We don’t make too many blog posts on here, so I figure this might be a good time to write down some thoughts and updates about the brand since it’s over three months old now (How???). I always like transparency from brands, as well as looks into creative processes, so maybe I’ll do something like this regularly.
Books and Booze Hiatus
First off, the big news right now is that we won’t be uploading Books and Booze episodes in October with the exception of a Halloween episode. If you don’t know already, I am leaving in October with family to vacation in Italy for a few weeks. Because of this, our normal scheduling for filming, editing, and uploading B&B was thrown off. We decided pretty early on that we didn’t want my trip to affect our uploading, so we started to figure out ways to start doubling up our filming of B&B. It was working okay at first, but we got burned out on it. Our plan was to start doubling up on weeks after we filmed all of our IT content, since that book was a monster in itself. It’s been about two weeks since then, but we underestimated how much time we actually spend on prepping, filming, and editing B&B, as well as how much time we had (especially since Ellie is now back in school). Because of this, we decided to just cancel our planned episodes for most of October, as much as it pains me to be skipping the perfect time to read horror.
To sort of go over our process for B&B, we do a lot of planning. We have books planned out weeks ahead in order to give us plenty of time to actually get the book and read it. Our goal is to film a B&B episode two weeks before it goes up on our channel, giving me plenty of time to edit the episode. About a week before filming, we have a meeting in which we discuss what we’re going to do for the episode, then plan out when during the week we can go pick up materials and ingredients needed. Between reading the book, planning, filming, and editing, we easily put in about 20 hours of work per episode. Now double this for the week, and that’s where we were at.
Doubling up our episodes for the week had a couple other problems besides just us burning out:
- B&B Episode Delays: The episodes we had scheduled for uploading this month got delayed. This happened mainly with IT and Murder on the Orient Express. This is completely my fault, and I apologize. I’m going to try to get back to our normal upload times of noon on Thursdays.
- Episode Quality Decreased: The episodes we ended up filming took a hit in quality. Some of the activities felt dull and we came away from the episodes unsure of if they were going to be fun to watch. One entire episode we filmed we both decided not to upload just because it felt so bad. Luckily this was one of our planned videos for October, so we don’t have to go and re-film it. Maybe some day in the future I’ll go back through the footage and see if any of it is kinda actually good.
As of right now, we have all of our September episodes filmed and in Editing Hell, and I think all of them are pretty good. We also are going to try and streamline B&B some more to get videos that are consistently fun to watch. One thing I’m very proud of is how much we experiment with our content. Since it’s first episode, the format of B&B has almost completely changed. We removed all spoiler-filled discussion to make the videos more accessible to anyone who wants to watch while focusing on the comedy aspect of the series. B&B feels a lot more “book-inspired” now, and while I don’t expect anyone to take us seriously as a book review show, it’s still fun to cover the book each episode. We are definitely trying to have serious review content as well, but we keep that separate, such as in Adapted or as a blog post on our website.
Speaking of how we experiment with our content, even though we won’t be uploading B&B in October, we will have some other videos that will go up in that month. The obvious one is our unboxing video for September. I would also like to try and record another Adapted if possible. Along with those, we have other show ideas we would like to test run, so we will probably have something new then as well. We both are always excited to make fun, fresh content for you, so we hope you give it a shot when you see it.
What’s Coming Up?
Now, everything I have talked about thus far has just really been about videos (primarily B&B), but we have no plans to keep all of our eggs in the YouTube basket. No matter what we’re doing, Ellie and I are pretty much always thinking about or working on stuff for The Paper Tavern. This obviously contributed to our burnout, so here’s a quick preview for some of the stuff we have been working on:
- Blog Posts: The thing you’re reading now! We want to start writing regular content for our website; we are starting out with book reviews, but our ideas our endless. The biggest issue right now is that it takes time away from other things, and blog posts are pretty low priority for us.
- Website: The thing you’re on now! I’m working on revamping aspects of our current site to help personalize it to our brand. I’m also working on adding functionality and new sections that can be utilized for things we have planned in the future. This is also pretty low priority for us right now since the website is technically functional and serves what we need it to do.
- Prep for our Next Readathon: It’s coming, and a lot of prep went into our last one. First off, we had to design the entire event, cutting back on a lot of things we wanted to do because we just didn’t have the time and resources for it. We had to get assets for it (by the way our team logos for the Summer 19 Readathon were made by my brother, Michael Charnecki, so huge thank you to him!), I had to make the website and tracker, and then we had to plan, film, and edit the announcement video for it. All of this stuff has to be done again for our next readathon, so it’s always on our to-do list.
- NaNoWriMo Content: We are working on planning out some videos and things for National Novel Writing Month, a writing-focused event that lasts all of November. I am not going to say much else about this, other than we are planning it.
- More Weird, Hopefully Funny, Videos: We love making videos, so we want to keep doing it for a long time. We hope that you enjoy our dumb asses enough to watch us do many different things. This is something else I don’t want to give away, so I’m going to be as vague as possible.
- EVEN MORE: There’s so much that I can’t talk about but am really excited for and hope we get to do.
Right now, our most limited resource is time. This stupid little brand that started out as us wanting to drink and talk about books has grown exponentially within our minds. We are so thankful for everyone who watches and supports us! Your support is invaluable to us! We hope our content inspires you to share it with any friends and family that you think might find it funny or interesting.
That’s about all I can think of to mention in this update. I hope someone found this interesting, because I think it’s something I would really like reading myself. Let me know either in a comment, tweet, or something what you thought! What was the most interesting thing I mentioned here, or what would you really like to see us do that I have not mentioned? Please let me know!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Chris is very tired