Escape Artists, audiofiction and me
I have come late to audio fiction, I think I first started buying audio books in 2007 or 2008. My main motivation at the time was to find something to distract myself from mundane tasks, like housework, and because I had a disjointed commute so reading from a traditional book was difficult as I kept having to change from train to bus and back again
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I should first mention that while I understand the sense in which you mean the term "fan" produced, Pseudopod is a professional market and we do pay competitive rates for our stories. Not, officially, "pro-rates", but certainly in the high end of "semi pro". I point this out not out of pride, but simply relative to my further statements. Your comments about narrator's approach to the material are valid, but I would mention that unfortunately our budget does not allow us the ability to pay our narrators, so all our readers are volunteers. And, we must also keep to our announced schedule. So, while we do attempt to not only carefully choose a reader with the correct voice for the story (we do audition readers), and also give them suggestions for approach, and also do retakes on readings that come in and we do not feel work (or, occasionally, scrap a reading and re-assign it), our ability to have flexibility in these areas is variably affected by our choice of people willing to donate their time (and, in the case of retakes, re-donate it) for free and also our production schedule. A reader who falls behind or blows a promised deadline can occasionally cause a cascade effect on production, and on top of that there's the touchy aspect of prodding readers who may be dragging their feet or not grasping the material correctly when they are, of course, doing this for free.
If this sounds overly apologetic, I don't mean it to. I'm very proud of the work Pseudopod (and Escape Artists in general) puts out, but there are mitigating factors to delivering purchased stories from professional writers on a weekly schedule to an audience for free that may not be apparent to the listeners. We are always trying to upgrade the quality of our work and I would ask you to occasionally listen again to each of the podcasts to see if things have changed to your liking. I do not know when you stopped listening to Pseudopod, but if I might suggest - we've gotten some very positive feedback on the reading of "The Worms That Gnaw", which is available at http://pseudopod.org/2009/08/14/pseudopod-155-the-worm-that-gnaws/.
Also, we currently use Voices.com as one of our recruiting sources but if you know of another forum for requesting professional volunteers for readings, we would certainly appreciate the information.
Unrelated to us specifically, I found your comments about audiobooks in general very interesting. As a lifetime listener to both radio drama and readings of fiction, I've found that the way the ear/mind tracks the two formats is very different. One's mind can drift a bit listening to "productions", in which the work is delivered by various actors and includes sound effects and the like, but straight reading (which, yes, should always be a performance but won't usually contain much production work) involves a different level of concentration. I state this only to point out that I've found over time that there are certain writers/writing styles that just do not adapt to audio, no matter how good the performance of the reader (well, I try never to be an absolutist, so let's say, seem unlikely to adapt well to audio). Henry James is a good example, his complicated and dense sentence structures are nearly impossible to sustain in a narrative reading that an audience can follow. On the page, one has the luxury of mentally dawdling or tracking back, but such is not the case for readings. I try to keep these things in mind when purchasing possible stories for Pseudopod. There are a number of modern horror authors who are great writers but the needs of the podcast would not be fulfilled by their prose that works best on the page.
Anyway, I'm rambling and so I'd like to thank you for this chance to address some of your concerns.
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