Good tip for Popups from an IPod submissions site

[Pamela Jo]

Submissions - The NoSleep Podcast

Here at The NoSleep Podcast, we love nothing more than hearing from up-and-coming or seasoned horror writers who’d like to work with us. We want you to frighten us and mess with our heads, so we in turn can terrify our listeners. As such, we’ve prepared a handy list of submissions guidelines to get

www.thenosleeppodcast.com

Note: We have no maximum word count, but incredibly long stories have to be exceptionally good for us to accept them. We get so many stories that would adapt into a production of an hour or more, and often their length isn’t warranted. To work out your story’s rough running time, take the word count and divide it by 155. Then take a listen to the podcast and gauge the average length of stories we do most often. It’s very rare we’re able to say yes to a 50+ minute story as it’s a massive commitment in all ways. Try and be ruthless with your editing and make sure everything in your story is going to have a good pace when it’s translated into audio. Feel free to send longer stories in if you’re really confident in them and their suitability for audio, but be strict with yourself when you’re appraising them. You can get away with padding in prose but you really can’t in audio.

From my days in radio, 15 seconds is a very long period of time for the listener. Don't just read your submission aloud before you submit-time them. If you are still in description or scene setting after 10 seconds-you've probably lost the listener. And that pretty much goes for the reader too. "Try and be ruthless with your editing and make sure everything in your story is going to have a good pace when it’s translated into audio." Probably good advice for any commercial fiction.