How Long until a Voice-Over Career Takes Off? - Episode 26

Links & Resources from this episode:
https://voiceacting101.com/voice-over-career-takes-off/

Would a private voice-over community help you?

I'm thinking about creating a private online community where voice-over actors could meet, chat, ask questions, encourage others, get audition feedback, etc.

If that's something you'd like to see happen, visit https://voiceacting101.com/group/ to share you input.

Transcript

How long does it take for your voiceover career to take off?

How many auditions do you have to do before you get that first job?

That is what we're going to be talking about today on the podcast.

Hey, it's Jason here with Episode Number 26 of the voice acting one podcast. If you're new here, this is where I try to answer voiceover questions in the least amount of time as possible, all in hopes that it can help you start, build and grow your own voiceover career. So looking forward to getting into today's question, before we do a quick reminder, if you haven't picked up that free five step guide to working in voiceover, you can get that it's at voice acting 101 dot com slash Get Started completely free. It covers the five steps that I took and many other people have taken to get into voiceover and then it kind of walks you through what you should be focusing on, depending on where you are in the those five steps. So get that at voice acting 101 dot com slash get started. Alright, let's jump into today's question. And this one comes from Mike.

Hey, Jason, Mike Vincent here, aspiring voice actor. Just want to start start off by saying, I'm a huge fan of yours. Love all the tutorials, all the YouTube videos. Really great stuff. My question is, I've been doing this for about two months and via audition for more than 100 parts and have not received one job yet. I was wondering how long it took for your voiceover career to take off. Thanks very much.

All right. Thanks for the question. Mike.

Don't forget if you have a question you would like to submit you can do it like Mike did at voice acting 101 dot com slash ask.

So to get to your question, you know, you asked how long did it take for my voiceover career to take off, it was a little bit different. When I started, I have a radio background. So I was in radio for a few years. And when I figured out that I wanted to do voiceover, I wanted to focus on audio production. In voiceover, at that time, I had a few local clients from the radio station. So they, I was doing commercial work for them, a couple of them.

But really what made the difference was when I did a marketing push to radio station, so I put together a package, I sent my demo to radio stations, several 100 radio stations around the country with my imaging demo because I was doing imaging work at the time. And that was the area that I wanted to focus on. So I sent that demo to hundreds of radio stations at that time, I did one marketing push, and I ended up getting two retainer contracts back. So I was working on a monthly basis with two large market radio stations. And that was enough that covered the paycheck that I was getting at the radio station at the time, just those two contracts.

So that's kind of when I would consider that it took off just when I could I it exceeded the salary that I was making at the radio station at that time. So it's a little bit different because I was sending out demos, I wasn't really auditioning at that time. But it kind of works in the same way that I had to send, you know, X number of demos out to radio stations, and then I could kind of count that this many contracts would come back based on how many I sent out.

So that kind of translates now. If you're auditioning on like an online casting site or a pay to play website, that is your audition to booking ratio. That just means how many auditions do you have to do before you actually book a job. And that's kind of what you're asking how many auditions until you get that first job.

And we're just going to call it a to b, call it your A to B that means audition to booking ratio.

And there are several factors that are going to impact that ratio, a few of them are going to be outside of your control, you're not going to be able to control when someone has an audition for you or who has an audition for you know, even if you do audition and you're perfect for the role, the client may just go a different direction on a whim.

So there are several things that you can't control but there are also several that you can control they are within your control. So I'm going to go ahead and cover four here hopefully that's going to help you and you can tweak them and optimize these and they're going to help determine your A to B and they all work together in some sense.

So the very first one that you want to focus on is your recording quality.

You know if your recording quality is poor, then you're going to have to audition many more times to get a job because you're you're being excluded because your recording quality is poor so it doesn't really matter the mic that you're using, some mics are terrible. Some mics are good and some mics are great. I won't go into microphones, you know, but you just want to make sure that your recording quality is up to par. You want to make sure that your levels are set correctly. You want to make sure that it's not too loud and distorting or not too quiet where the you know you're you're not standing out if they're listening to you against other people and then you're editing quality. They don't want to hear choppy edits or loud breaths or Anything that's going to take away from your voiceover. So the very first one recording quality, you got to make sure that that's up to par. And that's going to reduce how many auditions you have to do to actually book a job. So that first one is recording quality.

Second is performance and training.

You don't want to sound like you're reading, are you announcing a script that says non announcer, then that's going to, you know, exclude you from that audition, you also want to make sure that your energy matches the script, you will be able to do that better as you do it more often as you practice, if you go through coaching or training, that's going to help you as well. But you want to make sure that your energy matches the words of the script, and whatever's happening in that script. And you also want to make sure that you're not stuck in a rut of doing like one or two style reads, it may work for some scripts, but the majority of them are probably going to be asking you to do something a little bit different. So that's the second factor when it comes to your A to B. And that has to do with performance and training, you just want to make sure that that's up to par.

Third, how well do you actually fit the casting.

It's you got to know what you're a good fit for and what you're not a good fit for. So you know, I could audition 10,000 times for a female voice job or like a deep movie trailer voice, and I probably wouldn't get one. So I would I would have a zero to 10,000, a to b and I'd be just wasting my time. So it's important to know your voice, know your abilities. And just make sure that you only audition for jobs that you feel that you're a good fit for.

And you don't want to let the budget be your only deciding factor that happens a lot. You'll see the budget and you'll be like, Oh yeah, I think I can do that. For that budget, you may not be able to do that. So don't let the budget, decide if you're going to audition.

Make it if your voice fits it. And if you have the ability to do what the client is asking for make that be the determining factor of whether you audition or not.

And then the fourth factor I want to cover is audition source.

Where are they coming from? You know, where are these auditions coming from that you're doing? Are they coming from an agent? Is it an online casting site, maybe a local ad agency, that's going to determine what kind of competition you're up against, you know, if it's an agent, you're probably up against the best of the best, if it's an online casting site, it's hit or miss a local ad agency, they're probably going to be working with a smaller pool of talent. So your competition is going to be less, that means the chances of you getting the job are going to be greater.

And one other point, you know, not that you have to stay local. But if you just want to make some progress quickly, one way to do that is just by marketing to local companies in your area. And that can drastically reduce the competition that you're working against. You may be the only voice over person that's ever contacted them offering voiceover services. So that's going to increase your odds of getting hired.

So then the next question that probably comes up is what's a good A to B ratio. So I would say just starting out kind of a ballpark, somewhere between 105 100 is what I would expect, I think it's going to be closer to 100, or maybe even less, if all these are dialed in. If they aren't, I think it could be closer to 500. Maybe even beyond that, if you're really off base. 

And that may sound like a lot. But the good news is that jobs will turn into repeat clients. And then you're going to end up auditioning less and less. Because once a client knows that they can go to you for voiceover work, they're going to keep keep coming back to you for voiceover work. So you're going to not have to audition for jobs, they're just going to have the job. And just say here, I need you to I need you to record this for me. So that's the good news. You want repeat clients, they come from the jobs that you booked, and the jobs come from the auditions that you do. 

So if you're getting to 100 auditions or 500 auditions and it feels like a struggle. Probably one of these areas could be improved. If you need help with it, go to voice acting one on one comm slash improve. And ideally, if you're firing on all cylinders, you would get this down to about one in 20. So you'd have an audition to booking ratio of one to 20. And a lot of that just comes down to turning down auditions that you're not a good fit for. 

So just as a summary the four factors that you have in your control that are going to affect your A to B first one's recording quality than performance and your training, how well you fit the casting So turning down the jobs that you're not a good fit for, or the auditions that you're not a good fit for. And then where the auditions are coming from that's going to determine how much competition you're up against, which is going to have an effect on your A to B. 

Alright, that wraps up this episode of the podcast.

Thank you for checking it out. Don't forget if you have a question, head on over to voice acting 101 dot com slash ask and hopefully I will feature it on an upcoming podcast episode.

I'll talk to you next time. Have a great week!