Resolutions

Happy New Year from ‘Every Photo Tells…’

It has been an incredible year, with forty-four episodes of the podcast released to date, ‘Book 1’ available at podiobooks.com, a Parsec nomination and an exciting range of writers joining us to share their visions of what our photographs suggest. When we started this project, we didn’t really expect to have more than a couple of guest writers join us, but already we have had a few months with four or five guests. We would like to say ‘thank you’ once again to everyone who has taken the time to submit a story; it fires the imagination to hear so many ideas come from a single picture every month and we do enjoy reading the stories and bringing your characters to life.

In some ways we are victims of our own success, finding that we have had to turn away some stories as the podcast has grown, just in order to maintain our level of quality. We’d like to quickly remind anybody who would like to submit a story of a couple of important points.

    Deadlines
    We both have day jobs as well as other podcasts, so we need to allocate time to EPT stories, so that we give every story the time it deserves. We also try to release episodes, where possible, throughout the whole month, so getting your story to us as soon as possible does matter. If you are in any doubt about being able to hit the deadline, please let us know as soon as possible so we can plan around it if we can. If you don’t tell us and go past the deadline, then chances are the story won’t make it.
    Editing
    Please get someone else to read your story before you submit it and also try reading it out aloud to yourself. These are tried and tested ways to check for mis-spellings, grammatical errors and story problems. If your story has any minor errors, we will endeavour to fix these before recording, but a story full of problems slows down the recording process, extends the time it takes us to edit the episode and pulls us (and potentially the listener) away from being immersed in the story. If we struggle to read the story, we’re less likely to want to record it, so… check it!
    Length
    Our submission requirements are for stories between 1,000 and 5,000 words. Please try to stay within those limits. If you realise your story is just short of 1k or you reckon you’ll struggle to stay within 5k, please let us know in advance. We can discuss the story, why it needs to be longer (or shorter) and what we can do about getting it into a suitable format for the podcast.
    Local Knowledge
    We’re from Scotland and Austria and, despite having a regular diet of American/Canadian/Australian/etc. TV shows and movies, we might not know how to pronounce that beer you’ve used in your story or even what a certain everyday word means. Chances are, neither will some of our listeners! If you need to use local colloquialisms or products in your stories, it would be good if you could provide some explanation about it and a guide to pronunciation, if possible. We can then include the details in our episode notes.
    Re-publication
    We release the podcast under a Creative Commons licence (by-nc-nd), so you don’t even have to ask if you’d like to include a copy in your own podcast feed, just so long as you use the whole, unaltered mp3 file and provide a link back to EPT. All story rights remain with the writer, so as soon as it is published you are free to submit to other markets. If you do re-submit your story or use our podcast files in any way, please do let us know and we’ll let our listeners know and add relevant links to the website.

Now, onwards into 2011!


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