Last week was the sixth anniversary of the podcast, so it’s time for the annual report. If you are new to the podcast, start anywhere else.
The Patreons are covering the hosting fees of the podcast, so it is financially stable. There has been a permanant price change in my podcast host, so now instead of getting 50MB a month, I get 162. This extra space has allowed me to do things like Fragment Week, but I can’t promise to find enough material to fill that each month. Essentially each megabyte gets you a minute, and so we’d be going from roughly 14 minutes a week to roughly 40. That’s harder than it sounds because between scripting, recording and editing episodes, a minute takes five minutes to produce, which means the podcast balloons out from just over an hour a week to three hours and I can’t currently manage that. Librivox recordings let me cut that down substantially, although it does make the episode lengths waggle about.
There’s always a temptation to push on and turn this hobby into a side hustle. I’m not going to do that because I think the added pressure would make the whole thing less enjoyable and burn me out. I have various medical things going on, chronically, so when I have some energy I line up a heap of episodes, and then when I need it I ignore the podcast for self-care. A professional podcast would mean I had to grind through promised projects, like the bestiary and Venice, rather than meandering about them and filling in bits when I can, following byways like the Pentamerone and Cellini.
I know this leads to a lumpy sort of episode length. Some weeks you get five minutes of new material from me, and the next you get an hour from a dead Greek chap with odd ideas about who lives on the Sun. A truly professional podcast would split into separate feeds, like The Great Library of Dreams does, but for now that’s not necessary. If things eventually get to the stage where the Ars Magica people and Magonomia people are not liking each other’s material, I’ll look at it again. Similarly, a professional podcast would have its own Facebook, Twitter and Discord, but I don’t see the point in fragmenting the communities further.
According to Libsyn, the podcast averages about 150 listens per week. According to WordPress, the transcripts get about 250 visits per week. That’s amazing, really, which is why I don’t trust it at all.
I don’t pay extra to get detailed stats, but my feeling on it is that we have a lot of people dropping by for stuff that’s not related to roleplaying. For example, the most popular post of all time on the blog is The Pear Drum, which is the story also known as The New Mother. I presume it is people who are Neil Gaiman fans looking up his inspiration for Coraline, and finding this site because it’s easier here that finding it under the original title in the depths of Project Gutenberg. Similarly the most visited page this month has been Earl Haldaran’s Daughter, and it seems like forty or fifty of the visitors have come from India. I’m not saying they are unwelcome, but I presume they are a class group who have been told to look at it, and have found it on my page because it’s not buried under OCR on Internet Archive, rather than that there’s a really big Ars group in India that’s making Viking-themed fae.
During Fragment Week I had slightly north of 45 daily audio downloads, with a bit of a bounce on the weekend. I presume that’s a solid number I can count as my listener base. 45 only sounds small if you are comparing to Joe Rogan – I’m happy to have a roomful of people listen each week.
The following episodes have already been recorded and are queued on timers on my podcast host. As you can see, I’m currently working on an episode for July 14th, which will be about the Venetian Ghetto. August 25 is probably a Magonomia episode about John Stow, a real world magical practitioner who lent books to the other famous magicians of the day and had a browsing library in his house in London.
June 2: Two little Venetian episodes, a demon of grief, and a discussion of Venetian cats.
June 9: Magonomia : Alchemy in Chaucer
June 16: Cellini swears he did not try to shoot the Cardinal
June 23 and 30: The poem “The City of Dreadful Night” split in two pieces and treated as an Infernal regio that seeks out dreamers.
July 7: Beth Gelert. This, for Ars players, is the greyhound Saint Guinefort, but in English form.
July 21: Celinni’s wounds are healed by the angelic host
July 28: Magonomia – Alchemists in Chaucer 2 – I now realise this is seven weeks after part one. I may move it closer.
August 4 Witch of the Atlas
August 18 Celinni is poisoned like a prince
September 1 The White Witch
September 15 Two short Celinni episodes: Cellini angers the king’s official mistress and Cellini swears his giant statue is not haunted.
October 6: Our Ladies of Death
October 20: Celinni in Paris
November 3: Insomnia Angels
November 15 Celinni and the fiery birth of the Perseus
December 15: Celinni and Renaissance Medicine
There are also five episodes for some of the monsters I wrote for the Magonomia bestiary. These explore the folklore, and the material I couldn’t include, about the creatures. I may do another two, as one of my co-authors needed to step away and I took over some of their pitches. There’s one episode which I have floating about that might suit the Magonomia bonus episodes, or might come loose on its own. It’s a poem about a skeletal courtesan by Beaudelaire.
Next year’s replacement of Cellini will be “The Discoverie of Witches”, which is an Elizabethan sceptic’s guide to folk magic.
Games From Folktales 