January 2023 Metacast

Presenters: Marguerite Kenner and Alasdair Stuart

Hey folks, welcome to an Escape Artists metacast. I’m Marguerite Kenner. And I’m Alasdair Stuart.

For those of you who have never heard a metacast before, think of this like a mini State of the Union address, a way for us to update you about what’s been happening at EA. The big thing is our news that EA now stands for the Escape Artists Foundation — we’ve become a nonprofit. We want to share with you how we got there, answer some questions, and explain what it means for you.

But first, a road map for this metacast. After you hear from us, you’ll hear from two others. 

First up will be Laura Pearlman, the editor of CatsCast, the fifth member of the Escape Artists podcast family that, like its namesake, kind of just … followed us home one day. After Laura, the PodCastle team will tell you about their exciting plans for celebrating their 15th anniversary.

Wow — 15 years already? *sniff* They all grow up so fast.

I know, right — Escape Pod turns 18 this year. Twenty years will be here before we know it.

Alright, so let’s dive in. 

Alasdair and I became the publishers of Escape Artists in 2014. EA had already been around, and exclusively audience supported for eight years at that point, but we decided to tackle the challenge kind of the way a start-up works (but without the word disruption, we promise). We made goals and plans, we opened cabinets and put out fires, we knew things would get terrifying three years in. Everything we planned for happened, alongside so very many things we didn’t.

Towards the end of those five years we started thinking about what the next five years should look like. And folks, we don’t have to tell you this — publishing short fiction is precarious. We are so fortunate to have such a committed group of supporters, and that group has grown as EA has. Their support — your support — let us raise our pay to writers in 2019, start paying our associate editors later that same year, and then in 2020 we expanded again behind the scenes this time to give every story we publish its best chance at finding its audience.

But the support EA receives has grown at about the same rate, and we still have a supporter base of roughly 2% our estimated audience. Most years EA breaks even, and that’s enough. But it hasn’t been ‘most years’ since 2019, for all of us, and EA’s no exception. We needed to do something.

So we shifted focus — we wanted to do something that would give EA its best chance of long term success without compromising our values. Drop pay rates? Not on the table. Abandon our commitment to pay every single member of our crew, from editors to community moderators? Not going to happen. We’d already given up on the idea of making money — in the arts? During COVID? In THIS economy? 

We started exploring the idea of becoming a nonprofit. Which it turns out, is a slow and expensive process. It took us several years, barrels of midnight oil, and the help of a very generous supporter to finally get there.

But we made it! And on January 1st, 2023, we became the Escape Artists Foundation.

So let’s talk about what that means for you.

As someone who reads or listens to our weekly podcasts, it means… not a lot. You’ll hear show hosts changing up their language a bit in their introduction or outros, but that’s about it.

If you’re an author, a narrator, or an artist who works with EA, again, very little has changed. We’re still a publisher. Our contracts will be updated with our new name and a few other small polishes, but again, pretty much business as usual.

Where things get the most exciting is for our existing supporters, and for those of you who might have been on the fence about supporting us in the past.