![]() "You have a group of people who have a passion for their role in this - whether they're writers or narrators - and they're trying to do their very best at what they're bringing to the show. "We're sort of like audio community theater," David said. So with the help of that small percentile that pays for the extra content, David puts all his energy into the show - it is, after all, his full-time job. I think it was a real turning point for me and the way the podcast gets produced." "I started to realize this is more than just someone reading words this is a person who's going to convey something and make it more authentic and more emotional. "That was a story that I kind of went from being just somebody who's reading words from a page to almost performing it a little bit, getting closer to voice acting instead of just voiceover," he said. It comes from the first season, and it's called "The Thing in the Fields." (Go listen to it!)įor David, though, one story he narrated really sticks out. One of note that managed to conjure up a nightmare for me was author Stan Studdens' "The Mummer Man," which is on episode four of season five. "I have to keep encouraging people to share the podcast and spread the word." "Almost 95 percent of our audience is just listening to the free show," David said. ![]() I think that's worth my 40 cents an hour for all the extra stuff I didn't get to hear with my free subscription. But of all the podcasts I listen to, this is the only one that doesn't interrupt one or more times to bring me a bunch of commercials. With the popularity of the show (it's grown five times larger in the last two years), David had hoped it would have taken a few months to get to the point where he could work on "Nosleep" full time and be completely autonomous.īut, "podcasts are viewed as free media," he said, and it actually took closer to a year until David was able to devote all his work time to the show.Īnd for those of us who are satisfied with an hour or so of stories each week, it remains free. "The goal was that I would be able to take part of that revenue and it would cover my costs and maybe allow me to do it full time." "I wanted to make sure the authors and the narrators both got some sort of compensation for what they're contributing to the show," he said. Now I've got even more catching up to do.īut, as David said, giving an audience a great product for free and then asking them to pay for it later doesn't always work well. With all the painting I do, I've caught up on four years worth of "Nosleep," so I recently purchased the pass for season five. In order to keep the program ad free, David decided to offer additional content for a cost of $19.99 per season, which averages out to about 40 cents per hour of content. (Mostly, though, it just helps keep me focused because I start getting too scared to look away from the painting.) There's something about creating art in an empty studio after dark while hearing the incredibly well-produced horror fiction of "Nosleep" that drives my creativity. I love to set up my canvas and paint while listening to this podcast. And it's produced commercial-free, so there aren't any interruptions to take you out of the world of horror. Of course, in addition to David, there are many others involved in the show. So while the idea for the show may not have been his, it was David who breathed life into it and made it into what it is today. David's enthusiasm for the project surpassed the rest of those involved, though. It all started about five years ago when a group of Redditors decided it'd be a good idea to bring the stories to life via podcast. I had the opportunity to speak with David Cummings, the man behind "The Nosleep Podcast," about his award-winning show (it grabbed the 2014 Parsec Award for Best Speculative Fiction Magazine or Anthology Podcast). (These people have issues, which is why their stories are so good.) "Nosleep" is a weekly show that consists of several narrated horror stories culled from the Reddit forum "Nosleep," a subreddit full of original content written by Reddit users. We can buy or rent terrifying films, we can read our favorite creepy stories, or we can download podcasts like "The Nosleep Podcast," which is what I do. ![]() ![]() But for those of us who love to be scared, what do we have to fill our lives during the 11 months that aren't October? Even with the sun (sometimes) shining, the flowers blooming and all the other telltale signs of spring and summer, there's still something this season doesn't offer: a good scare.Īs I've written about so many times before, I count "horror geek" among my many geek monikers. ![]()
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