To everyone who has ever heard an episode of Audible Autism – hi!
It has been quite a journey for the podcast. We’ve now produced just over 20 episodes of content, from how to organise oneself to being an autistic dancer, from a documentary on the impact of music therapy on autistic children to a multi-guest episode on dealing with social isolation.
Our production process has improved dramatically over the last two years. For the first few episodes, Odai and Sarah would edit the episodes themselves in Audacity, with mixed results. We then got a sound editor, Jason, who professionalised us substantially. Jason had to resign very suddenly last summer for personal reasons, and we put out a desperate call to get our remaining episodes edited and out the door, and a wonderful Citizen, Kenny, stepped up and has been filling in for the remainder of the season. Our deepest thanks to him.
We had another episode left but as Christmas has now come and gone, we are going to push that back to the next set of episodes and conclude with twenty episodes so that we can properly prepare for our next release date. For the last two years, we have been using a Just In Time approach that saw us trying to get out a new episode every two weeks, a schedule that regularly didn’t work out if a guest dropped out, changed interview date, the content of the episode was harder to develop than we had anticipated, personal circumstances intervened, etc.
We’re therefore now going to try to move to a batching model, where we will be trying to plan all of our episodes in advance in the first half of this year with a view to recording them in the summer, and then releasing them on time in the autumn/fall.
This will also give us the time to finish and promote our half-written Patreon. The running costs of Audible Autism are very reasonable, but take up dozens of hours of unpaid labour from a team of people. We are also very conscious that audio content is inaccessible to a lot of people, particularly autistic people, and we really want to be able to provide transcripts for every episode from now on and, in time, for our entire archive. This, however, would cost roughly five times what each episode costs now, and our supporting body, the Autistic Empire, doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to make that happen as it stands. That is our current priority as the next stage of development for the podcast, but it will need YOU to help out when the moment comes. We’ll hope you’ll step up too.
We’re therefore working to a current timeframe that by the second half of 2020, we will be able to get a bunch of new episodes of interesting questions and interesting facts out regularly and on time, and with sufficient financial support to be able to make that content accessible as a transcript as well. Fingers crossed!
If there is a topic you would like us to cover in the new series, please comment below or email us at team@audibleautism.com.
If you would like to be a guest on the Audible Autism podcast, please fill in our Guest Questionnaire here and someone will get back to you in due course. https://goo.gl/forms/JcXPCUNRELX46xPs1
See you then!
Sarah and Odai
