Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology VIII

[klb]

Welcome, friends, to year EIGHT of the Ladies Podfic Anthology! As before, we'll be collecting short lady-centric podfics by different readers in different fandoms to release as an anthology and as a collection of individual files.

Changes this year:

• The submission deadline is February 7th, and we will post on February 21st.


• The theme for this year's anthology is awakening. It's optional—all podfics are welcome as long as they follow the rules laid out in the Submission Guidelines—but feel free to let it inspire you if you'd like.


• We are lowering the limit of podfics an individual reader can include in the anthology from 8 to 5. Readers are still allowed to submit as many podfics as they want to the spreadsheet and the AO3 collection.


• We are slightly adjusting the required information spoken at the beginning of each podfic. Previously, it included "by [author]." This has been adjusted to "written by [author]."

If you are not familiar with this project, you can see the previous seven anthologies here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Important note: Please make sure you read and follow the Submission Guidelines below the cut. It helps everything flow together much better, and it makes the mods' jobs so much easier!

To Podficcers: Interested in participating? We'd love to have you. This should be a low-stress project, even for people who are new to podficcing, due to the word-count: 1500 words or less (with many being as short as 1-2 minutes). If you'd like to record something for this anthology, please fill out this quick google form and we'll send you the link to the spreadsheet where we'll be keeping track of all the podfics.

Here are some good places for finding short fics about female characters:
-The Women Being Awesome, Female Characters, POV Female Character, and Female Relationships tags at the AO3, limited to word counts of 1500 or less.
-The Misses Clause Challenge from Yuletide
-Femslash Minis
-Awesome Ladies Ficathon (original LJ ficathon deleted, but these works crossposted to AO3 remain)
-Real Women Fest
-Female Character Trope Fest
-The Bechdel Test Comment Ficathon
-The Bechdel Test Comment Ficathon II
-I am the Plot, Babe: A Villainess Ficathon
-Where No Woman: Un-erasing the women of Star Trek
-Femslash Kinkmeme
-The Femslash February Collection

Since this project has a relatively quick turnaround time, you may want to refer to the list of authors who have given Blanket Permission to Podfic, so that you can get started recording stories right away!

To the Podcurious: A number of prolific podficcers have gotten their start by contributing to previous years of this anthology. If you have ever thought you might like to create podfic, this is a really great starting place. It's low pressure, you'll get a lot of listeners, you're contributing to a cool fanwork that celebrates our love for female characters, and it's not too intense of a spotlight, because your piece is in the company of many other voices.

To Everyone: Feel free to comment with links to other fests or specific works that you think would be a good fit for this anthology. Additionally, we are looking for beta listeners who can absolutely commit to at LEAST two hours of beta listening between February 8th and 11th. Please let us know if you'd be available and interested; we'd be very grateful!

To Authors: We've had some awesome authors get involved in the past, in pod_together style, to create short female-centric pieces for the anthology in collaboration with podficcers. If you’re an author who’s interested and is seeking podficcers to work with, feel free to comment below. Podficcers who would like this sort of collaboration, please reply directly to the authors.

Below the cut is important information on what we're looking for with these podfics and how they should be submitted.



For the sake of consistency within the anthology, we'd like to ask that everyone follow these guidelines for eligible fics and the metadata you include in the podfic:

-Each reader can make up to 5 podfics to include in the anthology (though an unlimited number may be included in the spreadsheet/AO3 collection), and each story should be no more than 1500 words.
-All stories should focus on characters who identify as women within the story.
-All fandoms, including rpf fandoms, are eligible.
-All recordings should begin and end with two seconds of silence.
-Each reading should begin, "[Title], written by [author], read by [reader]. Fandom: [Fandom]." We also suggest including appropriate warnings or content notes for common triggers such as sexual assault and major character death.
-Each reading should end with "The End".
-To match last year’s anthology, the meta data should follow this format:

Name: [Fandom] Title
Artist: readername (reader)
Album Artist: authorname (author)
Year: 2018
Album: Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology VIII
Comments: Text at: http://link
Genre: Podfic
(Note that usernames should be all-lowercase, with fandom and title given title capitalization.)

-To help make sure the volume across the anthology is consistent, we are providing a benchmark volume file to use for volume-matching. Please make sure that your own podfics are approximately matched to this volume. If you aren't sure how to adjust volume, in Audacity it's Amplify under the Effects menu, and in Garageband it's track volume (the blue line here). If you have more questions, feel free to ask in the comments! The benchmark volume file is here (right-click save to download).
-All podfics should be submitted in mp3 format by February 7th, meaning that it must be February 7th somewhere in the world for your submission to count.

Comments

[melsheartsthings]

Can I write something lady-centric and as one of my 5 recorded podfic, read said work I myself wrote? I'm just curious if that's a party foul or not.




In any case, as someone who is 'podcurious' as you term it, I am really interested in trying this podficcing thing out this year and have maybe a couple of fics in mind already.

[klb]

Absolutely NOT a party foul. That would be delightful!

And I LOVE it when people use Awesome Ladies to launch themselves into trying out podficcing. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help out :)

[melsheartsthings]

Between Audacity and Garageband, which one is easier in terms of figuring out settings for a beginner podficcer to create podfic with (I use a Windows PC laptop, FYI)? Or are they about the same in that regard?

[sophinisba]

I believe Garageband is only for Macs, so you'll want to go with Audacity. Lots of us Mac users use it too and it's not too bad.

[melsheartsthings]

Thanks so much!

[melsheartsthings]

How do I volume match in audacity (once I've downloaded all the necessary additional files)? I'm so new to this whole thing.. HELP! A visual guide to doing that would help immensely since I'm, in part, a visual learner.

[klb]

I don't know of a visual guide right now, but you select all of the audio, go to Amplify in the effects menu, and then adjust the volume up or down as needed. To tell whether it matches the benchmark, I'd just export it and listen to it in iTunes next to the benchmark to see if they seem about the same level (like, can you comfortable listen to both in a row without feeling the need to turn the volume up or down when it switches from one to the other?). If you're at the point where you can't Amplify any more in Audacity but it still doesn't sound loud enough, try running Compressor under the effects menu, using the default settings. Let me know if you get stuck when trying this!

[melsheartsthings]

Thanks ever so much! It's very helpful! (right now, Audacity doesn't like my method of recording [headphones with microphone], so will try something new later, after I've had the smallest bit of time to get my vocal variety and intonations for the fics I'm going to be podficcing together and maybe a very short nap.)

[melsheartsthings]

After finally getting my WiFi issue fixed, now I'm making bloopers reels out of my first attempts... *sigh* I think maybe I might sleep a bit and try again in the morning, and just record until they sound right.

[klb]

If you want editing help, I’m happy to offer it!

[vaysh]

just a heads up that the Awesome Ladies Ficathon pages have been deleted. :(

[klb]

Aw, that's sad! Luckily, we spent 7 years podficcing a ton of it, so lots of it lives on that way, and I did find a collection of 100+ fics crossposted to AO3 with that tag. I've replaced the link with that.

Author Volunteer :)

[jadesfire]

*raises my author hand*

I plan to do some recording for this, but I'm also up for doing some writing. If you have a very specific idea that you want (the more specific the better), I'm happy to talk about writing it for you. Smut/PWP isn't my thing, but if it can come in under a T rating, I'll tackle it ;D

My list of fandoms is here, but I'm sure I forgot some, so do ask if there's something you really, really want!

[knight_tracer]

I volunteer as beta! I can easily do 2+ hours worth.

[semperfiona]

Check out Purimgifts for lady-centric short fiction as well. I just found that community/fest while looking for fic for this anthology, and signed up to create podfic for it this year.

Here's a link to last year's collection (this year own't be published until March): http://archiveofourown.org/collections/purimgifts2017/tags/Collection:%20Purimgifts%20Day%203/works

[summerstorm]

I'd be interested in writing something lady-centric in Check Please, iZombie, Make It Or Break It or Gymnastics RPF with a pod partner! I failed the one time I tried pod_together but this should be easier, I feel? I've had fic podficced for this anthology before and I'd love to get more involved. Speaking of, I might also be able to do Leverage? I'm weirdly self-conscious about that fandom, but it is what I'm currently watching and my very first bit in an ALPA was Leverage (I think????????? am I scared to check? you bet), so there's that.

I tend to run long but there's always the option of breaking up fic in sections. My Kate Argent pre-canon thing (probably jossed by canon by now, it's old) comes to mind as an example of something that would work broken up in pieces.

[snickfic]

Just FYI, the two Bechdel Fest Comment Ficathon links both eventually lead to a deleted LJ account. The person imported to DW, so the two ficathons are in this tag, although the masterlist links are still broken.

[klb]

Thanks! I've updated the links.

[sylvaine]

Do you have a preferred kbps rate for submissions?

[bessyboo]

Sorry for the late answer on this—feel free to submit at whatever bitrate you prefer, but know that it will get converted down to either 64 or 32kbps for the podbook (and depending on if we have a higher bitrate podbook, might get converted up too).

I know this is a really vague answer, but the behind-the-scenes stuff on this hasn’t been set yet, I’m sorry!

[sylvaine]

No worries! This was helpful :)

Volume Matching

[frecklebombfic]

Should we be matching to the max volume of the benchmark mp3 (approx -0.98) or the bulk of the other peaks (-0.25 to -0.5)? I'm finding a by-ear test difficult, because my voice is different to the test reader.

Re: Volume Matching

[klb]

Probably the latter! It should have a similar average peak as the test file. We are happy to assist with an ear test if you’d like an outside opinion.