By: Corey Dylan
There are SO many opportunities to use your voice to make money in Voiceover. I don’t know anyone who is an overnight success but if you start now you should be able to create a business for yourself and make some money with persistence!
TRAINING: I saw the writing on the radio wall several years ago and knew I needed to start my own biz so I decided to start training with a renowned L.A. VO Coach & Demo Producer via phone. Her name is Nancy Wolfson and her biz is called BraintracksAudio.com. There are many coaches out there and many who claim to be coaches who will gladly take your money so ask around and interview them. I think many of the best coaches are charging about $160 per hour.
Depending on what kind of VO you’re hoping to do I can recommend some other coaches. I trained with Nancy for over a year before she felt I was ready to record the demo that cost about $2000. All told I probably spent over $9000 in training, equipment and demo production. I did all of this while still working FT in radio. I recommend you DO get some training and have a demo professionally produced because almost every script you’ll see calls for a “natural, non-announcery, non-DJ read.” Producers and Agents do NOT want DJ’s. They want and hire actors and professional VO talent. In fact, I use my legal name for VO and a stage name for radio. Your read needs to sound as though the words on the page are coming from YOU, in character...not a DJ read that’s sing-songy with no connection to what you’re actually saying.
WHERE TO FIND WORK: Once you’ve trained and have a demo you may want to join Voice123.com for approx $400 per year. Bodalgo is also fairly respected. There are many other pay-for-play services out there but not many are reputable and some lie about the commission they take to broker the deal between talent and client. You will audition A LOT and likely do more auditioning than booking. When you start, your booking ratio may be 100 auditions to 1 booking...and it’s very, very competitive. Your best bet to get clients is to reach out to your LOCAL video production studios, marketing directors and advertising company execs. Direct business will always pay more. If you’re serious about VO, stay away from sites like Fiverr (or if you go that route, use a fake name). The pro VO community tends to frown upon people that do this work so cheaply as they feel it brings the industry down. And if you’re serious about a future in VO I wouldn’t piss off the working pros! LinkedIn and other social media outlets can be a great resource too. Join VO groups and interact!
I think it’s been said that you’re working in the booth 20% of the time and marketing your services 80% of the time. I’m still working on this to try to find more business and repeat clients!
REPRESENTATION: I’ve had a couple of boutique VO agents but primarily only work with one out of Atlanta right now, Houghton Talent. To land the big agents you’ll typically need to be consistently booking big jobs yourself.
EQUIPMENT: I list all the tools I use on my website CoreyDylan.com (in my “Shop”) but I bought a top of the line mic that’s widely used in VO, the Sennheiser Mkh 416 shotgun mic $800 from Sweetwater.com. You can work out of a closet stuffed with clothes and some fiberglass panels (for soundproofing) like I do and get started with less expensive equipment like the free editing software, Audacity, though I use TwistedWave for Mac $120 and the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 A/D converter $100. Less expensive but highly recommended mics are the RODE NT1-A and the AT-2020 (Audio Technica).
I also use Quickbooks for accounting ($20 per month) and Source Connect so that I can patch into any studio anywhere ($35 per month) and various fees associated with my website like VoiceZam (for JenOConnorVO.com).
YOUR WEBSITE: You’ll definitely need your own website and you’ll want to own the domain vs wix or something else that merely tags wix.com/yoursitenamehere. For this you *may want to use a site like Fiverr but vet the developers carefully or build a simple site yourself. I’ve had several websites built over the years for radio and VO and they typically cost at least $1000, give or take. Again, you can build a simple one yourself that includes demos and contact info. This guy has built a business building sites for voice actors https://www.voiceactorwebsites.com/ and https://courvo.com/resources/fellow-vo-websites
READING & RESOURCES:
http://globalvoiceacademy.com/rate-guide/
https://www.gravyforthebrain.com/voice-over-talent-websites-the-ultimate-list/
https://www.mediavillage.com/article/why-doesnt-your-ad-have-a-female-voiceover-it-should/
http://denzillacey.com/imaging-in-2018-ann-dewig-vo/
https://www.sagaftra.org/introducing-sag-aftra-talent-rates-you-can-afford-miami-local-regional-code
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/ways-aim-high-voice-acting-8702/
VIDEOS:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ewabsshow
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHHf1h8k7MA6-AG8FXjnQSw
https://vobuzzweekly.com/
https://www.ispot.tv/