i keep seeing people who are surprised that there is a new season of Alice Isn't Dead, and other than these occasional notes of surprise i see very little mention of it at all.
the new season has been out since mid-April and we are already halfway through it. i know the WTNV team has been posting about it on their social channels for months leading up to it. i dont think we are doing anything differently, promotion-wise, than we did with the first three seasons which seemed to find their audience much more quickly.
personally i find it rather frustating given the amount of work we put into this show, but im not really sure what to do about it. i know part of it is down to the fact that audiofiction is a far more competitive field than it used to be, and there's also so much noise and chaos in the world these days that its hard to find anything, and so many terrible problems that fiction feels less important.
these are obviously not all issues that i or anyone else on the team can solve but i am still curious if anyone has thoughts about why it seems to much harder to get the word out now
from what i've gathered from a lot of different responses to this post, here's my general theory:
1.) a mild oversaturation problem in the audio drama space. back in the day, and by that i mean the early 2010's, night vale/night vale presents projects were a dime a dozen and made people aware that podcasts could even be used as vehicles for storytelling. nowadays, there's SO MUCH stuff coming out on a monthly, and, dare i say, weekly basis at this point that getting lost in the shuffle of new content is inevitable
2.) alice isn't dead came out about a decade ago, around the same time as night vale's peak in popularity, so people losing track of a sequel being in production is mildly understandable
3.) a harsh truth is that the general fascination of the audio drama space has almost always been about white men with either heavily implied or canon homoerotic relationships with other white men. wlw, especially if they're woc, are treated as a divisive niche in the long run and just don't attract the tumblr hordes always looking for their new white boy of the week
4.) social media has changed. a lot. i blame all of this on the twitter takeover that used to be one of the best places to advertise audio drama back in the day (i would know, i was there) but ever since the change in ownership, people had to gravitate more to different platforms and rebuild their following from scratch on websites that aren't quite suited for promoting shows (that's not to say you can't build a substantial following, of course. it's always possible.)
and...i thought i'd have a fifth one, but i can't come up with anything. i might be right, i might be wrong, these are mostly cooked up on my observations or own opinions so take it with a grain of salt
