How exciting – we’ve reached the end of Series 1. What a great achievement (I blow on my nails and buff them against my zipped top).
We’re thrilled that the ten writers we’ve featured have enjoyed being our guests, downloads of episodes have surpassed 1,200 since we launched in October and the feedback from listeners has been overwhelmingly positive – enjoying the conversations and recognising the value of the podcast. As well as listeners in the UK we’ve got listeners in the USA, Europe, Canada, the Caribbean and China.
Pat and I had fun doing a special episode to wrap-up Series 1. We chatted about getting the funding for Series 1, the technical challenges we faced in starting the podcast during the pandemic, how our theme music was serendipitous – it’s called Chilllin’ in the West Indies, and what were some of our most memorable, moving, entertaining and inspiring moments from the series. Listen to the episode to find out which moments we chose. We’d love to hear what your favourite moments were. Get in touch with us via social media.
We’re thankful to Arts Council England (ACE) for funding Series 1, but now comes the challenge of fundraising for Series 2.
We’ve set up a crowd funding campaign on GoFundMe to raise £7k and will be getting in touch with individual donors and organisations that we think will be interested in supporting our work and we’ll also be applying to ACE again.
Times are tough right now with the cost of living crisis. Rising inflation is challenging for many people so we’ll be grateful for any donation, however small or large.
We’re used to reporting back to funders like ACE on how we’ve spent the grant that they’ve awarded us so for the donations that we’ll receive from the crowdfunding campaign, we’ll publish in a future blog how we’ve the donations have been used e.g. on the production process (research and prep, recording and editing); paying contributors (we always pay the writers a fee); to readers (we pay actors to read extracts from the writer’s work); marketing and PR (promoting each episode).
We’ve already got nine writers lined-up for Series 2 and will start recording again in early Spring – I can’t wait.
As well as fundraising to bring our listeners Series 2 we’re still keen for as many people to listen to the episodes in Series 1. So if you enjoy the podcast recommend it to friends and family and tell us what you like about the series on our socials or get in touch. If you have a favourite writer you’d like us to interview, let us know info[a]theamplifyproject.c.uk.
And as a lovely end to Series 1, last week Pat and I were guests on the Love your Library podcast. They were keen to speak to us and we were thrilled to find out that we were the first organisation that they’d spoken to as they’ve been exclusively interviewing authors. The interview will come out later this month and we’ll let you know on our socials when it’s released.
Pauline Walker