If Youâre On the Fence About Podficcing:
A âDo the Thing!â Essay
âI have a weird accent/voiceâ or âMy accent doesnât fit this fandom.â Would anyone even want to listen to it?
Um, YES.
Podfic is pretty niche, much more so than fanfiction itself, but those who are into podfic are INTO it, and hungry for more. We are always on the lookout for the next story that can accompany us on that run, that road trip, those dull tasks at work or the chores that await at home. I canât speak for everyone, but I know plenty of people, myself included, who are not picky about the voice or pronunciations weâre listening to, because it still provides the intimacy of hearing someone else tell us a storyâa human being.
Text-to-speech apps are great; Iâm glad they exist! But I prefer to hear a human voice when possible. It heightens the experience for me and provides a layer of connection that I miss otherwise.
Nobody has a voice that everyone loves. People nope out of podfics for the same reasons that they nope out of professional podcasts or audiobooks. Maybe itâs just not for them. Maybe people find my voice grating, my speaking too slow or too fast, or they donât like how I do voices. Thatâs okay! Because there are others who like those things just fine, or are at least unbothered by them. Itâs not a reason not to do something you might really enjoy.
Letâs take a look at percentages for a sec: In the Check, Please! fandom on AO3, there are 11301 works total. Of those works, only 204 are tagged as podfic. I suck at math but Google tells me this is less than 2 percent! I donât think weâre in a place to be fussy here, do you?
In my own podfic listening experience I have enjoyed many a non-fandom-matching voice. Same goes for little pronunciation mistakes and even background noises. In one of my favourite podfics, I could hear their pet bird chirping randomly in the background and it just charmed me, honestly.
Now, itâs true that as you make more and more podfics, your standards for your own work might rise. Thatâs pretty typical, right? There are things that really bug me about my earlier stuff, and things I wish I could do now that I either donât have the time to learn properly or the resources to pull off. But thatâs a standard I hold myself to, not one I hold for anyone else. So if you hear a podficcer bemoaning their mouth clicks or the inconsistency of their volume or speed or whatever, chill. Itâs not about you or your work.
My last word of encouragement/advice on this is a note about engagement. The engagement (kudos/comments/bookmarks) rate on podfic is typically much lower than that for fic. A person might make their first podfic, see how low their engagement is on this work compared to others, and assume no one liked it. This is incorrect! But I get that it feels that way. People donât always know how to comment on podfic if the reader isnât also the writer. They might download it to listen to later and forget to go back to ao3 once theyâve listened to it. We donât fully know what the deal is, but this is pretty much universal. You get used it, kinda? I will say, though, that this makes every kudos and comment that much more meaningful when I do get one. Like, every single one. Just knowing that someone heard my voice reading a story I love, and liked it enough to let me know, feels nothing short of amazing.
Do the thing!
