Life after the season
Heist Report #2
A little more than a month after publishing Chapter Four :: “Thief”, what I clocked as a reasonable season finale, I have the steam again to return here to the shadows. I promised new episodes come Spring, which means there’s no more time to dilly dally. Work begins. It’s time to pull up the cowl.
Heist Reports are Thief production updates, for folks who are interested in looking under the hood.
These nine episodes of The Thief represent two years of work, most of which was learning: learning to produce audio, learning to work with a cast, learning to find and audience, how to ad-spend, and toward the end how to keep to a monthly cadence despite the jam-packed calendar of a parent and a more-than-full-time job.
In this time a major lesson was that publishing on the fly when episodes are ready is a terrible production strategy, and it would be much more sustainable and organized had I just produced everything first, before publishing.
The Thief was never really supposed to be organized into chapters or seasons, and those of you who have followed from the start may have noticed my experiments titling episodes to create bingeable clusters and starting points for new audiences. But I found a way to fabricate a season for the practical reason of creating space to change my process.
And just as I was cracking my knuckles and shaking the dust from the cloak in order to steal again into the night, it dawned on me that I am a very different producer today than I was two years ago. I haven’t been around too many blocks. My night is still young.
But I know a thing or two, and I think you might find it interesting.
Life after the first season has three parts: distilling lessons from the season prior in order to optimize for the next; promoting the whole first season now there’s something bingeable; producing the next.
I appreciate your company, and I hope you find the next Heist Report of interest.