EA is thrilled to congratulate PodCastle for winning the 2025 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Fiction Podcast. Congratulations also to EA alums Suyi Okungbowa Davies and Shingai Njeri Kagunda for their Ignyte wins.
The Ignyte Awards, founded in 2020, celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.
Hello friends!
Escape Artists has always relied on the generous support of our audience members to bring free, accessible speculative audio fiction to millions of people worldwide. To ensure our financial sustainability as we enter our third decade, and to continue paying all of the creatives and crew vital to our mission, we’re making some changes to our subscription structure. Many thanks to everyone who provided feedback on our initial ideas.
Starting October 1, 2025, we’ll be introducing brief paid advertisements at the beginning and end of episodes across all our podcasts. All episodes will remain available for free to everyone in line with our mission and our values, but will include ads. (Continue Reading…)
The numbers have been crunched and we’re thrilled to announce that EA successfully reached its $7,000 fundraising goal for our 2024 year-end campaign! Our grand total was $7,158.
This was our first matching drive and we’re hugely delighted to have succeeded at this milestone. Thank you so much to everyone who spread the word, shared, and contributed!
Plans are already underway for a 2025 event — if you’d like to be involved get in touch.
Hey folks, Alasdair here with a quick introduction to a new crew member behind the scenes at EA. Sam Ferree is a nonprofit professional who volunteers with EA, and with his help we’re launching our very first year-end campaign.
Over to you, Sam.
Hi, this is Sam Ferree, Escape Artists Foundation’s newish Development Assistant. I have been a dedicated audience member since Escape Pod launched in 2005, and I became a fan of PseudoPod, PodCastle, Cast of Wonders, and CatsCast when each was introduced. I always wanted to do more to support this community, so when EA made the announcement that they were becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, I immediately reached out and offered to volunteer my services as a nonprofit development professional. (Continue Reading…)
The 2023 Hugo Award finalists have been announced and we’re honored to have picked up two nominations as both Escape Pod and PodCastle return as finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine!
Congratulations to both teams: (Continue Reading…)
Hey folks, this blog post is for the creatives the Escape Artists Foundation contracts with, including authors, artists, and narrators. As we mentioned in our recent metacast, part of putting our new American nonprofit status into effect is an update to our contracts. This has now been completed, and you can find the new documents under Pay Rates and Contracts. Every EA publication uses these templates.
Two additional points:
For those of you interested, below the cut you’ll find ‘patch notes’ going into additional summarized detail. As always, if you have any questions please get in touch with your editorial team. Our you can use the contact form on our site.
What you won’t find in this contract update is any new or specific language around artificial intelligence (A.I.) or machine learning tools. Here’s why:
The use of A.I. in the creative fields is a tangle of different issues that encompasses the way these tools are trained, the intellectual property status of their output, and the ways that output is being used or positioned with malintent.
The most pressing expression of these issues as it applies to short genre fiction venues, like us, is A.I. generated prose being submitted in spam-like volumes (see recent Verge and Wired articles for more).
Recent United States Copyright Office decisions are clear that work solely generated by these technologies are not protectable under US copyright laws; they’re not considered ‘products of human authorship’. So from a legal and copyright perspective, purely A.I. generated work isn’t eligible for protection — and therefore can’t be licensed to us for publication.
Our contracts have always required a submitting author warrant (the legal way of saying promise) that they are the author of the work they send us. Submissions we receive which are obviously A.I. generated will be treated the same way as other plagiarised work and declined.
However to aid clarity, we’ll be updating all our submission guidelines to reflect that we do not accept submissions generated purely by automated or machine learning methods.
Yes, this is a simplification of a complex topic. There are lots of unanswered questions: is a grammar checker A.I.?; does using name generators count? How much A.I. usage is acceptable? We don’t know; no one knows. We are actively working with our submission platform, Moksha, and monitoring trusted organizations in both the genre publishing and voice acting industries like SFWA and WGA as their own guidance and recommendations are developed.
If you’d like to learn more about this subject, we recommend this Genre Grapevine post by Jason Sandford, and this round-up created by SFWA.
Presenters: Marguerite Kenner and Alasdair Stuart
Hey folks, welcome to an Escape Artists metacast. I’m Marguerite Kenner. And I’m Alasdair Stuart.
For those of you who have never heard a metacast before, think of this like a mini State of the Union address, a way for us to update you about what’s been happening at EA. The big thing is our news that EA now stands for the Escape Artists Foundation — we’ve become a nonprofit. We want to share with you how we got there, answer some questions, and explain what it means for you. (Continue Reading…)
(December 23, 2022) — Escape Artists Inc., the home of free genre audio fiction since 2005, is thrilled to announce it is becoming a 501(c)(3) registered nonprofit as of January 1st, 2023. Building on its tagline of ‘One Story, Told Well’, this transition will support EA in its continuing mission to publish free and accessible speculative literature to a global audience.
Completion of the multi-year nonprofit conversion will allow EA to reduce its operating expenses and seek grant funding, while maintaining its SFWA qualifying pay rates to authors.
“Since taking the helm in 2014, we’ve brought EA into the forefront of genre publications,” said Marguerite Kenner, EA’s co-owner. “Two new shows joined the original trio, and we’ve been honored with major award wins and nominations including the Ignyte, Hugo, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Aurora, and Academy of Podcasters awards. Our supporters and audience have been there for us at every step.
But genre magazines are precarious. For all our millions of annual streams and downloads, only about 2% of our audience are donors, a number that hasn’t significantly changed in ten years. Most years, EA barely breaks even. Over the last three years even that has been the exception rather than the rule, with outside investment being required. And we aren’t alone; it’s been heartbreaking to see fellow publications struggle with the same issues, or shutter completely.
So we asked a different question — what could we do to set EA up for the greatest chance at long term success without compromising our values? We refused to consider dropping our pay rates, or abandoning our commitment to pay every single member of our crew, from editors to community moderators. We talked to experts in both the genre publishing and podcasting spaces, and decided that becoming a nonprofit was the best next step.”
Further details will follow in the coming weeks as the change takes place, including a company-wide metacast planned for mid to late January and a new FAQ section on the company’s website. Release schedules of the podcasts are not impacted by the change.
About Escape Artists
Escape Artists Inc. is a US-based media company. We specialize in creating free-to-listen short fiction podcasts including the original science fiction podcast, Escape Pod. Our award-winning content is downloaded or streamed millions of times a year. Visit EscapeArtists.net for more information and our press kit.
On January 1, 2023, we will become the Escape Artists Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Hello everyone! Escape Artists is so excited to announce that we are running our first ever audience survey from November 15th to 30th!
We are interested in learning more about you, our audience, including how you engage with our shows, your access needs, what content you enjoy and want to see more of, and how you think we could be doing better. We hope to evaluate and improve how we create our episodes, benchmark our diversity/equity/inclusion progress, and tell potential sponsors/advertisers about our audience.
The survey is anonymous and takes under 5 minutes to complete, and you have the chance to enter a draw to win an EA SWAG BAG full of incredible EA merchandise!
Thank you, as always, for your incredible support, and we can’t wait to hear from you!
EA is so excited and proud to congratulate PodCastle co-editor Shingai Njeri Kagunda for winning the 2022 Ignyte Award for her novella “And This is How to Stay Alive“!
Congratulations to all other finalists and winners as well!