Ella Watts Q&A

Ella is a Podcast Producer at BBC Studios, in this Q&A she talks about her work at the BBC, the wider Audio Fiction space and her recent Kickstarter success.

As a podcast producer for BBC Studios, what kind of areas of the whole podcasting process does a producer tend to touch on?


A producer in audio covers pretty much the entire creative process - from sourcing and connecting with interesting talent, to developing and pitching ideas with them in both fiction and non-fiction. We’ll then go on to cast, organise and direct recording, and sometimes will also be responsible for sound engineering the recording of a podcast. After that, a producer will either put together a rough edit of the recording to then share with a sound designer (which is what I do at the BBC) or edit and sound design the entire thing.


A lot of producers I know are also composers, so they’ll score their episodes too. After that you share with the world, and again if you’re an indie you’ll likely be one of your show’s biggest advocates, and take responsibility for marketing it and sending out press materials etc. But I tend to find when it comes to social media and marketing, even in the indie space, that life is a lot easier when you work with people who specialise in these industries.


The thing I love about being a podcast producer is this enormous amount of creative control you have over a project, which is really hard to get in a lot of other corners of the media sector (like film and television, for example).


Within podcasting, are there any things beyond the basic audio that you think could add to the experience e.g., Chapter Art, Transcripts, Companion websites that are not yet being fully utilised?


I’d really love to see transcripts being used more widely - especially by major content producers like the BBC, Audible and Spotify. But I’d also like to take it a step further. I think it’d be amazing if we could make transcripts engaging pieces of media in their own rights. Don’t just share a plain text document: consider working with a graphic designer, embedding video, commissioning artists. My utopian ideal would be that every podcast came with an engaging digital ‘magazine’ of a transcript that presents a totally engaging, enriching experience for all audiences, and especially the Deaf and HoH community.


You were recently co-curator for the Audio Drama Day at the London Podcast Festival what things did you look for in those you invited to take part and how did you feel the day went (and the wider festival as a whole)?

I was! We have a couple of things to take into consideration. First, we try hard not to pick the same shows. We’ve only been going two years now, but we don’t want things to get repetitive. And on that note, we’re really aware of the fact that we have a responsibility to seek out creators from a wide range of communities. This meant we were especially interested in hearing from people who are under-represented in podcasting: especially creators of colour, disabled creators, working class creators and trans creators.


I think the festival went really well! I’m especially proud of how safe it was in COVID terms, as we happily wrapped out without any major concerns. But it was also really nice to see even more people this year than our first festival in 2019, and a wide range of audiences in attendance. I really loved seeing a huge crowd in for our first showing - which is a free to attend ‘debut’ hour where we invite interesting upcoming shows who’ve never performed live before to do a minisode. It was free, first thing in the morning on a Sunday, and the room was packed. It’s just really great to see the way the audio fiction community comes out in force to support new creators.



In another article/podcast about your beginnings in audio you talk about after graduating having to couch surf for 8 months to be able to keep going financially, do you think the situation of having to work ‘for exposure’ has become worse compared to the early days of your career?

I think so - I had to take out a £10k private loan to get a Masters degree, and that led directly to where I am now. My generation was the first to get the £9k a year undergraduate fees, so I’m currently in over £50k of student debt. There are less and less paid opportunities that are getting more and more competitive, demanding more and more qualifications which requires more and more debt, and in the UK at least, the financial situation for young people is getting really dire.


Britain still has a deep class issue in its media industry, and a lot of that is built on the fact that it’s only realistic to try and break into the industry if you have an existing amount of wealth to fall back on. If you need money to live, it’s almost impossible to get in, and that reinforces class hierarchies and inequality.


This said, it’s not impossible. Whilst I grew up in a very privileged family, I’ve since lost that, and as a 25 year old with no savings to fall back on, I managed to get by thanks to the generosity of friends and colleagues.


I do recommend that anyone interested in working in media get a BJTC or NCTJ accredited qualification as soon as they can in their education, and a driver’s licence. I needed my MA because without a BJTC qualification, my applications just weren’t being taken seriously. If you can get that at college or undergrad, you can save yourself a lot of time and money and move into the industry much sooner.


How has the pandemic impacted your work personally and the wider industry - in both positive and negative ways?


A lot of the shows made at BBC Studios were recorded with live theatre audiences, so for my department that was a huge learning curve that I think they tackled really well. For me personally, my work didn’t change enormously: a lot of my work was flexible already, and concerned digital global communities, which meant I was already doing a lot of Zooms. Plus, I had my background in indie fiction that meant I was already accustomed to remote recording.


Whilst I’m a huge fan of remote recording for the way it opens up casting opportunities and saves money on studio hires, I do really miss being in-person for studio recordings. It’s probably the radio drama geek in me, but I love the romance of recording on set or on location, and I’ve really missed that energy and chemistry over the last two years.



I love audio but to my own detriment Audio Fiction has largely passed me by (I’m quite lazy and stick to what I know!), what would you consider as the ‘Gold Standard’ of Audio Fiction or a great place to start (Mockery Manor and Wooden Overcoats are on my to-do list)?

Ooooh good question! It really depends on what you like. I get asked this question a lot - but to flip it around, it’d be strange to ask “What’s a good TV drama to start with?” or “What’s a good novel to start with?” I could recommend Stranger Things and 1984, but if you don’t like genre fiction, I’d be risking you giving up on television and literature entirely. Which is kind of wild. So there are about 7000 audio fiction shows across a range of genres. 


You’ve mentioned
Mockery Manor and Wooden Overcoats, so I’m assuming you like comedy. If you’re looking for comedy, I would recommend Wooden Overcoats, as a surreal bittersweet sitcom that occasionally leans into farce. I’d also recommend Midnight Burger if you’re up for science fiction - a gentle comedy of cosmic wonder about a dimension hopping all night diner. If you enjoy alternate histories or murder mysteries, Victoriocity is a personal favourite of mine, about a detective and a journalist in a monstrous and ridiculous version of Victorian London.


I also adore Arden, which is a satirical take on true crime and also an adaptation of a Shakespeare play each season - it’s long, so I’m not sure I’d recommend it to brand new listeners, but as a piece of drama I think it’s sensational, especially season 2.


Length of a podcast series is something that is often discussed, for Audio Drama do you think there’s a sweet spot, also would you recommend a podcaster dropping a whole season to encourage listening in bulk?

This is an interesting question. I said back in 2018 that I think on average it takes 2 years minimum for a podcast to become commercially successful, and it was interesting seeing some data to support that in a recent edition of Podnews. I think generally speaking when you look at audio fiction that gets really huge numbers, they’re shows with 50-200 episodes. So for example Welcome to Night Vale, The Magnus Archives and The Adventure Zone. Obviously the problem with this is that if you try to make a commercial podcast paying union rates, 200 episodes of an audio drama is stratospherically expensive. 


I don’t think you need 50-200 episodes to be successful, but I do think you should have a plan for how you’re going to consistently engage those audiences for those crucial first two years. I also think it’s about your content: audiences aren’t really interested in peppered series that covers new casts of characters every few episodes. It’s about habit-forming, creating companionship for your listeners.


All the shows I just mentioned have a consistent core cast of recurring characters, except The Adventure Zone - where you could argue the McElroys themselves are the characters listeners come back to. I also think it’s interesting that Balance is their longest running series and remains their most successful.


For all of these reasons, I think season dropping is a bad idea. This only really works if you’ve got enormous cash behind you to invest in large-scale, global marketing. If you’re Netflix or Disney, sure. But if you’re an indie creator, you need that renewed grass-roots marketing opportunity with every new episode drop as often as possible. This is why we’re seeing even commercial commissioners go for 20-40 episode commissions in non-fiction. When you drop everything at once, you lose that chance to keep your audience interested for months, and you really lose momentum.


Podcasting is increasingly becoming an initial starting point for something that ends up becoming a TV show, do you think the influx of interest of all things podcasting from the tech giants could provide a fertile ground for Audio Drama (either in its own right or as a relatively low cost pilot option for TV drama?)

Maybe. The battle for the soul of audio fiction has been raging for my entire career in audio thus far, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere any time soon. I think it would be heart-breaking if audio fiction was consolidated into exclusively an IP breeding ground. Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes I want to go to the theatre to see a play that was meant to be a play. I feel the same way about audio fiction. There are beautiful, exciting creative tools that are exclusive to sonic storytelling, and it would be a tragedy to lose them.


This said, we live in a world defined by commercial capital, and I like to think I’m not too naive. If tech giants like Netflix, Apple, Spotify and Audible start pouring cash into audio fiction in the hopes of building a TV IP mine, I hope that at least some of that cash starts coming back to indie creators. But I worry we’ll just see the medium colonised by the same inequalities and lack of opportunities for marginalised creators that already exist in film and television.


I think what we really need is for governments to pay attention to this change in the landscape and start investing on the ground floor in access schemes for people from marginalised backgrounds. It’s something that I think is really exciting about the work Passer Vulpes has done with ABC, for example, in what the Audio Content Fund and the Arts Council are doing here in the UK and in what CBC has been doing in working with existing indie podcast creators.


Compared to two celebrities chatting about being celebrities for 45 minutes, Audio Fiction is far more labour intensive in all aspects (writing/production/editing), how difficult is it to convince commissioners of the artistic value of the genre given those issues?

Sean Howard from the Fable and Folly Network has done a lot of great work on this question in regards to educating advertisers, but it’s also applicable to commissioners. I think there are three strong arguments.


The first - as you mentioned above, is the IP goldmine. Audio fiction is expensive compared to non-fiction podcasts. It’s incredibly cheap compared to TV drama. You can use a podcast to effectively ‘pilot’ a TV show idea, do some market research, see what works and what doesn’t, for less money than commissioning one pilot episode. That can be really attractive to companies which make TV and audio, like Amazon and the BBC. There’s also the fact that securing a TV commission off the back of a podcast can be a huge windfall for a production company, which pays off the initial investment in the podcast and then some.


The second argument is that audio fiction has a very, very long tail. This is Sean Howard’s argument - audio fiction is evergreen. Listeners relisten to their favourite audio dramas 10, 20, 50, 100 times. They’re also consistent in a way that non-fiction audiences aren’t. In audio fiction, the audience you have at episode three is still going to be with you at episode 100. In non- fiction, if the celebrity your two celebrities are talking to isn’t interesting to you, you don’t listen to that episode. If the news is out of date, you don’t relisten to your news podcast.


The same is true of sports and topical comedy. Non-fiction podcasts get huge numbers, but they also get erratic numbers, varying wildly from one episode to the next. Fiction is consistent, and it’s still consistent 10 years later, when a lot of non-fiction shows have disappeared from the public consciousness. This is why a show like We’re Alive, which ended in 2014, is still getting new download figures in the millions.


The third argument is the ethical one. As TV and film executives get more and more shy of ‘risking’ hiring new voices, visual media ossifies into the same unequal hierarchies we see writ large across the Global North. Podcasting does not magically remove these inequalities - and it’s still true that it’s very difficult for marginalised creators to get into the medium. This is thanks to a combination of factors: it’s a white, male, cis dominated space that alienates people. It requires a huge amount of time and energy that makes it very difficult to engage in if, for example, you have any kind of disability or illness that causes fatigue. In the sheer volume of time required to make a podcast well and market it, it’s ludicrously expensive. You’re asking people to spend 30, 40 hours of their week working on something that may never pay any dividends and is more likely to cost them hundreds or even thousands of pounds.


For a very large number of people, that’s just not realistic. This said, podcasting and audio fiction have become a very exciting space in which new voices can share their talent with the world, instantly. And that’s a way to find exciting new voices, to ‘test’ them with a podcast series, and to then bring them up into other parts of the industry like film and television. For some commissioners, audio fiction can be viewed as a very useful new talent scheme.


Away from podcasting, congratulations on hitting your initial Kickstarter goal for your Tabletop RPG in just 18 hours and eventually raising £22k, can you talk a bit about the game and how it came about?

Thank you so much! The elevator pitch for Upriver, Downriver is that it’s a pastoral fantasy TTRPG where you play as the crew of a ship on the Great River who’ve sworn a magical oath to reach either its source or the sea. It uses dice rolling and drawing tarot cards as its core mechanics, and is an environmentalist post-war fantasy about boats and death. We often reference Wanderhome and Agon as good tonal comparisons.


Upriver, Downriver
was born out of cabin fever in the first few months of lockdown. I’ve been playing TTRPGs since 2013, and I really love the medium. I also have a background as a semi-professional sailor. At first, I just wrote the game long-hand, only really intending to play it with my friends. I poured into it everything I wanted to see and do in TTRPGs - boat mechanics! Playing as a ghost of your character! Drawing tarot cards and getting powerful abilities or curses! But then I started typing it up and shared it with my partner Max Briar, who wanted to illustrate it. At first we were going to release it for free, but I mentioned this to Sasha Sienna at MacGuffin and Company, and they gently pointed out that releasing a fully illustrated 130 page game manual for free sort of devalues the hard work done by indie TTRPG creators.


Sasha asked to read the game, and as it turned out they and their husband Jonny really loved it. They asked to partner with Max and I to co-develop the game and fund it on Kickstarter, and that led to where we are now! It’s been a real whirlwind, and overwhelming to see how many people were willing to support this wild thing we did. I’m very excited for it to exist in the world.


How have you found the experience of using Kickstarter, for your next one (or if you could start this one again) is there anything you’ve learnt that you’d apply.

I’m very wary of using Kickstarter again given their recent decision to use blockchain. It was enormously disappointing to myself and, as I understand it, thousands of other creators worldwide. I’m not sure where I’ll go next, but I’ll likely investigate things like Indiegogo, Seed and Spark and Itch funding. Fortunately, Kickstarter has no shortage of competitors in the crowdfunding space. Unfortunately, for now at least it does have the greatest reach in terms of audience, and so I cannot and will not begrudge any indie creators who continue to use it. I have the privilege of choice, I’m conscious that not everyone does.


This said, in terms of general crowdfunding lessons - I think my biggest thing is that I really underestimated the lead time needed in terms of press coverage. I’m used to working on a 1-3 months ahead of launch timeline for things like articles / digital press coverage. But for a TTRPG, actual-plays on podcasts and streams are crucial, and spaces fill up fast. They’re good not only for marketing but also for offering audiences a different way of accessing the game. A lot of people find it easier to learn or get a sense of a new TTRPG if they watch or listen to it being played. We didn’t have that for the first few weeks of our campaign, and I really felt that disadvantage.


 If I were doing it again, I’d be sending out materials 6 months minimum ahead of the campaign. I’d also probably bring on a few more people to help me manage the marketing side of things. I think the way that Rich at Hatchling Games has handled the lead up to
Overisles is a really good example of a kind of ‘best in class’ strategy that I’d want to follow in future crowdfunding projects.


I also would have loved to secure a bit more art - but that’s a bit of a Catch 22, as I refuse to ask artists to work for free, and we just didn’t really have any substantial existing investment that we could spend on the game ahead of launching the campaign. But I think it continues to be true that art is one of the deciding factors in a successful TTRPG crowdfunding campaign.


Although it’s a different area to your experience in Audio Fiction obviously storytelling is a key component of both, is there anything in particular from your background that has helped to make the Kickstarter a success?

I think that partnering with MacGuffin and Company was enormously helpful for us, and we wouldn’t have succeeded without Jonny and Sasha. I met Jonny and Sasha thanks to my work in the podcast community, and Jonny’s success in creating The Magnus Archives has allowed him to build a really positive professional relationship with an incredible community of generous fans who are really keen to support queer, independent projects like Upriver, Downriver. There’s also the fact that Sasha and Jonny have been part of the UK’s TTRPG scene for over a decade.


Sasha’s network of contacts in the space has meant that we’ve been able to make a really good game, and I don’t think it would be anything close to what it is without her expertise. Releasing the Quickstart Guide on MacGuffin and Co’s newsletter and Patreon ahead of the campaign launch helped us drum up real support from that community, and running the streams of the game gave us a huge boost.


Outside of MacGuffin, in general the generosity of people in the TTRPG space is why this Kickstarter worked. Especially the
Beholder to No One podcast, Planet Arcana, Two Weeks One Shot, Snyder’s Return  and The Secret Nerd. On Twitch, we would not have got as far as we did without Brambleberry Games. And the support of designers like Rich at Hatchling Games made and continues to make a huge difference. I can’t list everyone that helped us, but we really wouldn’t be where we are without the incredible generosity of the audio fiction and TTRPG communities.


Outside of, honestly, the kindness of others, I like to think that I had something worth saying which people wanted to hear. I wanted to make a story in the style of
Princess Mononoke and The Hobbit, but I wanted it to be queer throughout. Queer romances and trans characters are woven throughout the book. I wanted to see queerness in an epic, fairytale fantasy like this. I love the way that TTRPGs let us destigmatize death - the way they let us practice talking about death and grieving, the way they let us confront that fear and that sadness. So I wrote a game about it. I wanted to talk about the overwhelming force of the natural world - because I grew up sailing boats on the North Sea in storms and walking into the Australian desert and getting stuck up mountains in blizzards. And whilst all of these things were the result of immense privilege, the most important thing they taught me is that the natural world always wins. That you aren’t bigger or stronger than the sea, and that’s ok. That if we’re going to do something about the oncoming climate catastrophe, we need to learn that it’s not about saving planet earth. Earth will continue to exist long after us, just as it did long before us. Preventing the acceleration of climate change isn’t about saving the world. It’s about saving us.


So in my game, you can die easily, and if you don’t break your oath you pass on, and you don’t know what happens to your character. In my game, the river always, always wins, and characters are not stronger, or more powerful than the world. In my game a 16 year old non-binary person just inherited the bloody legacy of an empire, and needs to figure out what to do with it. I think that resonated with people. I hope it did.



Big thanks to Ella for her time answering the questions. On the subject of Audio Fiction, this gets a positive mention in the the first Podland of 2022 where Jonas Woost of Pacific Content gives his predictions for 2022 in podcasting based on discussions with a variety of people in the industry.



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