Career Advice » The Voiceover Boblog

What you believe is vital

Posted February 1, 2012 by Bob

Take a few minutes to read Dan Friedman’s latest blog post called What Do You Believe? These are sage words of advice that I hope you will both read and heed.

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Invite the Avalanche – part 6

Posted January 30, 2012 by Bob

Yesterday I wrote about the pitfall of being average. Now, let’s get very real for a moment. No one, no matter how talented and dedicated and industrious is going to be able to excel at everything. We’re all going to have areas of weakness and average-ness. Even in our professional lives, some things are going to be outside of not only our comfort zone, but our ability.

Having established that, here’s what I also know. You can be exceptional if you will take the time and exercise the humility needed to learn what you need to learn in order to become exceptional. Once you’ve begun this process, stick with it. The main thing that can derail you on your journey to being exceptional is to change directions or change focus. Doing so will derail your efforts every time. Needless to say, quitting will also derail you.

And once you’re on your way, here’s something you won’t hear from a lot of people. Don’t be afraid to say “no.” Know yourself, your strengths. You can’t please everyone. You really can’t be all things to all people. So don’t even try. Say “no” to the things that aren’t right for you. I do this all the time.

But, when you say “no,” keep in mind that this can still be a win for you. Refer a job that isn’t right for you to someone it is right for. In fact, when you do so, it’s a win for not just you, but your friend who gets the job and the client who gets when he or she needs. Do that often enough and you won’t know what to do with all the work you do have.

What? Turning down work leads to more work? Yes. Because at least some of those people to whom you refer work, will refer things back to you. And at least some of those clients you helped are going remember you, too and when they have something that is right for you, who do you think they’re going to call? Yep. You.

The more you concentrate on doing the work you are best at, the work you most enjoy, and turn down everything else by referring that work to someone else, the bigger your avalanche is going to grow.

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Playing the averages

Posted January 29, 2012 by Bob

Average is just that, average. As Seth Godin points out in a piece published at Business Insider, being average not only isn’t good enough any more, it’s much worse than that. This is true in the voiceover business as much as it is in any other business. I need to keep raising my skills. So do you. This isn’t so much to get ahead as it is to simply keep moving.

The real secret to avoiding “average” however, is to be you. If you’re trying to be the next whomever, stop. Find your voice. Build your business around the things you love voicing. Not only will you be happier, you’ll almost certainly be better paid, too. Just as I am the world’s exclusive source for voiceovers by Bob Souer, you are the world’s exclusive source for voiceovers by you.

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The Actors Library

Posted January 26, 2012 by Bob

While it’s not just for voice actors, there’s a ton of valuable information available for us voiceover types at Kristine Oller’s The Actor’s Library. Highly recommended. As is Kristine herself. Oh, The Actor’s Library is completely free!

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New additions to Pat Fraley’s Free Lessons

Posted January 12, 2012 by Bob

Pat Fraley is a top flight voiceover talent, a superb and thoughtful coach, and a friend. He’s also prepared a number of free voiceover lessons on a page at his website called, originally enough, Free Lessons. He’s just recently posted 3 new lessons on demos, confidence and flow, but really if you haven’t visited the page in a while, it’s well worth exploring.

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Fees and things

Posted January 7, 2012 by Bob

My friend Derek Chappell writes a very fine voiceover blog. Recently he posted some thoughts about rates and fees that is well worth a few minutes of your time.

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Faffcon 4 registration will open on Friday

Posted January 4, 2012 by Bob

General registration for the 4th edition of Faffcon, which will be held March 23-25, 2012 in Ventura Beach, CA, opens at Noon Eastern/9:00 AM Pacific on Friday of this week (January 6th). 25 of the 100 spaces available will be released 24 hours earlier to us frequent Faffers. I will register the first moment I can. I hope to see you there!

Category: Career Advice, General | Comments (0)
Invite the Avalanche – part 2

Posted October 10, 2011 by Bob

The power of accumulated time is something most of us don’t understand or if we do, we don’t really want to. My friend Dan Friedman blogged today about this subject with great eloquence in a post called The Most Difficult Part to Being in Voiceover. I’ll wait a minute until you’ve had the time to read and absorb what he said. When you’re done, click the “back” button and we’ll pick up again.

Good, but a little difficult to swallow in some ways, isn’t it? We don’t want to have to wait, but Dan’s right. Waiting is part of the deal. By the way, the waiiting bit is true for those of us who have been doing voiceover for years, just like it is for those who are just getting started or who’ve been doing voiceovers for a short time. And not just in looking back. We all have to wait, sometimes for a long time, in lots of different ways. It’s part of the deal.

The cool thing is that there’s something you can do to make the time pass a little more quickly. It’s to harness the power of the magical little E.L.B.s. You can read about these magical little creatures in the archives of the Monday Morning Memo, if you’d like to know a bit more. But, here’s the short version.

Every day, every single day, don’t go to sleep until you’ve made at least one step forward on your journey. It doesn’t matter how big or small the step. It doesn’t matter if it’s publicly visible or something only you know about. But every day you have to take some kind of action, move at least some tiny bit in the direction you’re going. If that’s success doing voiceovers then that’s the direction you need to head.

And the cumulative power of those little steps, taken one day after another, day after day will amaze you because it’s not one day’s action added to the next day’s and the day after that and so forth and so on. They don’t just add one to another. They begin to compound and multiply and before you know it, you’ve made an amazing amount of progress.

For 26 years I worked on voiceover as much as I possibly could, and things have gone pretty well for years; but it wasn’t until just the last 5 years or so that things have really taken off.

If you really do want an avalanche (remember I’ve all ready warned you it’s not fun to be sitting until that avalanche when it falls on you), you’re going to have to work at it every day, one little bit at a time. Unlike a real avalanche, which can be accelerated by explosions and the like, the avalanche of work has to be started one little bit at a time.

Are you ready to do the work? The only thing necessary is for you to start.

Category: Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover | Comments (2)
Pat Fraley and his character voices are coming to NYC

Posted September 21, 2011 by Bob

Pat Fraley is making a trip to the East Coast next month. If you are interested in character voices, audiobooks, animation and games you really should study with Pat. Details are on his web site.

Category: Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover | Comments (3)
Marice is also in Austin this month

Posted September 10, 2011 by Bob

Marice Tobias is coming to Austin, TX:

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Marice in LA, this month

Posted September 7, 2011 by Bob

Details here:

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So where are the dominos?

Posted September 3, 2011 by Bob

The other day I posted some thoughts that flowed from a Seth Godin blog piece at The Domino Project about luck and work and the old way of doing things in the publishing business. I made the analogy that auditioning for voiceover work is, in some ways, similar to the way the publishing business was run.

Now, I have nothing against auditioning as a way of getting voiceover work. I audition for things myself and in fact book work from auditions multiple times each year. But, auditioning is a process that leaves only one person with a job when many applied for it.

It’s much better when the work comes directly, without an audition, through relationships all ready established; or through relationships based on referrals from existing clients. This works very well for those of us who have been doing voiceovers for a while. But, as one of my good friends pointed out the other day, what about those who are just getting started? They don’t have a pool of existing clients from whom to get work or referrals.

Those comments from my friend have led me to think about this subject quite a bit in the last few days. I certainly don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that building relationships and getting work repeatedly from clients happens by magic or just by thinking about it.

Actually, thinking about it is important. But, after the thinking comes the doing.

For example, are there things you could do based on your own creativity that can lead to work? One friend came up with an idea to market her voiceover services directly to a category of businesses in her area. Made some phone calls. Put in some effort turning her idea into something practical and useful to those businesses. It didn’t happen overnight and it took some concerted effort and persistence, but it paid off.

Or, are there people who write about marketing (on a blog or in a freely distributed newsletter for example) from whom you can draw some ideas that you can implement yourself? Now, people writing for the general marketplace probably won’t offer an idea that can be used directly. You’ll probably have to think about how to adapt their ideas to the world of voiceover, but you’re a creative, intelligent person. You can do this.

What are the businesses that hire the kind of work you do or want to do? For example, let’s say you want to narrate audiobooks. There are a few big players that you can find with little effort; but what about the other publishers who are in the second or third tier of the business? It may take some extra digging to find those companies and, having found them, to learn how to submit to them. Everyone wants the low-hanging fruit. Your goal is to find the fruit that’s not so easy to pick.

I hope these few random observations help you start thinking about what you can do to move forward. And I’d love to hear how you make strides. Comments are always open.

Category: Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover | Comments (2)
Dominos and luck and voiceover

Posted August 30, 2011 by Bob

One of Seth Godin’s newest enterprises is The Domino Project. Several days ago Seth posted on their blog this question: Are you feeling lucky? Now, because The Domino Project is an effort to reinvent publishing, the most obvious point of that blog post about feeling lucky has to do with publishing. But the application to voiceover is equally important and valid.

In voiceover, the obvious parallel to the publishing model is auditioning for a job. Just like there would have to be a bestseller every week, there is going to be someone who books the job when auditions are sent out.

Now, this is not a rant against auditioning. I’ll leave such literary explorations to others. The point I’m trying to make here is that if you build your voiceover business on the basis of auditioning for work, then you’re always operating from the position of being “one of many” and only some of the time are you going to end up as the one who books the job. Sure, in an ideal world, auditions are only sent to a select number of talent; but in the real world where we all live and work, that’s not how it always happens.

There are lots of factors that contribute to the way things are. Again, I’ll leave the enumeration of those factors to others. What I’m hoping to persuade you to see is that auditioning isn’t the only way to book work.

Last year was a good year for me. And over 80% of my income came to me directly. An email or a phone call arrived with a message to the effect of: “Dear Bob, we’d like to send you a significant sum of money. Would you record the attached script for us?” This experience isn’t unique to me. Many working professionals in voiceover have learned the value of building relationships with people who want to work with them.

It takes time, a deep commitment to excellent service, and hard work. Put in the time and effort and you, too, can get those kinds of calls or emails. As you do, I’d love to hear from you.

Category: Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover | Comments (3)
Generosity and genius

Posted August 19, 2011 by Bob

It’s not always the case, but sometimes in our world of voiceover the brightest people are also the most generous. Case in point? Pat Fraley, who is one of the brightest and most talented people I know. He has just updated his “Free Lessons” page. It’s a treasure trove of good stuff and I warmly commend Pat to you.

Category: Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover, People | Comments (0)
Myths and Mistakes and Voiceover

Posted August 17, 2011 by Bob

Jeff Hixon, CEO of Voicebank writes about some of the myths about and mistakes made by voiceover people, that’s published at Back Stage. My thanks to Bobbin Beam for mentioning this article on her blog.

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Gear and rates

Posted August 14, 2011 by Bob

My friend Dan Friedman writes a compelling blog post about the connection between using quality gear and charging professional rates for voiceover work. Well worth your time.

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Take That! (updated)

Posted August 5, 2011 by Bob

My friend DB Cooper is one of the very best video game voice actors. (She’s also very good at all kinds of voice actory things, but this blog post isn’t about those things.) She’s going to be teaching a class on doing exertion sounds for video games and ADR on Saturday, September 10, 2011 in Studio City, CA. Details are on this page of her website.

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A deserving voiceover will go to Faffcon 3 for FREE with the FaffCon Scholarship!

Posted July 29, 2011 by Bob

Today I’m delighted to feature an official guest blog for the very first time. It’s from my friend CC Heim.

Over the past two years, a peer-to-peer voiceover UNconference known as Faffcon has taken on a life of its own. What’s an UNconference, you ask? An UNconference is a gathering of like-minded individuals who meet and discuss topics of interest. Sound sort of like a conference? Well, in some respects it is, in that folks register, attend sessions, network, eat. Stuff like that. But the biggest difference is that while a conference is typically structured with specific lessons that are predetermined and planned for in advance, an UNconference unfolds as it goes along, with participants determining the content they believe would be most useful for them during the weekend of the event. While it sounds rather unstructured, the concept works remarkably well.

Consider the most recent business conference you attended. What were the parts that really stood out to you? Was it a keynote speaker talking about some Big Thing? Was it a technical session that discussed how-tos with remarkable minutiae? Or maybe, just maybe, it was the time you spent in the lobby bar, chatting with a new friend about some really cool way he was drumming up new business/refining his performance approach/targeting new representation.

Let’s be honest – for many of us, the conversations held during the social part of industry conferences are the best takeaways. We make new contacts, chat about the industry often sharing “inside” information, and just generally enjoy having others around who can relate to our own professional journey. That’s what Faffcon is. One big chit-chat session. Granted, chit chat with focus. For instance, there may be a group chatting about mic technique, another chatting about how-tos of getting an agent, another chatting about personal websites… you get it.

So now you’re excited, and you want to go! But funds are tight, and that mortgage payment is really important. Well, we may have a solution for you. After Faffcon 2, many of the participants felt a strong urge to express thanks for all they received, and decided to do that by creating a scholarship fund. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the first two Faffcon events, it’s that participants are generous – with time, knowledge, and money! Lots of people pitched in, and before we knew it, we had 850 bucks in the kitty! So this fund is the direct result of your voiceover peers sharing their finances after enjoying a rich sharing of knowledge at the last event.

The Faffcon 3 scholarship is intended for a well-deserving voiceover professional, who may be a bit cash-strapped, but sees the value in this type of a gathering. The scholarship provides up to $850 to cover registration and travel expenses (see note below). Faffcon 3 is currently SOLD OUT with only one spot remaining – and that is for the recipient of this scholarship.

Don’t be shy! If you are a working voiceover talent who would not be able to financially swing it without the help of this scholarship, and really, REALLY want to attend Faffcon 3, I do hope you’ll apply. And I hope you’ll do it quickly because the deadline is August 15, 2011.

If the promise of one of the most amazing career-building events of your life is not enough, just remember: there will be chocolate. Lots of chocolate. Cheers!

(NOTE: The recipient of this scholarship will receive up to $850 in funds to cover air/rail travel, hotel room and registration fee. Actual amount to be awarded will be determined based on actual cost of these expenses. If these costs exceed $850, recipient will receive a full $850 and will be responsible for any costs over that amount.)

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Take That!

Posted July 28, 2011 by Bob

My friend DB Cooper is one of the very best video game voice actors. (She’s also very good at all kinds of voice actory things, but this blog post isn’t about those things.) She’s going to be teaching a class on doing exertion sounds for video games and ADR on coming up soon. Details will be announced as soon as they become available.

(edited to change details that are not yet fully finalized.)

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Advanced Voiceover Career Strategies MP3 seminar

Posted July 26, 2011 by Bob

Dan O’Day has just released a new 2-hour and 36-minutes audio seminar from Harlan Hogan in MP3 format called Advanced Voiceover Career Strategies. Winning an audition is a wonderful experience, but building a winning career over the long haul is even better. Harlan Hogan is a voice actor who has done just that and in this MP3 audio seminar, available for instant download from Dan O’Day, Harlan will share with you a ton of the key reasons he’s built and sustained that winning career. Click through to place your order and instantly download this MP3 audio seminar from Harlan Hogan, Advanced Voiceover Career Strategies.

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Faffcon 3 early registration ends today

Posted July 15, 2011 by Bob

The early registration discount for Faffcon 3 ends today. If you’re a working voiceover professional (in other words, you’re making money doing voiceover work, even if it’s not full-time yet), you are welcome and encouraged to join a bunch of us (your peers) in Harrisburg/Hershey, PA September 23rd through the 25. Please join us. Registration is simple.

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Vocal training and breathing

Posted July 14, 2011 by Bob

My friend Jane Ingalls emailed me a link to an excellent article on breathing at eHow. Jane and I share a common background in musical training, though she’s done far more with hers than I have with mine.

Category: Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover, People | Comments (3)
Faffcon 3 early registration is coming to an end

Posted July 10, 2011 by Bob

The early registration discount for Faffcon 3 ends in 4 days, 5 hours and 15 minutes as I’m writing this note this evening. If you’re a working voiceover professional (in other words, you’re making money doing voiceover work, even if it’s not full-time yet), you are welcome and encouraged to join a bunch of us (your peers) in Harrisburg/Hershey, PA September 23rd through the 25. Registration is simple. Please don’t miss this amazing experience.

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Are you on the right path?

Posted June 30, 2011 by Bob

Seth Godin, a very bright man, has started a new venture called The Domino Project. The newest release is called Anything You Want by Derek Sivers, the brains behind CD Baby. Derek is creating animated videos to illustrate some of the key points of his new book. This one is called If It’s Not a Hit, Switch.

If it’s not a hit, switch from Derek Sivers on Vimeo.

I don’t know if Derek realizes he was aiming this one at voiceover people or not, but wow does that hit the mark.

Category: Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover | Comments (3)
Marice Tobias in Portland next month

Posted June 27, 2011 by Bob

Marice Tobias is going to be in Portland, OR in July 2011.

As far as I know, this is Marice’s only visit to the Pacific Northwest this year.

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Nancy Wolfson Audition Critiques – ends today!

Posted June 24, 2011 by Bob

Nancy Wolfson did something pretty exciting earlier this week: A live teleseminar where she spent 2 solid hours reviewing real voice over auditions just before they were submitted. The live teleseminar was Tuesday, but until tonight (Friday, June 24, 2011) you can still get an MP3 copy of the entire event.

Here are all the details about getting this teleseminar as an MP3.

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Nancy Wolfson Audition Critiques – one last chance!

Posted June 22, 2011 by Bob

Nancy Wolfson did something pretty exciting this week: A live teleseminar where she spent 2 solid hours reviewing real voice over auditions just before they were submitted. It’s too late to take part in the live teleseminar because that was Tuesday, but until Friday you can still get an MP3 copy of the entire event.

Here are all the details about getting this teleseminar as an MP3.

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Registration is open for Faffcon 3

Posted June 21, 2011 by Bob

And I hope you will join us in Hershey/Harrisburg, PA for this exceptional voiceover unconference called Faffcon, September 24th and 25th. Registration is under way and getting your early-bird discount now means you won’t have to rush at the last minute.

Maybe you’ve never heard of Faffcon? Or even that term “unconference.” You’ll find comments here from a number of attendees at previous Faffcon events. And there’s also more information about who should come to Faffcon on the site.

If you’re a working voiceover professional, you’re welcome. Come to learn. Come to give. You will leave with more than you expect, no matter how high your expectations.

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Nancy Wolfson Audition Critiques – last chance to register!

Posted June 20, 2011 by Bob

Nancy Wolfson is doing something pretty exciting for this week: A live teleseminar where she reviews real voice over auditions just before the auditions are submitted.

Here are all the details about this live teleseminar.

Category: Career Advice, General, People | Comments (0)
Character voice actor or doing funny voices

Posted June 17, 2011 by Bob

Kevin Delaney speaks about the difference between working as a voice actor doing a character and just “doing funny voices” at his blog.

Category: Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover, People | Comments (2)

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