The Audio Drama Indie Awards – The Show for Hidden Gems

The Audio Drama Indie Awards is a volunteer-run award show designed to help highlight Hidden Gems in audio drama – the new, the undiscovered, and the underpraised. Submissions will be curated by volunteer judges and winners will be chosen by popular vote among the finalists.

The words "THE AuDIAs," with the AuDIAs font hollow, each letter filled with a color of the rainbow. The text is laid over a background image of a soundboard.

Notice

The mods of the AuDIAs are incredibly grateful for the support and enthusiasm we’ve seen for this event over the last week since opening nominations – you all are absolutely wonderful, we’ve been amazed at the number of submissions received! That said, we’ve already had to make some tough calls and wish to be as transparent as possible, along with ensuring that we’re all on the same page, going forward.

Within the week, we’ve had to close five of our seven nomination categories. While we understand this may be frustrating for those who were initially unaware of the event and who may now feel as if they’re being disallowed from participating, we want to remind everyone that this is a free awards project created by a team of three, who are working on this in our spare time. The audio drama community is wonderful and dedicated, but we will be adjusting our internal qualifications and culling nominations down to a manageable number, which means that not every submitted show will be eligible.

While we know (and agree) that nearly every podcast can qualify as indie, these awards were created hoping to highlight hidden gems specifically within audio drama, and is the reason we’re changing our eligibility requirements. We love this community, and we know that everyone is small compared to relative giants in the space, but, first and foremost, we’re aiming to uplift the hidden gems and give the shows you’ve never heard of before a chance to shine.

Thank you again for all the support, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out anytime at support@audias.org. We hope this event helps you all to find some new shows to check out, and meet our goal of really celebrating the unheard-of shows out there in this community!

What are the rules?

For a podcast to qualify…

You may nominate a show you are affiliated with, or one you are just a fan of. Please do not nominate a show for more than 5 categories.

Both creators and listeners are allowed to nominate and to vote.

There’s no hard and fast rule for how small a podcast must be, but we encourage you to nominate your favorite lesser-known podcasts; this awards show is for the hidden gems out there!

Once the nomination submission deadline passes, review teams of 2-5 judges per category will listen to the first episode of each submission (up to 40 submissions per category) and decide on which shows to nominate for the awards. If you’d like to be on one of those review teams, you can fill out this form. (Don’t worry, reviewers cannot judge for categories for which their own shows have been submitted.)

After a couple of months to give the review team time to make their decisions and us time to contact nominees, nominations will be announced and public voting will commence.

What are the categories?

There are 10 categories: 7 genre categories, 2 aspect categories, and an overall best. Only the Review Team can nominate for Best Writing, Best Sound Design, and Overall Best, picking from the submissions for the other categories.

What do the winners get?

The winners will be shouted out on all of the AuDIAs socials. They’ll also receive winner graphics to display on their websites, as well as a physical sticker in the mail. There’s no monetary reward, but we’ll do our best to get your show out to more ears if you win!

Who runs this thing?

The awards are run by Haven, Finch, and Kaylie. You can find out more about us below!

Haven (ey/em)

Haven (ey/em) is a disabled audio drama writer and sound designer dedicated to putting more queer, disabled art out into the world. Ey are the creator of Apocalypse Radio, The Soulmate Quest, and the upcoming Super Duper and In Every Universe.

https://audicinal.info

Finch (he/him)

Finch (he/him) is an Appalachian-based borderline-podcaster who spends almost all of his free time thinking about audio fiction and drinking too much caffeine. He is the founder and executive director of the online podcasting community Podcast Book Club, alongside the producer of sci-fi audio drama SPACE SPECKS. You can find him on Tumblr @smallsies, where he’s probably posting about dogs or doomed by the narrative plotlines.

https://podcast-bookclub.com/

https://spacespeckspod.com/

https://smallsies.carrd.co/

Hand drawn profile picture of a femme-presenting person

Kaylie (she/her)

Kaylie (she/her) is an audio drama performer & producer with Roll for Impact, and she is a new, but passionate collector of rare & important audio dramas, especially anything TTRPG/improv.

https://bsky.app/profile/kaylierfi.bsky.social

https://www.rollforimpact.com

Okay, so, when does it happen?

We’re glad you asked! Here’s the plan.

Submissions

March 16th – April

Contact

April – Mid May

Review

May – June

Voting

July 1st – July 31st

Winners

An Upcoming Audio Drama Sunday!

FAQs