6 Ways To Make Money With Stareable Enrich Even If Your Show is Over

Make money with your Stareable page!

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Stareable Enrich is officially live for all creators with a show on Stareable! To enable it on your own series, just log in and head to your Dashboard, where you’ll be greeted by this:

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Click “Tell me more!” and you’ll be on your way. Click here for a product walkthrough and some advice on setting up Enrich to work best for you.

I know what some of you are thinking, though: my show is over/on hiatus! I’m here to tell you that even if that’s true, you can still use Stareable Enrich to its fullest to start working towards a sustainable creative career. It’s also worth mentioning that web series have a nearly endless opportunity to attract new fans, because they aren’t tied to a particular air date and time. No web series is ever truly irrelevant, even a decade after its first episode is uploaded, so don’t sell yourself and your past hard work short.

1- Share Your Process

No web series was made in a day and without a million early drafts, planning documents, costume test images, production meeting agendas, and more. Fans love seeing that kind of stuff, and if you accompany a new document or screenshot or photo with some insight into your own creative process, that’s valuable even outside of the particular series it exists for.

Become an expert in your own creative process and share insights and secrets and challenges and successes, and offer it on a freemium basis with Enrich! Maybe every other post is available for free on your Stareable Updates, or every third one, to build your credibility but make people aware they can go deeper with a small monthly contribution. Or, release the first paragraph or just the media itself for free but go deep with insights (and maybe even offer advice to supporters who write in) behind your paywall.

Point is: the creative path is densely packed with documents and stories and advice, so mine it for all you can!

2- Share Nostalgia

Nostalgia sharing is the emotional sister of process sharing. While there are likely to be overlapping content between the two, nostalgia sharing can focus more on storytelling and the relationships you as the creator had with the series and the people who helped you make it.

Share behind the scenes trivia paired with screenshots you’ve shared hundreds of times, or release short bloopers or alternate takes that never made it to screen. Do a supercut of all the times your lead actor said “FUCK” or walk people through the inside joke that eventually became a central plot point. Be unabashedly in love with your work and your team, and share that love with fans who feel the same.

3- Share The Rest of the Adventure

Many web series end before their time, due to budget, waning cast/crew interest, creative differences, or life just getting in the way. Budget is why my web series, Brains, only has two seasons produced, despite there being 6 total seasons written. Instead of shelving those scripts, full of some of my best writing and favorite characters, I turned it into a tier. For $5 a month, fans of the original series get two new scripts, starting with season 3, episode 1, to continue the adventure. There are four seasons worth of character development, heartbreak, and massive zombie horde fight scenes that now people can continue to enjoy.

Even better, I also don’t have to do any work to deliver this reward- the scripts are already written. I just have to drop links into a locked Stareable Update twice a month for the next 20 months, a task which takes, at MOST, 5 minutes. That’s right, I have 20 months worth of content I can release for an hour a year’s worth of effort.

4- Share New Work Within The Universe

Maybe you also still have stories to tell within your web series’ universe, or for your web series’ characters. The precedent for creatives being unable to let go of past work has been set over and over again by Hollywood, with Netflix as one of the largest enablers. Why not take note? I’m certain I could come up with a handful of tweets or a short story or spin-off script that exists within the worlds of my old work. If you’ve truly moved on (how??) from your past work, think of it as an artistic exercise while acknowledging that for many fans, this is everything they’ve been hoping for.

5- Share New Work Within The Theme

Another option is, if you’re working on a new project that hits a lot of the same themes as your existing series on Stareable with the potential for Stareable Enrich now available (eyyy), make that your tier reward! If you’re known for comedies and are working on a new comedy series, let fans of your existing work get news of what’s next! It’ll still feel aligned without needing to strictly share a universe with your past work, and will more easily transition your audience from work to work.

5- Share New Work, Period

I will watch anything Mindy Kaling is a part of, whether it’s her self-titled TV series about a rom-com-loving OBGYN, a TV series about a guy who owns a Brooklyn gym and finds out he has a flamboyant gay teenage son, a movie about late-night shows, or even her Instagram feed where she shares recipes and fashion tips. Point being- I am a fan of Mindy Kaling’s, and I would not be mad if she set up Stareable Enrich tiers for The Mindy Project, a TV show that is not coming out with new episodes but that I loved dearly, and one of the rewards was to learn about what she’s working on now. If you intend to keep creating, sharing what’s next on a previous show makes total sense, and your fans will appreciate the heads up at there’s more to come from the brilliant mind of [insert filmmaker here.]

6- Enable Donations

If you really don’t want to set up tiers, really think about that, because the above ideas and all the ones in this article from last week are geared specifically towards making it as easy as possible for you to offer cool enriched experiences to friends, fans, and family alike while also starting to build a sustainable creative career for yourself. Key work: sustainable, in ways a one-time donation or campaign cannot possibly match. But if it’s just not in the cards for you, I understand.

That’s why Stareable Enrich also allows you to enable a one-time donation button. For tips on what to title your button and what to list as the suggested donation amount, head over to our best practices article.

Do you have an idea for how to use Stareable Enrich tiers on a show that’s over or on an extended hiatus? Let me know in the comments!

Bri Castellini is an award-winning filmmaker and the Community Director at Stareable, a hub for web series. She is also the host of Stareable’s ultimate web series podcast Forget The Box, available on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts!

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