Why donations are important
Every story here is free, and that is not going to change. But free costs something to make, and it seems fair to tell you who is paying for it and why we are asking you to help.
Who makes this
Two people: Dora and Nicolas. Dora writes the original mysteries, the ones with our own detectives in them. Nicolas writes the Captain Hastings and Anne Foster stories, and Pip, and puts together The Midnight Archive, which is the classic fiction: Chesterton, Orczy, Freeman, Bramah, the ones nobody records any more.
Then there is everything that is not writing. Turning a manuscript into an hour of listenable audio, the artwork, the captions, the uploading to five different places, and this website. A story a night, seven nights a week. It is not a hobby that got out of hand. It is what we do all day, and it is what we live on.
What happened with the platforms
The obvious way to fund something like this is advertising, and advertising is the part we cannot rely on.
Our YouTube channel was demonetised. Twenty-three thousand people follow it, the stories are original work, and for months it earned nothing at all. We were not told what was wrong. We applied again in the middle of June and heard nothing back for weeks.
Three weeks ago it came back. We were not told why it returned either.
That is the part worth explaining, and it is not a complaint. Platforms owe nobody a living, and they change their rules for reasons that have nothing to do with any one channel. But we never found out why the money stopped, or why it started again, and neither decision was ours to make or to appeal. It could go the other way next month and we would find out the same way we did last time: by looking.
One of you spotted it before we had said a word, and sent a small donation with this attached: “It’s a shame YT doesn’t see the quality of these stories.” We had not mentioned it anywhere.
Why giving here is different
When you support the stories directly, the money comes from you to us. No algorithm sits in between deciding whether this month counts. Nobody can switch it off because a policy changed in a meeting we were not in.
That is the whole of it. Patreon and this website are the two ways we have found to make this work stand on its own, and this website is the one we actually control.
What it pays for
The writing, first, because that is the slow part and it is somebody’s working week. Then the production of each episode, the software that makes the audio, the artwork, and the hosting that carries several hundred hours of it to wherever you are listening from.
Most listeners who give, give five dollars a month. That is genuinely the size of the thing. Enough of those and the calculation changes completely.
What does not change
Every story stays free. Giving unlocks nothing, because nothing is locked, and there is no version of this where the good ones go behind a wall. There is no account to make and no password to remember, and that is deliberate.
If you never give a penny and listen every night for years, that is a perfectly good outcome and you are welcome here. The stories are written to be listened to. That part was never conditional.