Two months ago: Covid-19 hits. Your job lays you off. With a ton of time at home all of a sudden and a USB mic steeped in dreams of voicing for Call of Duty instead of just playing it, you decide to use $400 of your $1200 stimulus check and jump into the P2P voiceover world.
Everyone knows how to talk! So what if you don’t yet have a designated space to record and no sound treatment to speak of. You just want to give it a shot! What can it hurt?
If you have no training or experience, and you think throwing some money at a website is going to make you rich, I’m going to tell you to stop right there. For your own good.
Here are six reasons why now is a great time to start your voiceover career, but a terrible time to start a voiceover business:
The House Always Wins:
Even on a day before Covid-19 hit, many P2P sites are rigged worse than Vegas. Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but a lot of these sites now have so many tiers, they should be a wedding cake in the Hamptons. If you’re paying $400, you’re losing jobs to those paying $600, $900, or $12,000 a year, who are being given first crack at the better jobs, which will probably be filled before you even see them. And just because you pay for access, doesn’t mean you’ll book the jobs.
Your Competition Is Fierce (And Numerous):
One large P2P recently boasted they were now home to a MILLION users, attributing that partially to “Aspiring voice talent…registering in record numbers.” So while advertisers are generally advertising LESS right now, more and more people are entering the fray to compete for fewer jobs…against voiceover talent with professional home studios and with a whole lot more experience and skills.
Auditioning IS the Job:
When you start out, you’re going to spend a lot more time auditioning than doing work. According to Backstage, on average, it takes 200 auditions to book 1 job. And if your sound isn’t up to par, or your read doesn’t cut it, your audition is getting tossed out faster than you can say Adobe Audition.
Rates Aren’t What You Think:
Things have changed since 20 or 30 years ago. The huge paychecks that voice actors used to make from commercial jobs have dwindled, both because of the fragmentation of the market and because of the rise of non-union work and P2P sites. Most jobs online are non-union, and therefore unregulated.
As a newcomer, if you DO luck out and book something on a P2P site, it will probably be well below industry standard rates. You might think “Yay! I booked a job that’s going to pay me $100 for about 30 minutes of recording and editing work…that’s $200 an hour!” But once you figure in the hours and hours you’ve spent auditioning to get that one single job, your hourly rate drops below minimum wage pretty quick. (If you figure that it took you 200 auditions to get that job, and you figure an average of 5 minutes per audition with setup time and editing and whatnot, then you’re making twenty cents per hour…I just did the math.)
You Are Your Own Sound Engineer:
If you don’t have any experience recording and editing, that’s going to be a problem as well. Auditions from home need to sound professional and clean, and if you book a job, they often expect you to send edited files, not raw audio. Learning how to properly record and edit can be a long process, depending on your aptitude for technology, but it is essential to running your home VO business.
Voice Actors are More Than Just a Nice Voice:
Voice acting is ACTING. Have you ever seen a “real person” interview on TV, or watched a local business owner do a commercial for their business, when it’s obvious they should have just hired a professional? Just as actors undergo years of training in order to convincingly behave like a real human being in front of an audience or on-camera, voice actors have to train to sound believable and natural on a microphone, reading someone else’s words, often having just received the script a few minutes before recording. If you haven’t trained to be facile at cold reading, if your vocabulary is limited, or if you struggle to emote, then this business probably isn’t going to be for you, at least not without years of training first.
So, by now, you should have realized that I’m not really here to tell you NOT to go into voiceover. I don’t actually want to dissuade anyone from pursuing voiceover if that’s what they truly want to do. But a lot of people seem to see it as an easy way to make money, and something anyone can do…and it is neither of those things.
Getting into animation is almost as hard as becoming a movie star. Video games can wreck your voice. Audiobooks are a lot of work, and don’t pay that well. In order to do this, you have to really want to do it because you love it.
The reality of the voiceover business is that it is a business, which requires a lot of time, money, and persistent effort in order to get established and start making a livable income.
So, if you really want to get into voiceover, DO IT. If you have the time right now, use it to do the work! Because it is all going to take TIME.
If you’re still with me…if you made it this far, and you still want to do this, go here, and get started the right way.
Now is a great time to start your voiceover career. The business will come once you’re ready.