I logged onto eventbrite at about 11.01 yesterday to check how ticket sales were going and discovered the first 100 had sold out in about 48 seconds, which, frankly, was astonishing. I slightly wondered whether the whole Interesting thing had jumped the shark but, at least for 100 people, it seems not.
Which suggested another plan, which is this:
We normally sell 300 tickets for Interesting. The hall capacity is about 500 (maybe more) but we did 300 the first year and it seemed nice and intimate and I didn't want to mess with a semi-successful formula. (With 300 I lose an acceptably small amount of money.) And I've also been thinking about a way to support Howies and their Do lecture thing, because it's a great idea, but the only way they can do it, and get all the talks online for the world to see for free is to charge £1000 per ticket, which is a lot. (I guess it's like distributed sponsorship.)
So I thought we'd do this. We'll sell an extra 50 tickets for Interesting. That'll raise enough money for a Do ticket - we'll buy that and then everyone who's bought an Interesting ticket gets entered into a prize-draw to go to Do. We support the Howies thing and you get a 1 in 350 chance of getting a ticket for Do.
I think that's a good plan. We'll do that. No need for any action on your part - just buy an Interesting ticket (if you want to) and we'll stick you in the hat.
Next lot of Interesting tickets will go on sale at 1.30pm (BST) on Thursday 25th of June.