I recently sold a story to a science fiction podcast. This is exciting news (to me, anyway!), because for the second time ever I’ll get paid for writing, and for the first time something I’ve written will be performed. I don’t believe I can say more on that now, but did you know there are lots of neat audio scifi publications? This website has a great list of what many people think scifi podcasting is (continuous stories, like with TV shows). What I thought I’d do here, however, is highlight a few of the websites that take submissions from the general public and match them with voice actors.

• DRABBLECAST is great. Their logo features a monstrous green tentacle, which does a good job representing what type of stories they accept and produce. It’s all sorts of weird science fiction plus a bit of fantasy—very 1950’s America.
• ESCAPE POD is part of a family of podcasting magazines. They do VERY strict science fiction (talking about logos, theirs is a literal escape pod) because their sister magazines cover the other speculative elements. The next three on the list here are also run by Escape Artists, Inc.
• PSEUDOPOD is a magazine I check out almost as much as Escape Pod. They focus on horror, which you can probably tell from their pale green—and much more aggressive—alien tentacle logo. Now that I think about it, I have no idea if they or Drabblecast came first. Huh.
• PODCASTLE is the fantasy magazine, and unlike the above podcasts, I don’t really listen to it (I’m sorry, but HIGH fantasy just isn’t my jam!). It seems like I should mention them though, along with CAST OF WONDERS, Escape Artist, Inc.’s YA audio publication, as the company is great.
• BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES is a very famous fantasy podcast. Since they take fantasy submissions of the broadest nature, I enjoy their content. They have wonderful audio quality, but also, the art on their website is terrific—it really sets them apart in this regard.
• THE CENTROPIC ORACLE is a relatively new magazine which is doing very well. They tie with Drabblecast as being my favorite, because they publish a lot of quirky, “weird” science fiction. And in case you thought I was being mean, “weird” is actually a scifi subgenre. The Centropic Oracle also publishes all of their stories through YouTube, which is amazingly convenient.
• GLITTERSHIP is a magazine I only recently discovered. I wanted to point out how, like with traditional online “magazines,” there really is something for everyone in the scifi podcasting world. Glittership only publish stories that have LGBTQ elements, and though relatively new like The Centropic Oracle, they’re really making a name for themselves.

The number of these podcasting/audio science fiction magazines is constantly growing, their quality keeps increasing, and I think podcasting is how more and more people are going to consume science fiction as time goes on. Books on tape are nothing new, but serialized fiction services are. So check some of them out if you ever get a chance!

–Jeff and Leah