem is that audio fiction podcasts, by and large, don't have particularly high listenerships compared to other podcast genres. There are some productions that hit the big-time, but in general, you're looking at less than 1000 listeners per episode, which means the rates you can offer are pretty low, and while there's some ways you can get around this (like joining a Podcast Network, who can negotiate better rates), most options will require more work from you, and may come with expectations that you're not likely to meet.
However, probably the bigger problem overall is that Audio Fiction takes a lot more production time and effort than other Podcast Genres. Even if you only count the active work-time, Audio Fiction Podcasts can take 5-20 hours per minute of final runtime, when you take into account writing, casting, rehearsing, recording, line editing, sound design and marketing. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, means that daily fiction podcasts are nearly unheard of, and weekly fiction podcasts are incredibly rare, and in fact, most Fiction Podcasts run for maybe 10-20 episodes a year. In terms of Advertising spaces, that means you have very little to offer. If you stuff your Mid-roll with 2 ads per episode, you're still only selling 20-40 ad spaces, probably at pretty low rates.
Campaign Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding campaigns are excellent if you already have a wide audience, especially if your crowdfunding campaign is built around funding the next season of your podcast. You can think of crowdfunding in general as a way to convert viewership to funding.
And that's unfortunate, because Audio Fiction, as I noted previously, is generally pretty niche - "Big" Audio Fiction podcasts might still only have 1000-2000 listeners, and yes, if everyone contributed $10, that's a lot of money! But that's not ever how this goes - Of the audience you have, only a small number will have disposable income that they're able to toss your way, and of that small number, only a few are going to toss it your way.
It's also not really a great way to make money, it's more a way to get funded. While we've all seen Kickstarters go to the moon and get hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are folks who have been collecting data on very close to every audio fiction Kickstarter, and, well, I'll let their data speak for them (all $ amounts are USD-equivalent):
You may break even with campaign crowdfunding, but you're quite likely to fail, especially if this is your first project, but frankly you're very unlikely to make enough money to pay yourself, whether you put that into the crowdfunding target or not.
There's other problems with Campaign crowdfunding that's mostly due to more recent events, which means that however good it used to be, it's gotten a lot worse. It used to be the case that you could generally run a pretty high-impact social media campaign, and the algorithms would be reasonably good with helping compatible people discover your campaign. But Twitter is now completely dead and Facebook has become 100% pay to play, and we're now in a period where audiences are distributed across a bunch of platforms, and it now costs significantly more effort to run social media-based campaigns, and you get significantly less return for that effort. Worse, the rather large increase in the cost of living worldwide has meant that less people have free money to throw into crowdfunding generally. So... Yeah, right now is not a great environment for campaign crowdfunding if you don't already have an audience!
Subscription Crowdfunding
So, this is kinda considered the "best" option - Build up an audience, hope for a good conversion rate, and hopefully as you grow, you'll end up with enough money to be able to live off the Patreon funds, or at least cover the costs of the production.
And that is indeed the best income - if it happens. But that's not guaranteed, of course - while audio fiction podcasts do have a relatively high listener-to-conversion ratio (certainly compared to YouTubers), this is rather cold comfort if you don't have that many listeners. It's very possible to reach a natural ceiling with both your listeners and your patrons where you're bringing in enough money to feel the sense of obligation to those patrons, but not enough money coming in to allow yourself to focus entirely on your podcast. This is often a one-way path to creator burnout, because you're dealing with all the bad parts of Crowdfunding, and not even getting the benefit of being able to focus on your creative work.
There's another element here too, in that the best-performing Patreons provide additional content that's similar to what you're already providing for free, We discussed above that Audio Fiction is already a very labour-intensive medium, you're already making a show and releasing it for free, and now you have to think of another concept that you can provide to Patrons that gives them more of the world they're supporting, but is still sufficiently disconnected from your free content that your non-supporting audience won't get frustrated listening only to the free content. One might think that you can just provide behind-the-scenes stuff, or extra art, or just early-access, but people (like the folks behind Fable and Folly) have done the testing - many people will back you just to support you, but a lot more people will back you to get more of the content they fell in love with.
And then, of course, there's the censorship issues. If your audio fiction is mostly PG, this probably won't be a problem for you, but if your show engages with heavy themes, or sexual content, or sometimes even just queer content, you're going to have to toe the line with whatever content-restrictions that your Patreon-alike enforces, and this can change without notice. If you're living off Patreon, this can cause major disruption, because even if you can find another Patreon-alike that has better content-rules, you're almost certainly going to lose a significant number of your patrons, and there's no guarantee that your new service isn't going to change their content rules later on. This isn't an audio-fiction specific problem, of course - this is a problem for artists in nearly every genre - but if you're, say, running a very sex-heavy audio fiction podcast, this is a major concern! Subscription-crowdfunding's advantage in providing a regular stream of income is also a major disadvantage, in that it's very possible to lose your income stream just as you need the money to continue production, so while I'd still say it's the best option, there's some significant downsides.
The Other Option
One other option, that admittedly is very hard to get, is to go for mainstream funding - find a production company, or grant, or some other Very Big And Very Rich Company, and convince them to give you the relative pennies required to produce the podcast you want.
Understandably, this is probably the least-common form of funding - Fiction Podcasts, as noted, aren't really mainstream, and while audio fiction is significantly cheaper than visual media like TV shows and Film, as noted above, there's generally significantly less return available for such shows, and businesses generally want to get some sort of return. But, sometimes you can get lucky, and a company might be willing to commission an audio fiction project as part of a marketing campaign - which means they don't necessarily care about a monetary return, but the nature of such campaigns are likely to impose creative restrictions.
This, again, is much easier if you have a body of work behind you, and already have a certain degree of popularity and recognition - you need a certain amount of visibility and/or connections for these sorts of opportunities to access these kinds of opportunities, and even then, these are extremely rare, and usually one-off opportunities, but they can be quite lucrative, and can, sometimes, lead to opportunities in other media later down the track.
Art grants are somewhat different, in that they're generally much more common opportunities, that tend to come around regularly, but generally don't provide quite as much funding. The downside to the commonality of grants is that there's always still more people going for grants than opportunities, so grants can be something of a lottery. The more grants you apply for, and the more work you put into your grant request, the more likely you are to get the funding, but if you have an idea burning in your head, it can be a real bummer to go through an entire grant season and miss every possible grant opportunity, and the only feedback given is "we really like the idea, buuuut there were better ideas, so you went to the back of the queue".
So, that's the basics of podcast funding! It's, uh, not great, so hopefully you can have a bit more sympathy for audio fiction podcasts who choose advertising as their monetization strategy - crowdfunding just isn't for everyone!
I was messaged and someone noted one option that I didn't discuss, so I'll go through that one quickly:
Pay-to-Download
The idea here is that you use Bandcamp, or some other system, to allow people to download your work for money. This is different to the options above, and it is worth discussing.
The benefit is that you don't really have to deal with the issues with subscriptions, and because your storefront is permanently open, you avoid the issues with campaign crowdfunding too. And people, generally, understand the concept of paying for a product, so they're likely willing to do so.
But, of course, there's issues. RSS systems aren't smart enough to block access to something because you haven't paid for it, so if you want to fully paywall your audio fiction, you kinda have to leave the realms of podcasts. And this leads to the bigger problem - doing this basically reduces your distribution, on purpose, and that means you're putting a deliberate brake on the ability for your fans to get other people engaged with your work. Yes, you get a guaranteed payday for every person who listens to your work, but you'll get much fewer people listening.
Now, you might think "But surely, could you release your show for free and then sell an 'album'?" But there is a slightly more subtle problem with this, that has to do with how podcasting works. To put it short, podcatchers already download your show, just to listen to it. That's how podcasting works! Podcatchers download a show that you then listen to when you want. This means that if this is the model you want, you are, in effect, asking folks to donate to you to get something that they could easily get anytime.
Now to be clear, some non-fiction podcasts have made this work - a good example is Answer Me This, a podcast that has been around for multiple decades at this point. They made the decision to not have every single episode of theirs on their feed, and instead only freely distribute episode 201 onwards - if you want to listen to the earliest episodes, you have to pay (at £9.99 for a pack of 10 episodes). They also release "Best of" compilations and albums for purchase as well - basically, they're offering archive access and collections of the best bits, so you don't have to listen to the whole damn feed if you don't want to.
But that kind of model isn't that lucrative, according to Helen and Ollie, and at any rate, unless you're a fiction podcast with a massive backlog, this isn't really something you can duplicate, and has the added problem that if you do lock your archives down, you are (once again) restricting your future audience - few people will want to pay to get context for the free content. And doing it the other way, where you release a bunch of free content and then paywall the finale? I have seen podcasts do that, and I wish cold fire and brimstone on their heads. I find that kind of model incredibly manipulative. In multiple cases, I have flatout chosen not to pay to listen to the finale because I was that pissed off.
So, it's absolutely an option, but has it's own drawbacks. There just isn't a "perfect" way to make money from fiction podcasts, alas, no matter how much we'd like that to be so.
This is a fantastic post and one you should read! The conversation about ads in audio drama is one that is fraught with complications. I believe art should be free for everyone but I also believe artists should be paid for their labour and shouldn't be expected to make a free product without any sort of compensation.
Audio drama costs money to produce, especially if you want professional actors and sound designers and musicians and graphic designers. There are also things like hosting costs to consider that, while not a lot, do stack up eventually.
I want to add to this post about the Pay-To-Download model, as there are other ways to use it based on our experiences over here at Tin Can Audio and our shows.
We've had a lot of success with a Pay-To-Download model, in particular with Bandcamp. Back in 2019 we released The Tower, with episodes coming out regularly on the RSS feed. But listeners could buy the entire series at once over on Bandcamp. It functioned in the same way a season pass would, and we found a lot of listeners engaged with it. So the model was 'pay now for everything now, or wait and listen for free'. We've done this with every series of The Tower and it's been successful enough that it's a model we swear by, and have noticed other shows starting to do the same.
I also want to address the point that taking something out of podcasting onto somewhere like Bandcamp reduces distribution. I disagree with this. Bandcamp has its own ecosystem and, if anything, has better discovery than podcasting. You can search genres, other people's collections, and artists on Bandcamp can have other recommended artists at the bottom of their page. It's less about reducing distribution so much as it is aiming for a different audience.
And it is possible to do both!
When we released @camlannpod, at the end of every episode our incredible writer/director Ella Watts would recommend other audio dramas and include trailers. This was a great way to build community from a podcasting perspective but, for the listener, if they were wanting to listen to the whole series in one go, there was effectively a 3-5 minute ad at the end of every episode. So we released an Album Version over on Bandcamp. The whole series without Ella's bits at the end of every episode, making it much more suited to listening to the whole series in one go (Hearthbound has done a similar thing with a 'Road Trip Version' of the show which is one long track). I'll be honest, I initially had doubts about this as a plan, but it's been surprisingly successful for us.
When I say 'successful' I mean a significant (and growing) chunk of our audience has engaged with our Bandcamp releases. We've also had the advantage of being able to release the soundtracks to our shows on there as well, which is where the majority of our sales come from. I consider our Bandcamp model a success because we are now at the stage where we are able to use the money from sales to fund new audio drama.
Granted it's not of the scale of budget that we would need to make something big like a Camlann or The Tower, but it's enough to pay a couple of actors for a day's work and enough left over to pay the crew for some of their time. It's not perfect, but it's a start. The fact we're able to do this entirely from Bandcamp sales is not something I thought we'd ever be able to do, and it makes me hopeful for the future of this medium.
There is never going to be a perfect solution to this problem. Some shows are happy being on a network and running ads on their shows. We tried that and it didn't work for us. Crowdfunding is great but we've found it to be less dependable and with diminishing returns over time. We're really happy with the Pay-To-Download model while still maintaining podcast feeds.
Karen, Richard, and Matt are professional relations: business partners who are also family members. This issue, Karen edits her son Matt’s i
In the latest Professional Relations, the monthly @foggyoutline newsletter, @merelymatt interviews his Dad and is both horrified and validated to learn that parents procrastinate too.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord: the old, US-dominated, "rules-based international order" was total bullshit:
Unlike Carney, I never pretended to like that old order, and indeed, I spent my entire life fighting against it – literally, all the way back to childhood, organizing other children to march against Canada's participation in America's nuclear weapons programs:
All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I'm living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.
Take Trump's tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn't buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.
This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly, they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from Tiktok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks, and unwired the country so thoroughly that today, the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery:
This is an inversion of the normal order of things, in which rich countries get all the good stuff first, and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we've gorged ourselves. Think of vaccine apartheid, in which monsters like Howard Dean insisted that we had to prevent countries in the global south from making their own covid vaccines, because poor brown people are too stupid and primitive to run a pharma manufacturing operation:
But, thanks to Comrade Trump, Pakistan was first in line to become the world's solar capital. The country's LNG terminal – built with Chinese Belt-and-Road money – is now a stranded asset, because no one there needs gas.
That's gas whose supply has been choked off in the Strait of Epstein…which brings me to Trump's foreign policy and its impact on the global energy shift. Transitory energy shortages have small effects: when your energy bill goes up for a while (because of extreme weather, say), it makes you angry and sad and might result in an electoral loss for whatever politician presided over the price hike. But when you get genuine, prolonged shortages – the sort that are accompanied by rationing – you make permanent changes.
Rationing is so psychologically scarring that it induces people to make long-delayed investments that result in permanent changes to their consumption habits. Maybe you've known for a long time that an induction top would be better for your indoor air quality and your cooking than the gas range you have now, but you don't want to buy a whole new appliance and pay for an electrician to run a high-wattage line in expensive conduit from your breaker panel to your kitchen.
But if you're an Indian restaurateur who can no longer get any cooking gas – because it's being rationed for household use – then you are going out to buy whatever induction top you can lay hands on. Maybe it's a cheap, low-powered single burner one that plugs into your existing electrics, or maybe you're splashing out and swapping out your whole gas appliance. Whichever it is, you are no longer interested in your chef's insistence that real cooking gets done over gas. If your chef can't cook on an induction top, your chef will need to find employment elsewhere.
This is going on all over the world right now, as people buy EVs (and pay to have chargers installed at home – maybe getting a twofer on their conduit runs with two high power lines run through the same conduit infrastructure). In Australia – where the last shipment of gas for the foreseeable came into port last week – people are calling their local EV dealers and offering to buy whatever car is on the lot, sight unseen.
Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a series of dollar-related crises caused the country to ban imports of internal combustion engines altogether (oil and gas are denominated in dollars, which means you can only get oil if you first sell stuff to Americans or others who'll pay in dollars). The country's fleet of noisy, dirty motorbikes is being swiftly replaced by ebikes that get eight miles to the penny:
Ebikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged and reliable, they're basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you've gotten accustomed to an ebike – maybe you've invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat – you'll never go back. The advantages of an ebike commute over a car commute are legion, but my favorite little pleasure is the ability to easily make a stop at a nice coffee shop halfway between home and work, rather than being stuck buying shitty chain coffee near the office.
Four years ago, another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine – and in so doing, catapulted Europe's energy transition into the Gretacene, with unimaginable defeats for the fossil fuel lobby. Not just subsidies for the clean energy transition, but also policy shifts in areas that had been deadlocked for a decade, like approvals for balcony solar, which is transforming the continent. Even the UK, one of the oil industry's most reliable vassal states, is now greenlighting balcony solar:
This may not sound like much, but the UK is a country whose politics is composed 50% hatred of migrants and trans people, and 50% incredibly stupid planning battles. Great Britain is a magical land where your neighbors can ask the government to prevent you from installing double-glazing on the grounds that it will change the "historic character" of their neighborhood of terraced Victorian homes.
I once lost a fight to get permission to put a little glass greenhouse on my balcony on the grounds that it would "alter the facade" of the undistinguished low-rise 1960s industrial building I live on top of. The fact that HMG is going to tell your facade-obsessed neighbors to fuck off all the way into the sun so that you can hang solar panels off your balcony is nothing short of a miracle.
Comrade Putin's contribution to oil-soaked Britain's energy transition can't be overstated. Thanks to "free market" policies that sent energy prices soaring after the Ukraine invasion, Brits installed so much solar (despite the existing impediments to solarization) that now the government is begging us to use more energy this summer, because the grid can't absorb all those lovely free electrons:
The UK is on a glide-path to adopting the Australian plan. Australia also benefited from Trump I's solar embargo, receiving a ton of cheap solar that would otherwise have ended up in America. Now Australia has so much solar that they're giving away electricity, with three free hours of unlimited energy every day. Stick your dishwasher, clothes-dryer and EV charger on a timer, invest in a battery or two, and fill your boots:
(Maybe at this point you're thinking dark thoughts about critical minerals and such. That's not the problem you think it is and it's getting better every day. To take just one example, lithium batteries are about to be replaced with sodium batteries. Sodium is the world's sixth-most abundant element:)
The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent, unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to cleantech than decades of environmental activism. Cleantech is so much better than fossil fuels – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner – that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it!
To take just one example here: Texas ranchers have been solarizing, thanks to the state's bizarre "free market" energy system that sees energy prices spiking so high during cold snaps that you literally have to choose between freezing to death and going bankrupt. Solar is great for agriculture, especially in climate-ravaged Texas, where it provides crucial shade for crops and livestock, while substantially reducing soil evaporation, resulting in substantial irrigation savings.
When the oil-captured Texas legislature introduced a bill to force electric companies to add one watt of fossil power for every watt of solar that their customers installed, furious ranchers from blood red Republican rural districts flooded their town hall meetings, decrying the plan as "DEI for fossil fuels." The bill died:
This is the template for the long-foreseeable future. Thanks to Trump's stupid, bloody, unforgivable war of choice in the Gulf, the world is going to install unimaginable amounts of cleantech. They are going to throw away their water heaters, motorbikes, furnaces and cars and replace them with all-electric versions. They're going to cover their roofs and balconies with panels. The battery industry will experience a sustained boom. The fortunes that fossil fuel companies are reaping from the current shortage is their last windfall.
The writing is on the wall. Trump opened Alaska for drilling and the oil companies noped out because they couldn't find a bank that would loan them the money needed to get started. Then it happened again in Venezuela. This de-fossilizing was already the direction of travel, the only question was the pace at which the transition would proceed – and Comrade Trump has just stomped all over the (liquid natural) gas pedal.
Energy is just one realm where Trump is doing praxis. One of the most exciting developments that Trumpismo's incontinent belligerence has induced is the global technology transition.
For decades, the only people pointing out the dangers of using America's cash-grabbing, privacy invading defective tech exports were digital rights hippies like me, and our victories were modest and far between. Despite the Snowden revelations, despite the tech industry's prolific snood-cocking at EU privacy regulators and Canadian lawmakers, we all just carried on using these incredibly dangerous, steadily enshittifying Big Tech products. We even run our governments and structurally important companies off Big Tech. We let US tech companies update (that is, downgrade) the software on our cars and tractors, our pacemakers and ventilators, our power plants and telephone switches.
There's lots of reasons for this. For one thing, ripping out and replacing all that software and firmware is a prodigious challenge, as is building the data-centers to host it for every "digitally sovereign" country. Add to that the complexity of successfully migrating data, edit histories, archives and identities and you're looking at a very big lift. So long as the American tech bosses kept their enshittificatory gambits to a measured, slow flow, they could keep the pain beneath the threshold where it was worth us boiling frogs leaping out of their pot.
But the most important force defending American internet hegemony was free trade: specifically, the US forced all of its trading partners to adopt "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to modify US tech exports. That means that you can't go into business selling your neighbors the tools to use generic ink or an independent app store, much less make a fortune exporting those tools to the rest of the world:
Enter Comrade Trump. When Trump started weaponizing US tech platforms to take away the working files, email accounts and cloud calendars of judges who pissed him off (by sentencing Bolsonaro to prison and swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu), he put the whole world on notice that he could shut down their governments, judiciaries or companies at the click of a mouse:
And of course, he's whacked the whole world with tariffs that violate the trade agreements that imposed those anticircumvention obligations that protect America's defective tech exports. Now there's no longer any reason to keep those laws on the books. Happy Liberation Day, everyone! The post-American internet is at hand:
But Trump has even more praxis up his spraytan-stained sleeves. Trump is succeeding where Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC failed: he's making the case for Democrats to defenestrate their useless, sellout, Epstein-poisoned leaders. All across the country, radical Dems and avowed socialists are sweeping primaries and elections, as voters realize that Blue No Matter Who will doom them to eternal torment in the Manchin-Synematic Universe:
Thanks to Comrade Trump, the median Democratic voter will no longer be satisfied with Kente cloth photo-ops and little ping-pong paddles stenciled with "down with this sort of thing":
Thanks to Trump, we might see criminal prosecutions – and a primary challenge for any Dem that gets in the way of a serious, Nuremberg-style reckoning with Trumpismo and its gangsters:
Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let's take the wins.
Crowdfunding @inyourbenevolence season 2 is the priority this year, but I have a few other audio drama projects in development as well – here's the rundown of what they all are and where they're at. Let me know which you'd most like to listen to!
Faith-based, religious stories of all denominations, sects, and whatnot.
I Need A Miracle is in this new list from The End, along with lots of other (finished) audiodramas with religious themes.
I always say I Need A Miracle is more about need than religion or faith ... but I also have to admit that Thoughts and Prayers would definitely work as an alternative title for the show.
Karen, Richard, and Matt are professional relations: business partners who are also family members. This issue, Karen interviews her husband
Dad's taking a photo a day of the same landscape all this year, to document the changing of the seasons. Mum interviews him about it in the new newsletter. There's some @inyourbenevolence season 2 news in there too.
"As a person allergic to religion, I had my doubts. I was wrong. It's fab. Great writing and acting, made even better by stellar production. And don't be scared off by it not being "full cast." For this show, it doesn't need to be."
- Evo Terra
Evo Terra gave I Need A Miracle a glowing review in The End, the directory of audio drama series that are complete, with all episodes available (no starting a series and finding it's podfaded, or speeding through all the episodes then waiting months for the next one).
And, well. Season 1 of I Need A Miracle certainly is complete. But more desires are straining to be heard.
We're planning to crowdfund a second season this year, and if we succeed, you'll get to hear what happens when we let a whole raft of new writers loose in this already unpredictable world.
The first ever I Need A Miracle live show is happening at @audiodramahub Hubfest 2025! It's on 1 November at 7pm GMT, in High Wycombe, UK and livestreaming online.
We're doing a never-before-produced episode titled Skip to the End, written by Matt Boothman ( @merelymatt ) and performed by Marta Da Silva (aka @nanaluvren; Sherlock & Co., The Silt Verses, The Road of Shadows) and Benjamin May (Alice in Wonderland and many other audiobooks for Audible).
Yep – two performers in one episode. Twice as many as any previous episode!
You can get tickets for the whole day in person, just the evening live shows in person, or livestreaming.
The 4th annual festival where creators both established and emerging can meet, mingle and learn from the event and each other.
It's today! Our live show is now at 6:45pm GMT (not 7pm as originally advertised). If you can't make it in person, you can also get livestreaming tickets and join us online.
