State of the Podcast 2020

Introduction

The Fantasy Inn formed as a group of friends sharing their love for fantasy books, and the podcast was started as a natural extension of that love. As both the blog and podcast have grown, so have our expenses. We launched a Patreon to help cover those costs in early 2020.

Now that people are investing some of their hard-earned cash in us, we felt that it was only fair to be completely transparent about our finances. And in the spirit of transparency, we are also providing a behind-the-scenes look at the podcast over the last year.

A few quick notes:

• Podcast statistics are shown from podcast launch (August 24, 2019) to July 31, 2020
• Income and expenses are shown from the first blog expense (December 2018) until July 31, 2020

Podcast Report

Statistics

In the last year, we’ve released a total of 43 episodes for a total of 35 hours of audio content. This includes interviews, discussions, panels, and book talks, as well as our initial trailer episode.

Technically we’re still a biweekly podcast, but with lockdown we’ve been putting out extra episodes while we have the time and energy available. We’ll likely switch back… eventually.

Episode Breakdown by Type

Past Guests

An updated list of all podcast guests can be found here.

Press Kit

If you’re interested in being a guest on the podcast or a publicist looking to schedule an author as a guest, check out our press kit for more information.

Audience Demographics

Note that the sample of audience members using Spotify is not necessarily representative of the total audience, and only around 9% of our downloads come from Spotify (see Spotify subscribers over time below).

This is the most in-depth data visible to us. We can’t see anything about specific users.

Podcast Growth

We’ve been incredibly fortunate to grow rapidly in our first year of podcasting. In our first year we’ve had more than 12 thousand downloads and seen a steady increase in new subscribers.

The colored sticks at the bottom show when each episode was published. Notable spikes occur in January when the podcast won a Stabby from r/Fantasy and in March when The Fantasy Inn and The Legendarium podcasts swapped episodes.

Note that Spotify accounts for roughly 9% of total episode downloads. Spotify has its own analytics which are far more detailed than Pinecast, our podcast hosting service.

Spikes occured in September 2019 when the podcast was publicly announced, in January 2020 when it won a Stabby award from r/Fantasy, and in March 2020 when it collaborated with The Legendarium podcast.

Financial Report

Income & Expenses (Dec. 2018 – Jul. 2020)

Below is our income and expenses to date. A detailed breakdown of each income and expense type is shown after the overall summary below.

To date, the Fantasy Inn’s total income is -$928.87 (USD). We have no intentions at this time to ever actually turn a profit, so if we do break even and have a positive income in the future, out plan is to a) reinvest that in the blog and podcast and b) host regular book giveaways on Twitter.

Income

Expenses

Our original goals on Patreon stated that we’d begin upgrading our microphones at $100/month. However, between our podcast recording software being upgraded for free (Zencastr removed the free limits for the duration of coronavirus) and out of a desire to have the best sound possible, we decided to upgrade early and hopefully recover those costs later.

We bought a WordPress.com plan back in 2018 to get our official thefantasyinn.com url. Podcast hosting through Pinecast only began costing in October 2019 since we did not need the audio file size limit upgraded until our first interview. Then in November 2019, we migrated from WordPress.com to WordPress.org and purchased a three-year hosting plan.

Patreon Update

We’ve published 23 Patron-exclusive posts in the last year, including:

• 13 early-access episodes
• 4 articles detailing our behind-the-scenes processes
• 3 themed lists of books and podcasts
• 1 extended episode
• 1 early audio clip from our upcoming bonus episode
• 1 poll for feedback on what Patreon content we should offer

Tier Rename

We renamed our $2/month tier to be based on Discword rather than Harry Potter. Regardless of what the written Harry Potter story itself may mean to us and our audience, we could not in good conscience reference it in our tiers.

Goals Update

Several of our goals no longer make sense given how much everything has changed throughout 2020. We will be updating these in the future once thing settle down.

Our end goal is to be able to provide transcripts for every episode we release. The cost of transcripts is around $50-$100 per episode (depending on length), since each hour of audio takes at least 4-5 times that long to transcribe. At our current rate of 4 episodes per month, that would require a significant increase in Patreon funding or some overly generous volunteers.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Lessons Learned

• Transcripts are far more time-intensive than we realized, hence why only 8 or so episodes are currently transcribed.
• Audio editing is tricky. We think we’re close to figuring out loudness standards and cleaning up echoey/crackling audio.
• Mouth noises are the actual worst, though you can eventually adapt to hearing your own voice.

Future Goals

• Prioritize BIPOC and LGBTQ+ interview guests. We’ve already taken steps to improve this but our guests are often booked months in advance. We’re stating this goal here to hold ourselves accountable.
• More panel episodes like our Worldbuilding and Book Cover Design episodes. With all the online conventions taking place, an occasional audio panel for people on the go seems like a good target.
• Episodes dealing with the business side of the industry (editing, marketing, agents, convention planning, etc.).
• More collaborative episodes with other creators.

Closing Comments

It’s been a rough year in general, but we’re happy we’ve been able to continue the podcast through it all… especially since so many of our guests have had in-person events cancelled this year.

Thank you everyone for the generous support you’ve offered every step of the way, and we hope to keep improving and offering even better content in the year to come.