Hello friends!
It’s been a little since the last time I posted (in my defense this is also the most I’ve posted on my website in literally years) but as holidays approach the more time-conscious of you might remember the trailer for Roy Kaplan I posted back in November and the fact that the launch date for Roy Kaplan is now less than a week away! So I thought it would be nice to do a little update about what’s been going on in the meantime.
I’m not going to talk too much about the project itself today–I think I’ve done enough of that. This will just be about what I’ve been working on and some personal thoughts as we head into the release of what has been a really big project for me.
What have I been up to since the last time I posted? To be perfectly honest, I’ve been playing a lot of Old School RuneScape in the last few weeks–as some of you might know I exist in some state of being perpetually trapped in 2007 and also it’s Leagues season again, which I like to participate in whenever I get the chance because it’s a lot more fun than regular RuneScape. But leaving that aside, the last few weeks I’ve been getting transcripts onto this website as well as doing final volume and timing adjustments to the episodes, exporting them, getting them prepped, and starting to upload and schedule them. For some reason I thought that after the episode was edited would be the easy part but all this stuff that comes after to actually distribute the episodes so people can listen to them is really tedious and exhausting. If you’re not aware, I have four separate uploads for each episode: one on Pinecast, which distributes to most podcast aggregators; one standard quality for Patreon early release; one high quality for Patreon early release/individual download purchase; and one video for YouTube. Getting one episode exported four separate times is simple enough but multiplied by twelve it stacks up pretty fast (and that’s before even having to put in descriptions and other information at the actual upload stage). There’s just a lot of work involved in getting things neatly put together in time for release, so I’ve been spreading that out over these few days.
It’s been a really long road to get Roy Kaplan to this point and I’m ready for it to be over and to release the show out into the wild. I’ve basically reached the point where I probably won’t listen to these episodes again–despite what it might look like from all the work I’ve done on Roy Kaplan, I really don’t listen to things like podcasts pretty much ever, and I’ve already listened to every episode of Out of Sight way more times than any reasonable person would want to listen to a show. From here on out, it’s for everyone else to listen to, and whatever happens, happens.
I’m trying not to stress out about Roy Kaplan. I do think it’s a well-made project and there’s a lot of high quality work in it. Whether it’s able to recoup its production costs or it makes absolutely no money at all, the season is finished and going to release and that itself is success enough. If it’s not financially successful, the only thing that happens is that I won’t make future seasons, which is fine. It’s not as if I don’t have other projects to work on.
So what happens in the last days leading up to launch? Well, I’m posting this blog, and that’s kind of about it. I’m not going to do any countdowns or lots of promotional material because it really doesn’t make sense to me to try and hype things up before there’s actually something to listen to. I’m not Netflix that needs to maximize the number of listeners in the first twenty-four hours–if people listen to the pilot now or in four months, it’s all the same to me. By a similar token, I’ll wait until after launch to make a more formal post about how people can financially support production–there’s no need to ask for money before people can even hear what they’re giving money for.
In the meantime, I’ll be (hopefully) getting everything uploaded and taken care of this week so things will run smoothly for the next five months. I’m pretty burnt out on this project at this point (hence all the RuneScape) because it’s kind of been six months straight of “after this bit of work is finished things will be easy” where the work never actually gets easier. But most creative projects of this scope are like that. Even if I’m tired, I’m excited to share what I’ve made and for people to listen to it and hopefully enjoy it.
If for some reason, you’ve gotten this far without knowing what Roy Kaplan is and you’d like to know, go check out the Roy Kaplan main page and that should pretty much cover your bases. The easiest way to stay updated with Roy Kaplan and make sure to not miss the launch date this coming Saturday is to subscribe to it on your favored podcast aggregator or sign up for my email newsletter here.
In addition to posting the episodes and transcripts on this website, I’ll be posting some writers commentary blog posts as the season goes on, probably a week after each episode releases. That’s just for fun if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
I think that’s all I’ve got today. I’ve still got work to do to get this season up and running, so I’ll hop back to that. Best wishes, and I’ll see you on the other side :)