[Podfic Meta] Thoughts on Podfic Cover Art and the Unnecessary Barriers to Podficcing

For the audio version of the post below, please click HERE.

Thanks must go to kaixo and analise010 for their invaluable contributions to this post.

This has been crossposted to Tumblr and AO3.


Fellow podficcers, from newcomers tp those who have been around even longer than me, I have some thoughts to share. There has been some discussion lately about podfic covers and the way that we all say they aren’t expected, yet also rarely post without them--even going out of our way to commission them from others if we don’t have the time/inclination to do them ourselves. I want to empower us all to change this.

My part of this discussion came about while watching someone get into podficcing for the first time. She is a prolific writer and I've recorded many of her fics. She's friends with several podficcers and has embraced the art and championed the cause of transformative works statements amongst other writers. She's undertaken podfic a bit as an academic exercise in that she wanted to try it so she could better understand the process of creating podfic and what goes into it. She's set a goal of a target number of hours of work and a target number of fics to record in order to understand the process and see whether or not podfic is for her. Watching someone undertake podficcing from a scientific perspective and posting detailed notes about what she struggles with along the way has really opened my eyes to all the little things involved in creating podfic that I take for granted. Most of these things have a pretty steep learning curve. Reading about her undertakings, I'm struck by the thought that podfic doesn't have the low barrier to entry that I thought it did.

 

 

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