Don’t Just Read the Headline. And Oh, By the Way… We’re Back
Yes, I know. I told you we were done.
I even had this very long missive thanking everyone for playing, thanking our staff, and the people we interviewed, and then I said we were going dark. And I meant every word of it. At the time I wrote it, I had no intention of coming back. Because really, I was burned out and frustrated because a majority of our audience were bots, and there were things going on behind the scenes that just sucked the fun out of things. You’ve dealt with fun-suckers, right?
And then…
A few months ago, Planet Comicon announced their 2019 dates and reminded everyone that it would be their 20th anniversary show. That tickled a little piece of my brain. I began to think about anniversaries and the fact that our tenth would have been in March 2019, right as Planet Comicon was having their anniversary. And as fate would have it, that prompted one niggling little question at the back of my brain: what would SciFi4Me look like if it came back?
The dice had been rolled. I think from the moment the words formed in my head, I was doomed.
What followed was a few months of frenzied activity, and a lot of notes — thirty pages worth! — about process, marketing, staff, social media strategy, and collaborations. That was a key part of this. In order to grow our audience, we needed to partner with other creators who had audiences of their own, audiences we could share. Collaborations had never been a key element for us in the past, mainly because I had my doubts that we would attract anyone to play in our sandbox. Needless to say, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at who’s agreed to stop by for a visit:
Fangoria. The horror magazine of record for a couple of generations of us, now resurrected for new generations to enjoy. The guys at Traveling the Vortex, who have partnered with us on the new TARDIS Sauce to talk about Doctor Who. Several film critics, filmmakers, industry insiders, all coming over to visit the Trailer Park. And of course, Tom Kane, the voice of Yoda, is still with us.
It’s been a bit of a frenzy here, mainly because the original plan was for us to come back in some small way in March. But then SuperheroStuff.com came back with a discount code, and I felt we needed to do something in January rather than make them wait, so … we lost two months of planning and prep because you don’t want to make an advertiser wait, right? And instead of starting small, we had to go an launch (or relaunch) six different shows all in the same month!
Bringing everything back has been a crazy ride so far. A lot of late nights designing new graphics, a new logo, new title sequences for the shows, getting everything together for press releases and promotional spots, making sure we have the right settings for the live streamcasts (yes, we do, finally), and all sorts of random “Oh, I need to add that to the list” items like weather graphics and sponsor logos and lists and lists.
Sleep? What’s that?
Now, we still have the challenge of getting people to actually read our articles and watch our videos and listen to our podcasts, and we’ll be working on that. But it occurs to me that we have a number of people following us on our social media and on WordPress, and it also occurs to me that the number of people actually reading our articles doesn’t quite match up to the number of people on those first two lists. So what do we do to get you to read more than the headline?
Now, it does look like our videos over on SciFi4Me TV are getting more interaction — more thumbs up and such. More comments and feedback are always welcome.
But with regard to the articles we post here, I do ask just one little thing: don’t just read the headline. Click the link. Read the article. Share it with your friends. Tell us what you think. Let’s have a discussion about the news. Let’s have that back-and-forth if you don’t agree with an opinion from one of the staff.
We are genuinely glad you’re here, and we appreciate the opportunity to be doing this again. Now we just need to be sure real people are seeing our work. So let us know. Please and thank you.
Thank you for being here for ten years. We’re looking forward to doing so much more for the next ten.
