How to Make a Stellar Audio Drama as an Indie Podcaster 🎭

On producing fiction podcast City of Ghosts soup to nuts

My very first podcast was fiction — almost a decade ago, back in the early days of podcasting — and my collaborator and I had so much fun making it. Since then, I’ve been producing primarily chatcast style shows, but my recent artist rumspringa has got me noodling a lot more in the narrative direction, including fiction. Because of that… and because City of Ghosts is such a well-made indie pod, I’m thrilled about the wisdom and transparency co-creators Ryan Patch and Carina Green offered in their Q&A about how they made the show and what they learned in the process. Let’s get into it!

I read on your website that this was a pandemic project. How long had you been working on it prior to Covid, and how did the production find its legs when the lockdowns hit?

CG: We actually first started working on this project all the way back in 2018. Ryan and I went to a grad school screenwriting program together. He sent an email to our cohort mentioning that he was looking for more projects to direct and had become interested in podcasts as a cool storytelling medium. I happened to have fallen down the…