8 BRUTALLY Honest, NO Bullshit Truths About Voice Over for Beginners
Here are 8 brutally honest, no bullshit truths about voice over that all new beginners need to know. It you had a room of 10 pro voice actors, I’d venture to say that 9 out of 10 would agree on these truths.
Are there are exceptions to all of these? Yes. But they are very rare. They are edge cases and by far not the norm.
Knowing these truths up front will save you years of sifting through hot garbage that is coated in snake oil, coated in sugar, and fried to a deep, dark brown.
So put your big girl panties on and listen up.
#8. No One Gives a Shit How Pretty Your Voice Is.
“I’ve been told I have a great voice. They call me Golden Tones, or Silky Sounds, or Velvet Voice, or the Melodious Muse.” 🤮
No one cares. This is the pros. You may have been the smartest kid in high school, but this is the Ivy League and it’s full of smart kids with pretty voices. We’ve ALL been told we have a nice voice.
The blunt truth is that if you can’t act, you won’t work much.
That was true 2 years ago. It’s even more true now because you know who else can’t act and is orders of magnitude cheaper than you to hire? Our new colleague, Generative AI.
And even the successful voice actors who haven’t been told they have a great voice are great actors. See Drescher, Fran. See also Gottfried, Gilbert, the late.
You cannot get by in this business with a nice voice and no acting skills. That’s like saying you’d make a great carpenter because you have nice hands.
#7. No Matter What Your Background, You Need to Train in Voice Over.
I don’t care if you’ve done 67 years of radio, 5 decades as an anchorman, 27 musicals, and sing like Taylor Swift. Voice acting is a different skill set and you need to train in that skill set.
I speak from experience, when I got back into voice over, I had done 15 years on the radio, produced and voiced over 6000 radio commercials, and had done over 30 plays. All of that meant years and years of training in habits that are incompatible with voice acting. I sounded like a disc jockey swallowed a carnival barker who got tea-bagged by Nathan Lane.
Thank god I was smart enough to know that voice acting is a different animal, and the first thing I did was seek out a coach to start finding out what I didn’t know and developing skills I didn’t have. Did a background in acting also help? Yes, but because it was stage acting, the technique is very different from voice acting and I had a tone to learn and unlearn.
If you’re a broadcast pro, or a stage actor, singer, PA announcer, or anything adjacent to voice acting, just understand that while there are some advantages, no doubt, there are also disadvantages and that your background is no substitute for working with a reputable voice over coach.
#6. The Days of New Talent Relying on the Pay-to-Play Platforms Are Over.
Even pre-COVID, there were more voice actors than ever before. Once COVID-19 struck and everyone with lungs and a USB mic thought they could be a voice actor, the pay-to-play platforms became overrun with untrained and undertrained voice actors.
That flood not only increased the quantity of competition by orders of magnitude, but it also drove down rates and altered the algorithms. The goal of any P2P is to take a relatively little amount of work and distribute auditions to a massive number of voice actors in such a way that the client gets back the best auditions for that project.
With so much garbage in the system, and I mean literal garbage – horrible audio, awful performances, room noise, mouth noise, lawnmowers and leaf blowers, people arguing in the next unit over, you name it, the algorithms become less reliable, and the relatively few veteran voice actors who had already trained the algorithms and developed the relationships are the ones who are now still reaping the benefits.
And this is not a problem you can just throw cash at. If you can’t deliver the goods technically and artistically, don’t think you can toss a couple grand at a higher tier on Voice123 and you’ll be successful.
#5. If You Don’t Learn to Market Your Services, You Will Struggle to Find Work.
I’m going to say that again: as a new talent, if you don’t learn to market your voice over services, you will always struggle to find work.
As I just said, the days of new talent relying on the pay-to-plays are over. You have two other ways to find work.
Through an agent.
Marketing your services.
But if you’re a newer talent without much experience, you will likely work with lower-tiered agents who don’t bring much good work. What’s more, you’ll be competing with dozens or hundreds of other voice actors for each job. The better your agent, the better those voice actors you’re competing against and the better actor you will have to be to book.
Only elite voice talent rely entirely on their agents for work. As a beginner, getting an agent will not be a game changer. It will not “get you noticed.” It is not your “big break.” It will not bring you full-time income anytime soon.
That leaves learning to market your services. One of the essential functions of any business is marketing and sales. Without that, there is no reliable funnel of customers and no real growth. The P2Ps aren’t going to save you. Your agent isn’t going to save you. You are going to have to put in the work to learn how to market just like you put in the work to learn how to be a good actor, record, and edit.
75% of voice actors report making less than $50,000 and 75% report reaching out to market their services less than three times a day. 50% of all American voice actors make less than $8,000 a year. 50%! Coincidence? Hardly.
If you’re getting in this business in 2024 to make $10 grand a year, congratulations, you don’t need to market. Everyone else does.
#4. If You Work for Fiverr Rates, You Cannot Have a Profitable Business.
I don’t care who says otherwise or how big their YouTubechannel is. A business needs to charge what it needs to charge to be profitable. Otherwise, it is either a charity or a failed business.
Charging bottom of the barrel rates will lead directly to an unprofitable business. If you’re signing up to be a charity or to fail, knock yourself out on that $35 a holler rubbish.
Otherwise, you need to charge what it takes to support yourself, your family, and your business in your home country. You do not charge less because you’re selling your services to a third-world country unless you live and operate your business and are subject to the cost of living in a third-world country.
Operating a profitable business does not mean overcharging. It does not mean ripping people off. It does not mean being deceitful or manipulative in any way. It means having the skill to deliver a professional service and charging appropriately for doing that.
I don’t care if you work on Fiverr. Just charge appropriate professional rates. I have it on good authority that those jobs do exist on Fiverr and Upwork and can be found. But you have to be willing to stick to your guns.
#3. There Is Only 1 Reason to Work for Shitty Rates: You Are Untrained or Undertrained.
You don’t get to charge less because you’re new. A first-year surgical resident doesn’t give you a discount hip replacement. You don’t get 60% off of airfare because the pilot is a rookie. These are professionals and professionals charge based on their training.
Would you work with a guy who offered a great rate and watched a few surgery videos on YouTube? Hey, he’s got a relatively rust-free filet knife! That’s the same thing, right?
You don’t get to charge less to win the work. Emma O’Neill told me of one casting director who was looking for a specific role and had to cast a wider than normal net, so she put the casting notice on one of the big pay-to-plays.
She received multiple notes from voice actors who offered to do the work for substantially less than the stated budget, which was in line with pro rates.
If you’re one of them, you’re not a pro. You’re a hack. You don’t have the goods to compete so you have to bribe the client to get the work.
If you’re asking other businesses for money, get trained or get out.
#2. Looking for Work Before Getting Properly Trained Will Kill Your Career Before It Starts.
How arrogant do you have to be to think you, with no training yourself, can compete with pros who have been training for years, often decades?
If some snake oil salesman told you that this happens, they’re lying. It doesn’t. Ever. Not at pro rates.
What does happen is that well-trained, yet lesser inexperienced voice actors can beat out highly experienced actors for any given role. That happens a lot. But the difference is the training. You can win without a lot of experience. You can’t win without training.
Every year in every sport, there’s a Rookie of the Year who just lights up the league. They’re called rookies because they don’t have a lot of experience, but they’ve been getting elite level coaching for decades. They been putting in the work for years. They are well prepared for the big leagues.
And it’s the preparation that makes them successful, not the experience.
And #1. This is a business and like any business, it takes investment.
You cannot expect to start any business, even voice over, without investing in it. You will need to invest in performance training, gear, a properly treated recording space, demos and a website, and marketing training, not to mention setting up your legal entity, and investing in other business tools like a CRM.
You don’t get to collect dividends before you make the investment. That’s not how life works.
The good news about voice over is that startup costs are absurdly low. It takes about $10-15 thousand to initially set your VO business up properly.
The other good news is that you don’t incur that entire expense all at once. You start with research and training, with basic pro gear, maybe an ugly but effective recording space, a professional but clean and small 1-page website, and you evolve our business assets and tools and grow over time.
Starting a business also costs a ton of time - more than you can imagine, especially if you already have a full-time job and/or other responsibilities like caregiving to a loved one or other obligations.
Do you have the money, time, energy, and skills to start your business? If yes, go nuts. If not, you’ll either have to acquire them, work toward acquiring them, or wait until you can acquire them.
Or, this business may not be for you.
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Thanks for the conversations we have here on the blog, on Youtube, in the VO Pro Community and the VO community at large. The more we talk, the more we listen, the more we exchange ideas and information, the better, stronger voiceover industry we can have.
We’ll see ya again here soon. Thanks for watching and/or reading.