Hi all,

I announced this in the intro to last week’s episode, but got distracted and didn’t put it into written form here. Until now.

With the aid of an anonymous donor, Escape Pod is presenting a contest for the best SF story of 300 words or less. There are no restrictions on theme, plot, or structure. The goal is simply to present a strong idea-based story in the minimum space possible.
(Continue Reading…)

As promised in the past couple of episodes, our online storefront for selling podcast archive CDs is (finally!) up and running at PodDisc.com. This is your chance to get all of your holiday shopping done in one place — provided everyone you know wants over 45 hours of science fiction short stories on CD.

What do the discs look like? I’m glad you asked. They look like this:

Beautiful, isn’t it? And for a very slight fee, you can have your own personal message put on the CD. You can buy each disc for $10 or a bundle of all three collections for $25. Shipping is a cheap flat rate in the U.S. (and tolerable everywhere else), and satisfaction is guaranteed.

Right now only Escape Pod CDs are available, but once the business model proves viable I plan to open this up to producing archive discs for other podcasters. If that’s a service you’d be interested in, drop me a line and I’ll give you more details.

And remember: If you’ve donated $20 or more to Escape Pod this year, or if you’re a subscriber, don’t buy yet! I’ll be sending details to you in e-mail on how you can get this stuff for free.

…Right after I get some sleep.

Escape Pod is a weekly podcast bringing you fun short science fiction and fantasy. You can listen at your computer, on any MP3 player, or subscribe to receive each episode. We pay our authors, but we’re always free to listen.

• For all of our past podcasts, click here.
• For the 2006 Hugo Nominees, click here.

Hi all,

Just a quick heads-up that due to a last minute technical issue (that I’m too annoyed at myself to describe), today’s Escape Pod will be posted sometime this afternoon.

Our official release schedule is “Sometime Thursday,” so strictly speaking this doesn’t make us late. However, I know that many of you are used to getting the files in the morning, and for those of you who’ll miss having it for these few hours, I apologize.

If all goes well it’ll be the first of our Hugo nominees, so hopefully it’ll be worth the wait. And my new job schedule should mean this is the last time I stay up this late to get things done.

Thanks for your understanding!

Here’s a minor new feature for the site. If you look at the sidebar on the right, you’ll see a poll asking you to vote for your favorite Escape Pod story from 2005. We’ve picked a couple of likely candidates, but if you don’t like any of those, feel free to click on “Add an Answer” and submit your own.

This is not an entirely academic exercise, by the way. We plan on using this information for a good cause in the next few weeks. (Hint: Hugo nominations are now open…) So let us know what you liked best!

As I just mentioned in today’s podcast, we’re conducting a brief listener survey:

Why should you fill it out? Because it’ll help us understand how we’re doing, what you like and what you don’t, who listens to us, and it might help us in the future with grants or funding.

And also because I’m giving $1 to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play for each completed survey. Click some boxes, help a kid. How good a deal is that?

UPDATE: Janice’s comment (thanks!) made me understand that I probably ought to be a lot clearer about my intent with this. Yes, the survey was composed by a marketing company. Their intent with it, I think, was to help podcasters prepare a pitch to advertisers. That is not my intent with it. We seriously are doing better with donations right now than I think we’d be likely to do running ads, and I know as well as anyone that if we started running commercials the donations would probably drop to nothing overnight. I don’t want to do that. You all have been incredible in your support, and I want to redeem that trust.

The reason we’re using this survey (despite some annoying questions) is because it was free and ready-made, and that saves us a lot of time. Also, we do want to prepare a pitch — but not to advertisers. I’m hoping that some of this information will be useful in our application to the IRS for 501(c)(3) status, and later on if we decide to go looking for public arts grants or ad-free sponsorships. And some of this stuff we’d simply like to know. I’m far more interested in the questions like “What do you think of the Web design/show length/frequency?” than “How much would you trust this host to recommend real estate products?”

If you find those questions obnoxious, just skip them. I can’t really can’t blame you. Heck, I’m not sure I would trust me to recommend real estate products. If you would, you haven’t seen my lawn.