My (No Gear) Voice Over Christmas Wish List
Welcome back and happy holidays.
Christmas is right around the corner. And of course, this is the time of year when voice actors get the steamy undies for all kinds of gear. Mics, interfaces, preamps, amplifiers, headphones, you name it. We want all the gear.
But I think in this season of gratitude and giving, I want kind of a different kind of Christmas wish list this year for voice over.
Sure. I love great gear as much as the next voice actor, but what I want for voice over this year is not for me. It's for everybody. Everybody that calls themselves a voice actor.
So, Santa, if you're listening or watching, here's my list. I've checked it twice and I know you know who's been naughty or nice.
Now, my first wish on my list for voiceover this year is …
I wish we Would all stand up for fair and professional rates
I get it. I get being new, I get imposter syndrome. I get that it's scary to ask prospects for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars, but we're so lucky in this business to have established rates both on the union side with SAG-AFTRA and on the nonunion side with the GVAA and Gravy For the Brain. Pros use these rates every day, but there are a lot of people who don't quote and get fair, reasonable professional rates for their voiceover work.
And there's only one reason: they're not demanding them. Demanding professional rates means you quote them and you stick to them. Now, that doesn't mean you never negotiate, it just means that your rates and your quotes are in line with standard union or nonunion professional rates the overwhelming majority of the time. It doesn't mean you never negotiate. You negotiate appropriately.
But being new and unconfident is not grounds for undercutting your brothers and sisters in the business. There's only one reason to cut rate, and that's if you're not a properly trained professional, in which case you're just somebody with a mic and a mouth.
Get trained, get really good, and get paid appropriately.
Second, and this is no shocker, now….
I wish everyone would get properly trained
Why? Because if everybody could do this, everybody would. It takes months and years to get good at voice acting, and it takes decades to become elite. Stepping into this business without getting proper training first is literally just asking to have your ass handed to you. It's ill-advised and it's unnecessary.
I wish we could all be kinder and gentler to each other
Look, I get it. We all get passionate about our experience and our beliefs. I'm certainly guilty of this. And it's so easy today with social media and all the digital interaction that we have with each other to just fire off a hot take rather than to sit and listen and understand why somebody believes what they believe. It's a problem in the larger culture.
It's a problem with voice actors. And yes, sometimes it's a problem with me and I'm going to work on that.
I wish all of the pay-to-plays were ethical
The chief offender here, of course, is Voices.com, but they're certainly not the only ones that put profit before talent and clients. These companies control a huge amount of work globally in the voiceover business, and it's a travesty to me that rather than seeing themselves as leaders and stewards of our industry, they couldn't give a reindeer turd about anything else other than putting profit ahead of people, clients and talent.
I wish more voiceover casting pay-to-play sites were run ethically like CastVoices, like VOPlanet, like Bodalgo, etc. These companies understand what goes in to becoming a great voice actor. They know what it means to provide excellent customer service to the video buyer. They champion fair and established rates for talent, and they get that business is about service and relationships, and they act and run their businesses accordingly.
I wish that voiceover were a meritocracy
If you put in the time and the effort and the investment to get proper training, to practice your craft and get really good, if you invest in your gear and you invest in your recording space and you're trying to do all the things right as you build your voiceover career, then I believe a meritocracy would say you can find work and support your family while doing what you love.
But so many good voice actors are struggling. Half of us, HALF OF US, are making less than $8,000 a year. Three-quarters of us are making less than $40,000 a year, which means we have a mind-numbingly passive approach to finding work in this business. Three-quarters of us, 75%, reach out to market our services less than three times a day.
And the fact of the matter is that voiceover will never be a meritocracy until everyone knows how to go out and find the work that they're so well trained to do in the first place.
I wish everyone could experience VO conferences
It is so easy in this business to get isolated and squirrely and up in your head and feel like you're out here on a, you know, in a padded cell on an island all on your own.
What we do is, by definition, isolating. And then you throw in a couple of years of pandemic and a lockdown, and it's a wonder all of us aren't in the fetal position in our booths, under a pile of auditions, scripts rocking back and forth and going [unintelligible babble].
But I also know this: after being in radio, in the corporate world, on the stage, in technology, there is no other community quite like voiceover.
We're not competitors. We're collaborators, we're friends, real friends. And nowhere is this more apparent than at voiceover conferences. We get together several times a year and we talk and we laugh and we tell stories and we hug and high-five each other. Did I mention we laugh a lot? Oh, and by the way, we expose ourselves to the expertise and experience and knowledge of the best voice actors and demo producers and agents and coaches and service providers in the world, in the business.
And yeah, we learn a ton at voice over conferences, but with all due respect to the programming and to the people that run and organize these massive, huge, amazing events, the value for me is in the people and the togetherness and the friendships that blossom and bloom from these conferences.
It's here that we learn that we're not the only ones struggling with things. It's here that we learn that we're not alone, that we're not the only ones with fear and occasional self-doubt and worry. We get inspiration from each other and sometimes, mostly without even knowing it, we inspire others.
Yeah. Going to voice over conferences is educational, but more than that, it will fill your soul. Even more than your mind. And that's what I wish everybody could experience.
I wish everyone could have a friend in the business as good as Craig Williams
My dear friend, voice actor Craig Williams
Craig and I met years ago at VO Atlanta, and soon after he asked me to be his accountability buddy and he asked me if we could do a call each week where we could check in on each other and hold each other accountable and support each other.
And we've been doing that for the last several years. And in that time, he has become my biggest cheerleader and supporter and psychiatrist that I have in the business. It's amazing what you can learn about a person when you share a chat just an hour a week. Craig is a great voice actor, there's no doubt about that. But he's even a better person and a better friend.
And I wish everybody, not even just in this business, but everybody at least once in your life. If you could find a friend like Craig. That's what I would wish for you.
I wish voiceover had no snake oil salespeople
Look, it takes a metric fuck ton of work to become a professional voice actor. And while the number is still very small, our business, just like most, has our fair share of shysters who will exploit you for your dreams and take your money.
They say things like, “Hey, you can make six figures while working in your jammies from home doing voiceover.” And while that's technically true, you can, and I do. (Sometimes I wear my jammies. Not always the ugly Christmas sweater.) The fact is, it takes years to get there and it's not going to be their weekend webinar with a so-called professional demo at the end that's going to flip the switch for you.
It's not as easy as getting a USB mic and a Fiverr account. It's not as easy as sitting on the pay-to-plays all day. It takes years of work and grit and resilience and coaching and practice and frustrations and failures and successes and everything it requires to go out and actually live your dream.
But it's so much easier to be mezmorised by the shiny object and the slick salesperson and the visions of easy money.
Just the performance end of this business is astonishingly hard to learn. There are Hollywood celebrity on camera voice actors who are literally shocked when they come to understand what goes into becoming an accomplished voice actor. And then remember, you still have to learn the audio production and tech end and the marketing and sales into the business.
If someone is touting Fiverr or Upwork or a course or a piece of gear or a webinar, seminar, you name it, as the solution in the thing that's going to make you successful in voiceover, they're lying. Because there's not one thing that will make you successful in voiceover.
What will make you successful in voiceover is you. It's your grit. It's your resilience. It's your practicing your craft. It's your training, your coaching, your dedication, and your consistency that will make you successful. Everything else is just a tool. Great tools make the job easier, but they don't build the house for you.
The VO Freedom Master Plan takes voice actors with no marketing plan, no business plan, relying on the pay-to-plays, oftentimes making part-time income, to having a proven system and a plan to start and grow relationships at-scale that lead to consistent booking, business, revenue, and income.
Click this link for that and also click the link for my Move Touch Inspire newsletter, which comes out every Thursday specifically for voice actors, you can get that for free in this link as well.
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From my family, my son Robbie and myself, to you and your family, no matter what you celebrate this year, we wish you a happy, healthy, a warm Holiday Season. I'm so deeply grateful for your support.
Thank you so much. And we'll see you back here soon.