As I continue to work towards the relaunch of Stupefying Stories, one fact has become clear.
The days of Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE are over. When we first launched SHOWCASE as a webzine, with Issue #1 on June 14, 2013, it was a great idea. There is still a lot of great content out there—e.g., "Smart Money," by Samuel Marzioli—and you can still browse the site, if you know how to find the secret entrance—
But a Google search can't find the site anymore, and even I have trouble getting into it, and I created the blessed thing and have full admin rights. This may simply be another strange behavior of Edge, as with its absolute refusal to let me enter smart quotes into a Blogger post…
But I digress. My point is, SHOWCASE began as a webzine, then migrated to become a free short-story feature on this Stupefying Stories parent site, and the longer we produced it, the clearer it became that this was not an effective way to deliver fiction to readers or to attract new readers. We have published hundreds of stories in SHOWCASE over the past thirteen years, and in so doing developed a long list of what doesn't work.
- Weekly serials, such as "Market Futures," by M. Ian Bell, don't work.
- Long-format complete stories, such as "Welcome to the Death Machine Factory Tour," by Ray Daley or "Planting the Flag," by Graham Brand, don't work.
- Wildly experimental stories, like "On the Menu Stains of Madness," by G. Scott Huggins, (which, by the way, I love and think you should read right now) don't work.
What does work?
Short stories. Really short stories, the shorter the better. Better yet, can you cut it down to just a paragraph or two? Gimme an eye-catching image and a quick emotional gut-punch. Readers these days are busy, and don't have the patience to scroll through anything longer on their cell phones. And no, they will not click-through on "read more" links.
The numbers don't lie. The longer the story, the fewer the number of people willing to read it online, and the longer we kept doing SHOWCASE, the fewer the number of readers we were drawing in for each new story we published. Eventually even the flash fiction failed to draw a significant number of readers.
So, it's time to admit that the parrot isn't merely pining for the fjords, he's dead, and it's time for us to move on to doing something else.
Such as?
That's where the idea of a podcast comes in. This is not alien territory to me. I do have a background in radio and television production, after all, not that I speak of it often. I did name the company Rampant Loon Media when we incorporated, with the idea that we would branch out into audio and video production eventually.
Okay. Eventually is now.
Hence this call for help. We have done some experimenting with the idea. We do have a Stupefying Stories YouTube channel, which we have yet to make use of. We do have the first full season of The Odin Chronicles recorded and ready to release as soon as we settle on a suitable distribution channel, as well as the complete run of Dawn of Time. To give you some idea of what we already have in-hand, you can preview the first episode of The Odin Chronicles on my personal YouTube channel.
This is just a taste; a sample. It's good for what it is, but it's not complete. We have the tools. We have the technology. But what we don't have is a show.
That's where you come in. What can we do with Stupefying Stories, the podcast, to turn it into an interesting show, that people come back to again and again? I have some ideas, but right now I'm more interested in hearing yours. What works in a podcast? What doesn't? What would you love to see done if it was your show?
The lines are open…
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