New year, new-sletter
This is still the Foggy Outline newsletter, but we’re trying something new with it. Read on to find out what’s different and why.
Karen, Richard, and Matt are professional relations: business partners who are also family members. This issue, Karen edits her husband Richard interviewing their son Matt.
Richard: When did you first start publishing a newsletter?
Matt: I had to look this up! I first started in 2020 to coincide with a relaunch of Merely Roleplayers, mainly as a way of letting fans of the podcast know what was coming up. But of course I snuck in stuff about other things I was working on too.
Richard: Are you pleased with the response you've had over the years?
Matt: I'm pretty pleased! I haven't picked up thousands of subscribers, but the ones I have, I've hung onto for a long time, so hopefully that means I've been doing something right. And I've got some nice replies over the years too.
Richard: Is it time consuming to publish a newsletter every two weeks?
Matt: It’s been manageable, but we’re going back to monthly this year. We’ll still have all the information about all the things we’re doing, but in a more abbreviated form. It's all experimentation! We'll see how the changes go down.
Richard: Before you began publishing, did you do much research? Did you think about the pitfalls of publishing a regular newsletter?
Matt: I read a lot of other newsletters by writers and journalists and studios and things that I like, so I had a lot of thoughts floating around about what I liked and didn't. I wasn't thinking so much about the pitfalls – just about how to make something that people might want to subscribe to and read, and that was also achievable.
Richard: What is the purpose of the newsletter? What are you trying to achieve?
Matt: A newsletter is a way for an artist or a creator or a company creating things, to tell people who might like those things, about those things. Our readers (hello!) have given us their email addresses and agreed we can send them emails until they say stop. However, everyone’s busy, so we need to make our email newsletters stand out by making them interesting, useful, worth reading, worth sharing, worth telling other people about.
Richard: What have you learned from publishing a newsletter for 5 years?
Matt: A thing I think I'm still learning is that this is still a conversation, even if none of our readers ever writes back. (Some of you do! Point still stands.) One of the reasons for the newsletter is to let people know what we’re doing, but it needs to be in a way that engages the reader. We’ve had good feedback about the links to things around the web that we're reading and enjoying, so I was thinking about how to include more of that kind of thing, while still letting people know about our current projects.
Richard: You've alluded to the change of format for the newsletters. What's prompted this?
Matt: I change up the format roughly once a year to keep things interesting for me (and now you too), and hopefully for the readers as well. Each change is also a chance to bring new people in.
Richard: What do you think makes the Foggy Outline newsletter stand out?
Matt: Still figuring this one out, honestly. I'm hoping this iteration is more entertaining, while still telling people about our work. It's a bit unusual to go into business with your parents when that business isn't something like a shop or a trade. I'm not aware of anyone else out there showing people what that's like.
Richard: What are your thoughts about paid newsletters?
Matt: I think paid newsletters are a good idea; I'm all for any model that lets people get paid to write. For this newsletter? I can confidently say we'll never charge for it, because it's not the thing we're here to make. We're here to make courses, and other educational material, and dramas, and stories, and games. This newsletter is one of the ways we let people know about those things.
Though – having said ALL that – if you do feel like this newsletter was worth something, you can always buy us a cuppa to enjoy while we're working on the next one! And if you do, you get to read the bigger, longer, and uncut version of this interview!
🎉 We reached 10,000 students on Udemy in December.
🧳 Richard published a blog, Is climate breakdown causing mass migration?
🛫 Matt published No such thing as a clean break – chapter 17 of A Net Too Wide To Break His Fall (which now lives on our website instead of only in the archives of this newsletter!)
🌳 Friends of the South Downs shared Countryside Pollution, our animation for Friends of the Dales about plastic tree guards, in their regular email to members.
🎲 Merely Roleplayers, the podcast where theatrical people play roleplaying games, is back with Her Many Masks: a perilous and emotional journey in 3 acts. We’re playing For The Queen, a storytelling card game by Alex Roberts.
🎥 Does anyone know anything about the Inno Vision Film Festival? They made I Need A Miracle an official selection, then went radio silent. The festival was meant to happen in November, then December. Their Film Freeway page has disappeared and they’re not responding to email. Did this festival ever exist? Did we get scammed?
📖 There Is No Safe Word: Neil Gaiman’s alleged history of sexual assault has been gradually coming to light, and Lila Shapiro sets out the whole story in this article for Vulture. Only read if you’re in a robust frame of mind. Gaiman’s books were formative for me (Matt); all the time he was writing them, he was doing this. I feel a fool.