How do you want your pulp served? Podcast? Video? Or good old fashioned verbiage? Pulp-master and welltoldtales.com proprietor, Kevin Colligan thinks you ought to be able to take your pick, and he’s making sure you can. Somehow between writing, directing, filmmaking, and webmastering Kevin found some time to answer some questions about Well Told Tales past, present, and future, in this four part (you read that right) interview.
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, and what sparked the creation of Well Told Tales?
I’ve been a writer for a long time. In college, I was convinced I’d be a novelist. At some point, that morphed into a desire to be a screenwriter-slash-movie director. And I’ve sort of vacillated between those two goals over the years.
I needed a day job, of course, so I started off as a newspaper reporter, then shifted to the newspaper’s Web site and got into New Media.
Since I was a writer who built Web sites — who knew the basics of digital audio editing from my film work — I was in a pretty good position to do something like Well Told Tales.
And then I somehow stumbled upon Steve Eley’s Escape Pod podcast. His stories tend to be a bit more hardcore sci-fi than my general tastes, but I thought, damn, that’s a cool idea — I oughta swipe it.
Not much later, in Spring 2007, Well Told Tales was born. And Steve was really great about giving me advice and helping to publicize the show.
As far as I know, Well Told Tales was the second paying digital audio market for short stories (or the third, if you count Steve’s horror cast Pseudopod separately from his sci-fi cast, Escape Pod.)
How did the name come about?
I dreamed up a bunch of names, and spend a lot of time typing them into GoDaddy to see what was available.
The site could have been StoryGod.com or Storypalooza.com. I also registered CoolTales.com, but that seemed a bit dated (Internet oldtimers may remember the CoolSiteoftheDay.com.)
I liked that Well Told Tales had a retro feel to it. And the name has a decent rhythm when said aloud. Plus, it was available.
Has Well Told Tales evolved from its original concept?
My original plan — or dream — was to eventually build Well Told Tales into a multi-platform content company. That’s why we option every short story we run on the podcast.
(Not to get too technical, but we buy a two-year exclusive window to purchase derivative rights on these stories — so we could create a TV show, film, etc. based on the story for a pre-arranged fee. It’s all spelled out in our submissions policy.)
There hasn’t been a ton of movement in that direction, but we’ve had some successes. We had a radio show for a little while in Burbank, Calif. on a small, independent station 92.5 FM The Why. We’re not on that station anymore, but we’ve got a template now that we’re shopping around to other radio outlets.
I’m also trying to devote more time to my filmmaking. It’s pretty low-budget — close to no-budget — stuff, but it’s a lot of fun and I hope people enjoy watching it.
I’m a huge fan of the old TV anthologies like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone,” so one day I would love to see a Well Told Tales television or online video series. Even with the slow decline of TV, I think a smart basic cable channel could gain a solid, loyal audience for a show like that — and given today’s digital technology, production costs are dropping enough to give it a good chance to be profitable.
The most obvious change, of course, is the relaunched WellToldTales.com Web site, which aims to be a social network for writers, filmmakers and podcasters.
Basically, we’ve opened the doors to anyone to publish their short fiction, audio stories or videos online. We’re also letting members write blog posts and reviews, and there’s all the community bits you’d expect like friends and private messaging.
I’m hoping that opens the door to other creative people who want to share their work online. (Of course, Well Told Tales doesn’t get any rights to that shared content — it remains strictly the property of the creator.)
Behind-the-scenes, the biggest change to the podcast is how it’s produced. Back in the old days, I would schlepp my laptop and microphone all over Los Angeles to find actors to read our stories. Now, our readers record remotely from around the country — and world, actually. Despite that change, we’ve been able to keep up the high-quality of the recordings, which I like to think has been one of our hallmarks.
One other thing is that I now use my real name — instead of the pen name Finn Colgan — for my intros and writing credit. When I started up the podcast, I worked at a relatively stodgy company, so figured it was best to stay undercover. But my pulp-fiction fetish is now out of the closet.
Where is Well Told Tales headed, what do you see in the future?
Well, we’re trying to get the community involved in the site a lot more now. Anyone can go to WellToldTales.com now and publish their own text story or short film or audio story. They can blog or write reviews as well.
So far, we’ve had a lot of writers join us and post their short text stories. A writers’ site named Storiesville.com went dark just as we relaunched, so we’ve become a second home to some of their refugees.
We’ve had a few short films go up as well. I’m still anxiously awaiting our first batch of community-brewed audio stories.
At the same time, we’ll continue to publish our original podcast. The community stuff won’t be in that feed — since that’s not really what our subscribers signed up for — but I may pick and choose some of the best of the community stuff to highlight and link to.
On the original content side, I’d love to get a series of short films going — my own little version of The Twilight Zone meets Alfred Hitchcock Presents — or maybe even a micro-budget feature film.
One small thing, too, is I’d love to see the site raise a bit more money through donations. Our budget for the short story audio podcast is about $1,500 per year, so if the majority of our subscribers sent us a buck a year, we’d be covered. We’ve had PayPal buttons on the site, which have brought in a couple of hundred bucks per year, but now I’m trying a new service called ChipIn, which shows our goal and how close we are to reaching it. I’m hoping this spurs more folks to send a donation.
(Note: I’m not including the cost of films or other hijinks in that budget. That’s just for the audio podcast. The site has a full breakdown if anyone is interested.)
Any interesting lessons learned since the early days?
Never do a full cast and sound effects production. It’s a TON of work. I tried it with “I Killed AwesomeMan” — which was one of my feature screenplays before I adapted it for audio — and I will long curse the day I came up with that bright idea.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the story and I’m happy with how it’s turning out. But it was way more work than I expected (hence all the AwesomeMan delays.)
If there are any AwesomeMan fans reading this — sorry for all the delays. I will finish the series before the end of summer. (I hope.)
That’s it for this week, but keep an eye on your RSS feeds, and your finger on the refresh button, because we’ll back next week with the second part where Kevin gives us some details on his “I Killed Awesomeman” audio project and his short film “Side Effects” and more.
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