Photo by Emily Ibarra

Podcasts saved the general public from my road rage; To help make the hellishly slow crawl across the 10 freeway more bearable during my commutes this week, I’ve been catching up on podcasts! I came across this really great interview that Felicia Day did last year on KCRW’s The Breakdown. She talks about The Guild, Dr. Horrible, and Dragon Age: Redemption. I’ve pulled my favorite quotes below (emphasis mine).

On the work that goes into promoting a web series:

Whenever you upload [an episode] you’re competing with a piece of video against a blog entry for people’s attention. I thought […] if I were a viewer who would think this was funny, where would I go? And I just listed places that I thought those people would be hanging out on the Internet and I went there. And I did postings, and I did postings, and I did postings!

People underestimate the amount of work that it took and continues to take to get web content any visibility whatsoever, especially on no budget. I was online for 12 hours a day for days and months and years actually, just spreading the word about my show.

I like to say I was a zealot. I continue to be a zealot about my show… I would leave bookmarks for the Guild on toilets… every single public toilet, restaurants, I gave some to my dentist! She put them out on her side table… you know, anywhere and everywhere I could tell somebody about my show, I would do it.

On why quarterlife might have failed:

It was definitely before it’s time. I think that it didn’t hit as authentically as possible. I think actually the high production values hurt it because it simulated TV in too big a way. I’ve always come from the point of view that if you try to make TV on the web, you’re going to fail, because you’re not going to have enough money to make it look like a TV show. It’ll just look cheap.

On the value of web series as a medium:

You could do anything you want to entertain the audience, and that’s what you should make for the web: tell stories that people don’t see, feature characters that they’re not used to, and talk to a niche, and you’ll find an audience much faster than if you make a generic sitcom for the web.

This isn’t old advice either… I feel like this is stuff we tell producers all the time at Blip. Overnight sensations in web series are rare; that’s called a viral video and it’s not a sustainable model.

If you’re a web series producer, I highly recommend you check out her interview; she has so much insight from all of her experiences in our industry. Definitely worth 20 minutes of your time.