Well, I said on Twitter that I was curious about what fan response to episode 4 was going to be, and it is definitely mixed. Some people really enjoyed it. Some people really didn’t.

Stepping out from behind the curtain for a bit here, there’s a reason why we’ve always described Welcome to Sanditon as a summer bridge series, and not a full on sequel or follow up to Lizzie Bennet. As announced, our next big novel adaptation will premiere later this year, but we didn’t want to just let our world go dark while we were in pre-production.

So we took Welcome to Sanditon as an opportunity to try out something new.

We know that changing up our format isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste, and not everything we try is going to be a raging success. But if we didn’t try new things, we wouldn’t have made TheLBD in the first place.

For those wondering, the theory behind an episode like #4 is that it lets people who aren’t actively involved in RP keep in touch with events outside of the “main” stories that are covered in Gigi’s weekly updates to her brother. Even though the show actively fosters interaction, we realize not everyone is an RPer, and we wanted a way for lurkers to see what other fans were creating as part of the “lean back” experience.

I mean, come on, we’d hate for casual fans to miss out on Jawsica the shark just because they don’t track 500+ twitter accounts. :)

If the episode numbering scheme has people confused, we’re honestly sorry about that. It was never our intention to mislead anyone about a video or to create false expectations based on the fact that Lizzie posted two videos a week as a baseline.

(We all knew what we were planning to do, so obviously it would be clear to everyone else in the world, right? *hindsight headdesk*)

The team actually discussed using separate numbering schemes for different episodes, but the alternative to sequential numbering was to give every video in a different format a different number. And that just felt like it would be even *more* confusing to try to figure out how they all fit together. Especially since—unlike, say Lydia’s videos on LBD—they’d all be on the same channel. Maybe that was the wrong call, but it seemed like the best one at the time, and I still stand by it. Maybe going forward we’ll experiment with other ways to clue folks in to alternative format episodes, but for now, look for Gigi’s update episodes on Mondays, and other video content on Thursdays.

We’re in new waters here, and we are listening to your feedback. Welcome to Sanditon is a big change in gears from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. That was a deliberate choice, but we recognize that it can make for a rocky transition. Thanks for hanging in there with us. :)