So you’ve read Part 1 of Breaking Into Audiobooks and you’re still interested? Great! Now that you know the recipe for a successful narrator, here’s a list of eleven practical things you can do to get started! Take “The Test”: This suggestion was originally offered up by colleague Sean Pratt in his excellent blog post “So…
I receive inquiries from enthusiastic folks all the time asking how they might be able to break into audiobooks. It’s becoming such popular field, and though I try to answer everyone individually, lately it just isn’t possible, so I thought I’d write a post about it instead, with some tips and insight into how to…
Well we made it! Here we are at the last day of the year. I couldn’t let it go by without a quick post to wish you all a happy New Year. I still have one more post about agents in VO, but the holidays got the best of me so I figured I’d save…
Once you get an agent, the work really begins. Here are some tips on how to develop a great working relationship from the start.
Welcome to Part 2 of my 3 Part Series on Agents for Voiceover: How to Get One. If you missed Part 1, click here. Once you’ve determined that you’re ready to look for an agent, the obvious question becomes, how do I do that? There are a bunch of different ways and they all require…
Getting a voiceover agent can be a challenging part of any career. This is the first in a 3 part series.
This week I received a delightful and unexpected gift. I got paid for a job I thought I’d gotten burned on. Let me backtrack. My business is divided into two parts. There’s the agented side of things: I audition for jobs with my agent (s) either at home, in their office or at casting places…
Recording an audiobook at home is quite a project. The scope is much bigger than anything else you will do as a voice actor. I remember when I first started, I would become a slave to my internal anxiety. I didn’t even realize how secretly freaked out I was under the surface; it was this low-grade anxiety that would follow me around and be under my skin for days. Recording an entire book by myself felt like such a huge responsibility: I want it to be great and there’s no director or anyone giving feedback and it’s taking so long and I have to juggle all my other work and…it’s TAKING SO LONG and…ai yai yai…a recipe for a not so fun time. I would end up working every waking hour, pulling all-nighters, eating junk food and getting no sleep or exercise. My mindset was kind of like: Let’s just hunker down and get through this!
Thankfully, after two years I’ve figured out some coping strategies to quell that anxiety and make the entire experience more sane and enjoyable! There’s lots of great articles on how to actually prep an audiobook for record, but lately I’ve been thinking about how I’ve learned to prep myself for the task at hand. Here are five things I do to set the stage for success.
If you’ve been in the VO industry for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years, you will have noticed massive changes. I’ve noticed changes just in the past five years! Jobs used to pay more. There were more campaigns and long-term contracts. There were less voice actors and hardly anyone had a home studio. If you did have one, you had a serious advantage. And if it sounded good, even doubly or triply so!
Summer can be a little slow for voiceover. Particularly the month of July! Like all good over-achievers, I start to feel a bit lost if I’m not generally accomplishing things or doing something constructive. To that end, I offer up a list of 10 things you can do while it’s “dead”: 1. Organize your computer….