The audio slot

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The audio slot

Your story can be as long as you want but....

	A complete novel produces a very large file. So it is best to break it up into scenes for recording.
	Variable length makes it hard to offer the material to web radio stations. It is important that they are organised into standard slots so they can be sold to other broadcasters.
	A good sound quality file for this slot should be less than 3 Mb. Files of this size will be handled by mobile readers where the files will be downloaded over the mobile network.

SO.....

We would like you to plan the work to fit 'the slot'.

The slot

In the ideal world, we would like your audio files to be 14 minutes long.

The text for a slot should fit onto a few sheets so there is no need to turn pages when recording.

The slot is what you can realistically record in one hour.

The slot provides 4 minutes in each hour for trailers and adverts.

Depending on your settings, (higher recording quality takes more space) 1000 words takes 5-7 minutes to speak and will take about 1.5 Mb to store as an MP3.

But...

These are early days so we will not be rejecting anything that is not this standard size. We just wanted to flag it up now.

The downside

Editing your text for the slot will take a little more work and thought.

You want the listener to stay with you so you need to think about 'episodes' with a good beginning and ending.

So you will have to do a little editing.

The Benefits

	A 14 minute slot makes an audio file than can be downloaded quickly.
	The slot is a good way to pace the work. Experience shows that a slot can be fully prepared in a couple of hours.
	People like to know what they are getting when they download a file.

The slot is not a restriction

We will not reject files that are not 14 minutes long. The slot is advisory.

You can still take the audio files and make another edit to fit the chapter structure or adopt another size to fit the recording medium you want to use for distribution.