General Expectations Post

[paraka]

Last week I ran into a situation where the author of one of the fics I had podficed and I discovered we had different expectations of what permission to podfic meant. Everything turned out great in the end but the author left it feeling bad that she hadn't done enough research into podfic before giving blanket permission for people to podfic her works.

As I told her, as a podficer I don't actually expect the authors I work with to know that much about podfic (in certain fandoms, I'll actually link to the Fanlore definition when I ask in case they've never heard of podfic before). If anything it should be on the podficer to explain what we expect (which is how that conversation happened).

revolutionaryjo took that idea in an awesome direction and wrote a Dear Author post to actually spell out what her stance was.

I think it would be an awesome idea if all podficers did this and linked to it when they ask permission to podfic. That way we're letting the author come to an informed decision over whether or not they want their story podficed and can save future awkward situations.

I was thinking we could maybe turn the comment sections of this post into a brain storming session. I just tried to write one up for myself but it's hard, espcecially since I expect a higher level of control over my podfic than revolutionaryjo seems to. I'm not sure how to say it without it sounding like, I don't know, like I'm demanding too much? But I also don't want to give over all control over my work.

I'm actually a contract coordinator in RL; that's probably the wrong kind of experience to draw on for this :S

X-posted to podficmeta, amplificathon and amplificathon

Comments

[revolutionaryjo]

Well my thoughts on the subject have been pretty well laid out already, haha. It wasn't easy though. That short little post was the result of writing increasingly long sentences and then going back and boiling them down to their simplest form to keep everything straight to the point. Because I don't really want to subject anyone to an essay or anything when all I want to do is ask permission.

Any of those things I mentioned can be discussed in much greater detail, but I think the nitty gritty is best discussed behind the scenes and on a case by case basis. Author A may be really, intensely interested in where I'll be posting my podfic while Author B could care less. That's why I left things a bit open-ended with an invitation to contact me with any questions.

The whole thing took me about an hour and a half to actually write all the same.