Content Bible 2026–27

The year at a glance

Q3 2026

The runway. August and September. Build the habit before the release needs it. Nine weeks of pre-release for County Line: lunch-break writing clips from the print shop, Tin Lantern residency footage, lyric fragments over caliche-dust visuals. Warm up the 640-person mailing list.

Q4 2026

The drop and the anniversary. October through December. County Line lands October 9. Yard Sale Gospel turns one in November and gets a proper birthday. December announces the first regional tour: the Texas triangle plus New Mexico. Three real moments, spaced so one person can carry them.

H1 2027

The road. January through June. Night Shift Hymn opens the year, the Long Road Home Tour runs late February into March, and Heat Shimmer drops with a tank full of tour footage behind it. The road feeds the content and the content fills the rooms.

Release timeline

Operating principles

The hour a day rule

Wren has a day job at a print shop and this plan respects it. The content budget is one hour on weekdays, one afternoon a month. Anything the plan asks for that doesn't fit inside that box gets cut from the plan, not from Wren's sleep.

The constraint is the charm

A 400-dollar single, a phone on a tripod, a truck with a tape deck. Don't hide the seams; they're the story. Nobody roots for an artist pretending to have a label. Plenty of people root for one writing verses on the paper cutter at lunch.

Batch on Sundays

One capture afternoon a month produces three to four weeks of posts. Kitchen demos, dashboard harmonies, caliche-road drives at golden hour, postcard stills. Weekdays are for posting what already exists, not for making new things at 11pm.

The list comes first

640 mailing-list subscribers beat any algorithm. Every campaign moment reaches the list before it reaches a platform. Social media is the front porch; the list is the kitchen table. Grow it toward 1,000 by year's end, one honest letter a month.

Phase strategy

Q3 2026: runway

August – September 2026

Mission

Build a posting habit that survives a 40-hour work week, and spend nine weeks making County Line feel inevitable before it exists. Nothing in this phase requires money. It requires a phone, the print shop at lunch, the Tin Lantern on residency nights, and the discipline to post three times a week whether or not anyone claps.

Objectives

• First capture Sunday by August 9: bank four weeks of posts before the runway starts in earnest
• Establish the three core formats: Lunch Break Verse, Caliche Reel, Tin Lantern Clip
• Tease County Line in fragments: one line of lyric at a time, never the chorus
• August and September mailing-list letters, each with one story and one ask (pre-save in September)
• Film both residency nights at the Tin Lantern; bank one full-song take from each
• Baseline the numbers so the campaign can be judged honestly: 8,400 monthly listeners, 1,900 Instagram followers, 640 on the list

Posting cadence, Q3 2026

Key milestones

Q4 2026: release and anniversary

October – December 2026

Mission

Land County Line, throw Yard Sale Gospel a first birthday, and announce the tour. Three moments, one per month, each sized so a person with a day job can do it well instead of doing all three badly at once. October is loud, November is warm, December is a promise.

Objectives

• County Line release week: every platform fires, the list hears it first, the Tin Lantern hosts the release show
• Sustain County Line for four weeks: live takes, the 400-dollar budget breakdown post, harmony breakdowns
• Yard Sale Gospel anniversary: live EP take from the residency, an actual yard sale pop-up show, a letter about year one
• Confirm 11 tour dates and rooms by late November; announce December 4, list first
• Grow the list from 640 toward the 1,000 year-end target on the strength of the release and the anniversary
• One 60-dollar boost experiment on the best-performing County Line reel; measure, don't assume

Key milestones

H1 2027: tour

January – June 2027

Mission

Take the songs to the rooms. Night Shift Hymn opens the year with a six-week runway, the tour runs late February into March, and Heat Shimmer lands while the road stories are still fresh. The tour itself is the content engine for the whole half: 11 nights, each producing a clip, a photo set, and a story. When it ends, the plan has a year of proof and the next EP has a waiting audience.

Objectives

• Night Shift Hymn out January 15 with the same runway playbook, compressed to six weeks
• Tour capture protocol: one song filmed per night, one postcard carousel per town, door and merch tallies logged
• Nightly story cadence on the road; the list gets a mid-tour letter from a gas station somewhere outside Las Cruces
• Heat Shimmer out March 26, campaign built almost entirely from tour footage
• April: rest, on purpose. The plan schedules the off month so it actually happens
• May and June: tour retrospective, EP #3 writing clips begin, list at 1,000 or an honest post about why not

Key milestones

Campaign blueprints

Each campaign follows a 3-phase arc: runway, release week, sustain. The arcs are sized for one person with a day job. Specific captions and shot lists get written per campaign as each one approaches; the blueprints below are the load-bearing structure.

County Line

Oct 9, 2026

The flagship. A 400-dollar single with a nine-week runway, which is longer than most label singles get. The extra time is the whole strategy: when the budget is small the calendar is the budget. By release day the audience should know the Ranger, the print shop, and one line of the chorus by heart.

Campaign arc

Key deliverables

• One full-song live take from the Tin Lantern (Marisol's board audio synced to phone video)
• Announcement stills shot on the capture Sunday: caliche road, folding chair, golden hour
• 6–8 Reels across the runway (verses, fragments, drives)
• 8–10 TikToks (rougher cuts of the same, plus print shop process)
• Bandcamp release with liner notes in Wren's voice
• Two mailing-list letters plus the release-morning letter
• The budget post: 400 dollars, line by line, no flinching

Yard Sale Gospel anniversary

Nov 14, 2026

An anniversary is a release that costs nothing. The 6-song EP gets a birthday: one live take from the residency, one letter about what year one taught, and an actual yard sale in the front yard with a 20-minute set from a folding chair. Neighbors welcome. Merch table is a card table.

Deliverables

• Live EP highlight take from the November residency night, up on YouTube
• The yard sale pop-up: filmed simply, one camera, the event is the content
• Risograph anniversary posters from the print shop, sold for the cost of coffee
• A letter to the list: what the EP earned, what it cost, why it was worth it
• A carousel of year-one artifacts: setlists, door tallies, the pawn-shop parlor guitar

The Long Road Home Tour announce

Dec 4, 2026

Eleven dates, the Texas triangle plus New Mexico, late February into March. The announce is a campaign of its own: the list hears it December 2, the public December 4. The poster is a risograph print. The reel is a map, a truck, and a list of towns. Tickets move on trust built all year.

Deliverables

• List-first announce letter with a presale word for each room that offers one
• Dates reel: route drawn on a paper map taped to the Ranger dashboard
• Risograph tour poster, numbered, sold at the December residency night
• One post per town in the weeks following: why that room, what to expect

Night Shift Hymn

Jan 15, 2027

Single #2, written on closing shifts. Same playbook as County Line with the runway compressed to six weeks, because now the formats exist and the audience knows the world. Stacked pew harmonies front and center. The release show is the January residency night, ten days before tour rehearsals begin.

Changes from County Line

• Runway shortens: six weeks, leaning on proven formats instead of introducing them
• Whatever pulled hardest in October gets doubled; whatever sat there gets cut
• Pre-save ask moves earlier, week two instead of week seven
• Tour dates ride along in every caption footer

The Long Road Home Tour

Feb 18 – Mar 7

The tour is a three-week capture day. The nightly protocol is deliberately small so it survives night six: one song filmed from the board or the back row, one postcard carousel per town, door and merch tallies in the notebook. Everything else is gravy. The mid-tour letter gets written wherever the coffee is worst.

Heat Shimmer

Mar 26, 2027

Single #3, three weeks after the last date. The campaign is already shot: eleven towns of footage, a truck full of stories, a chorus people heard live before they could stream it. This is the release that closes the loop and points at EP #3.

The Tin Lantern residency

Monthly · 2nd Thursdays

Not a release, but the spine of the whole plan. One night a month at the East Austin listening room: a guaranteed stage, a guaranteed live take, a guaranteed 60-cap room with a typical draw of 45 people who chose to be there. Every campaign above borrows footage, audio, or an audience from this room.

Monthly content calendar

Each month runs on one capture Sunday, one residency night, one Tailgate Session, and a queue of scheduled posts. Weekdays are for posting and replying, not producing.

August 2026

Runway opens + habit building

The foundation month. Capture Sunday #1 banks the first month of posts; the residency night banks the first live take; the month's Tailgate Session films off the tailgate at last light. County Line starts leaking out in fragments after the 20th. Nothing here costs money.

Week 1 (Aug 3–9): build

Capture Sunday #1, Aug 9. Three hours, four setups: kitchen table demos (two songs), dashboard harmony run in the Ranger, caliche-road drive at golden hour for reel backgrounds, postcard stills of the parlor guitar and the folding chairs. Enough raw material for four weeks.

Gear: iPhone 13, 20-dollar tripod, clip-on lav, dash mount, the Ranger, one good hour of light

Also in week one: set up the free scheduling queue, one folder per format in cloud storage, captions drafted in the notes app on the bus.

Weeks 2–4 (Aug 10–30): weekly rhythm

This shape repeats all year. Campaign weeks add volume on top; they never replace the base rhythm.

September 2026

County Line final approach

The runway steepens. Capture Sunday #2 shoots the announcement stills and the pew harmonies. County Line gets played live for the first time at the September residency, on camera. Pre-save opens the 18th.

Key events

• Sep 6: Capture Sunday #2. Announcement stills (caliche road, folding chair, golden hour), pew harmony split takes, October stockpile
• Sep 10: Tin Lantern residency. County Line debuts live; the room reaction becomes the announcement reel
• Sep 18: pre-save live, cover art revealed, letter to the list with the full story of the song
• Sep 21–30: fragment posts escalate. The chorus line finally posts in week four
• Sep 30: runway review with WMP. Release-week queue locked and scheduled
• The month's Tailgate Session: one song, one take, off the tailgate at last light

October 2026

County Line release

The loudest month of the plan, which for a solo act with a day job means five posts a week instead of three, and one very good party at the Tin Lantern.

Week 1: release week

Rest of month

• Oct 11: Capture Sunday #3, November stockpile plus anniversary prep
• Oct 16: the budget post. 400 dollars, line by line
• Oct 19–31: sustain cadence, harmony breakdown clip, one 60-dollar boost test on the top reel
• The month's Tailgate Session posts; release week doesn't pause the lane

November 2026

Yard Sale Gospel turns one

Key events

• Nov 1: Capture Sunday #4. Anniversary artifacts carousel, risograph poster run at the shop
• Nov 12: Tin Lantern residency. Yard Sale Gospel played front to back; Marisol records the whole set
• Nov 14: anniversary day. Live take out, front-yard yard sale pop-up show, letter to the list with year-one numbers
• Nov 21–30: tour routing finalized behind the scenes; December queue scheduled early because December is busy
• The month's Tailgate Session posts, same as every month

December 2026

Tour announce + year end

Key events

• Dec 2: tour announce letter to the list, two days before the public
• Dec 4: public announce. Map reel, risograph poster, ticket links
• Dec 10: Tin Lantern residency; numbered tour posters sold at the merch table
• Dec 14–18: one post per tour town begins, spread into January
• Dec 19: year-end letter. Honest numbers, honest thanks
• Dec 20–31: queue runs on banked content. Wren goes to Lubbock for the holidays and posts nothing new, on purpose
• The month's Tailgate Session posts before the queue coasts

January 2027

Night Shift Hymn release

Key events

• Jan 3: Capture Sunday #5. Night shift visuals: the shop after close, streetlight through the front window
• Jan 15: Night Shift Hymn out. Same release-day sequence as County Line, list first
• Jan 14: release show at the residency night, one day before the drop; the room hears it first, like always
• Jan 18–31: sustain plus tour drumbeat; every caption carries the dates
• The month's Tailgate Session posts; the lane holds through the release

February – March 2027

The Long Road Home Tour + Heat Shimmer

Key events

• Feb 7: tour prep capture Sunday. The Ranger loaded, merch counted, route map taped to the dash
• Feb 18 – Mar 7: eleven dates. Nightly protocol: one filmed song, one town carousel, tallies in the notebook, stories from the road
• Feb 27: mid-tour letter, written in the truck
• Mar 7: final night in Austin, filmed properly with two phones and the board
• Mar 26: Heat Shimmer out, campaign cut from tour footage while the road is still in the mirrors
• Tailgate Sessions hold on the road: one in February, one in March, filmed wherever the last light is good
• April: scheduled rest. The queue coasts on banked posts and nobody apologizes for it

Roles

There's no team. There's Wren, a plan, and a short list of people who owe or trade favors. The roles below exist so the work has owners, not so anyone gets a title. Posting is scheduled and automated; nobody posts live at midnight.

Wren Hollis

Artist

Writes the songs, sings the harmonies, holds the phone. Every caption and letter is in Wren's own voice: plainspoken, dry, concrete. Wren owns anything the audience will read or hear, because a hired voice would be spotted from the county line. The day job is protected; the plan bends around it, never the reverse.

Owns

• All on-camera presence and all performance
• Captions, liner notes, and every mailing-list letter
• Capture Sundays: setup, performance, teardown
• Community replies, 20 minutes a day, no doomscrolling rider
• Final say on tone: if it feels like an ad, it dies

Learning track

• Q3 26: phone framing and the tripod habit; trusting the first take
• Q4 26: basic cuts and captions in the free editor
• 2027: cutting a full campaign from tour footage solo

Well Made Plays

Management

Wrote this bible and keeps it honest. WMP builds the queue, drafts the calendar, cuts the heavier edits, reads the numbers monthly, and tells Wren when to stop adding things. The job is to make the plan smaller and sharper every quarter, not bigger.

Owns

• The content calendar and the scheduling queue
• Edit templates: one per format, so cuts take minutes
• Monthly numbers review, 30 minutes, no vanity metrics
• The 60-dollar boost experiments and their verdicts
• Release-week logistics so Wren can be a person that week
• Saying no to good ideas that cost sleep

Cadence

• Monthly working session, first Tuesday, one hour
• Quarterly review: cut one thing, keep one thing, try one thing

Favor network

Collaborators

Marisol runs sound at the Tin Lantern and hits record on the board every residency night, which quietly makes her the plan's live engineer. Tavo at the print shop runs the risograph for posters and takes the occasional lunch-break photo. Neither is staff. Both get thanked in every liner note.

Owns

• Marisol: board recordings of every residency set
• Marisol: one clean phone angle from the booth on request
• Tavo: risograph runs for posters and yard sale signage
• Tavo: print shop photos when the light through the front window is good
• Tour: whichever opener wants to trade filming duties, night by night

Terms

• Favors are asked once a month, not once a day
• Tacos, guest-list spots, and first pull of every poster run

Weekly workflow

The whole plan runs on about five hours a week plus one Sunday afternoon a month. If a week needs more than this, the week is wrong, not Wren.

Content formulas

Eight repeatable formats. Each has a fixed capture and edit recipe so making one takes minutes, not evenings. Example captions are written in Wren's voice and are safe to reuse as patterns.

The Lunch Break Verse

capture: phone propped on the paper cutter, 60–90 sec → edit: top and tail, captions → TikTok primary / IG Reel

Wren at the print shop, humming or half-singing a line over the rhythm of the machines. Work shirt on. This is the format that carries the whole identity: songs written on lunch breaks by a person you might know. Example caption: "Wrote this between two banner orders. The risograph keeps better time than I do."

Capture: Wren, self-shot · Edit: phone editor, 5 min · Platforms: TikTok, IG Reel

The Caliche Reel

capture: dust-road footage through the Ranger windshield, golden hour → edit: one lyric line as text, slow pace → IG Reel / TikTok

A single lyric fragment over caliche dust and heat shimmer. No hook reveal, no chorus, one line at a time across the runway. The visual signature of the whole project: pale road, white sky, words that sit still. Bank a season of backgrounds in one drive.

Capture: dash mount, one drive per capture Sunday · Edit: template, 10 min · Platforms: IG Reel, TikTok

The Tin Lantern Clip

capture: one song per residency night, phone from the booth + Marisol's board audio → edit: sync, light grade → YouTube full / cutdowns everywhere

The monthly guaranteed live take. Board audio makes phone video sound professional for free. Full song to YouTube, best 30 seconds to Reels and TikTok. Twelve of these a year is a live album's worth of proof that the songs hold a room.

Capture: Marisol (board + booth angle) · Edit: WMP template · Platforms: YT, IG, TT

The Kitchen Table Demo

capture: one take, one lamp, parlor guitar at the kitchen table → edit: none if possible → IG Reel / YouTube

Sunday evening, one lamp, the pawn-shop parlor guitar. Unreleased fragments and stripped versions of released songs. The imperfections stay in; the chair creak is part of the arrangement. Example caption: "New one. Still arguing with the second verse. The chair gets a writing credit."

Capture: tripod, clip-on lav · Edit: minimal · Platforms: IG, YT

The Dashboard Harmony

capture: phone on the dash mount, parked, stacked live over a played-back take → edit: split or straight cut → TikTok / IG Reel

Wren singing harmony against a phone playback in the cab of the Ranger. Church-choir stacking in a pickup truck: the whole biography in one frame. Always parked. The seatbelt chime made a cameo once and the comments demanded it return.

Capture: dash mount, parked truck · Edit: phone editor · Platforms: TT, IG Reel

The Pew Harmony

capture: 3–4 split takes against a plain wall, one voice per take → edit: grid or stacked layout → IG Reel / TikTok / YT Short

Self-stacked choir arrangements filmed in separate takes. The most technically produced format in the plan and it still costs nothing but an evening. Save these for campaign moments; they pull the biggest reach and shouldn't become wallpaper.

Capture: tripod, marked floor position · Edit: WMP (layout template) · Platforms: IG, TT, YT Short

The Postcard Carousel

capture: 5–7 stills per capture Sunday or show night → edit: one warm dusty grade for everything → IG carousel

Folding chairs, gas-station coffee, the merch card table, setlists taped to monitors, the guitar case in the truck bed. Micro-stories in stills. Strong save rates, zero production cost, and over a year they become the visual archive of the whole run.

Capture: phone, whoever is standing there · Edit: one preset grade · Platforms: IG carousel

The Letter

write: one story, one ask, plain text → send: monthly to the mailing list → excerpt: one paragraph as an IG caption later

The monthly mailing-list letter is the plan's most valuable deliverable and its cheapest. One true story from the month, one clear ask, no graphics, no subject-line tricks. 640 people signed up to hear from Wren; the letter is where the relationship lives.

Write: Wren, always · Edit: WMP proofreads · Platforms: email, excerpted to IG

Content mix per week (default)

The baseline weekly recipe during ordinary weeks. Campaign weeks add volume; they never break the base rhythm or the hour-a-day rule.

Capture day schedule

One Sunday afternoon a month. Three hours produces three to four weeks of posts because every format has a fixed recipe and the setups are modular: change the shirt, the light, or the location and one afternoon reads like a month of separate days.

Capture Sunday structure (template)

Total: about 3 hours. The tour replaces March's capture Sunday entirely; eleven show nights out-produce any afternoon.

Capture schedule, Aug 2026 – Mar 2027

Idea bank

Ideas not yet assigned to a month. Pull from here when a calendar slot needs filling. Add freely; cut ruthlessly at the quarterly review.

Content concepts

• How much did this costRecurring transparency post. The 400-dollar single, line by line. The merch table math: 60 to 180 dollars a night, and where it goes. People trust an artist who shows the receipts.
• Gas station coffee reviewTour series. One review per town, deadpan, five-word verdicts. "Brownwood: tastes like the drive here." Low effort, high personality, and it maps the tour without a single "come to my show" post.
• The 62 shows mapOne carousel: every show ever played, pinned on a paper map. Folding-chair venues and all. A history post that doubles as proof of work before the tour announce.
• Lyrics on the scrap pilePrint County Line lines on print shop offcuts using the risograph. Photograph them where they land: taped to the register, left in library books, under a windshield wiper. Physical media as content.
• Second Thursday front rowMailing-list perk: one reserved folding chair at every residency night, front and center, with a name card. Costs nothing. The photo of the name card is the post.
• The choir of oneShort series on how the church pew taught the harmony stacking. Old hymn arranging tricks applied to new songs, explained in one minute, no jargon. Craft content in plain clothes.

Visual / production concepts

• One grade, all yearA single warm, dusty color grade on every clip: pale road, white sky, worn denim. Consistency does the work a logo would. Preset saved once, applied forever.
• The Ranger as characterThe truck recurs until the audience greets it. Dash, tailgate, bench seat, odometer. By the tour, a photo of the odometer alone should read as a tour update.
• Risograph everythingPosters, lyric scraps, tour numbering, yard sale signage: all run on the shop machine in two inks. The print texture becomes the brand at zero design cost, and Tavo gets a liner note.
• The folding chairOne specific folding chair appears in the cover art, the yard sale set, the merch table, and the final night of the tour. Nobody points it out. Somebody will notice, and that comment will be the best post of the year.
• Board tape archiveMarisol's board recordings, collected. Twelve residencies in, there are enough clean live takes for a quiet Bandcamp live album: Second Thursdays, a year at the Tin Lantern. Zero recording budget.
• Window light portraitsMonthly portrait at the print shop front window, same spot, changing seasons. A year of them becomes the press photo set and a time-lapse of the whole run.

Gear inventory

Capture

Light and print

Software

The software budget is zero and stays there until a paid tool would save more hours than the day job pays for. Current stack:

Phone editor

For everything under 90 seconds. Trim, caption, the one saved grade preset. Most posts never touch a computer.

Free desktop editor

For Tin Lantern syncs and the pew harmony layouts. WMP maintains one template per format; a clip drops in, a post comes out.

Free scheduling queue

So Sunday's 45 minutes covers the whole week and nothing depends on remembering to post at lunch.

Voice memos

The songwriting archive. Every idea since the pawn-shop guitar lives here; the Lunch Break Verse format is voice memos with a face.

Plain-text mail service

On the free tier for the 640-person list. Upgrades when the list clears 1,000, which is the point of the whole plan.

One spreadsheet

Door takes, merch nets, follower counts, list growth. Updated monthly by WMP. If it's not in the sheet, it didn't happen.

Wren Hollis is a fictional artist we built this example for. Nothing here is blurred or renamed; this is the document at full fidelity.