Getting started in Voiceover

Nancy and Anna email today with news that they’ve put the entire Break Into Voice Over MP3 library on sale. Details are available at their site, but only through the holidays so pull the trigger before the end of the year.

My friend Michael Minetree has published a superb article on his blog about positioning oneself for success. The article is called Positioning for Voice Over Success – Are you ready when opportunity knocks? I think you’ll find it well worth a few minutes of your time.

Holdon Log has published a free report called 5 Things Every Actor Must Do. Not everything applies to voice actors, but much of it does.

It’s the slowest teacher. That’s a quote from my friend and sometimes teacher, Pat Fraley. Sadly,I have in fact learned several things the slow and hard way. Maybe my pain will help you avoid these mistakes in your own work.

Lesson number one: Always talk about the money right away. Years ago I was reluctant to bring up the subject of the budget for a given job or project first. (Here I’m talking about situations where someone contacts me about a job directly. When they come to me through my agent, all those details are all ready set.) A church had asked me to come record a narration for a marketing video they were preparing. They didn’t bring up money. I didn’t either. Not on the phone when they called. Not in the studio before or after the session. Then, as I was getting ready to leave, the producer, a member of the church staff said,

Thank you for your good work today. We’ll send you a check in the mail in a few days.

Sure enough, a few days later a check arrived in the mail. For $25. That was the last time I didn’t talk about the budget before we started recording.

Lesson number two: Give your clients the benefit of the doubt when a payment is late. This is one that I’m especially sad about, because I ended up hurting a relationship. Here’s what happened. I had been hired through a local radio station in a small market to serve as the signature voice for one of their clients. After some time that client decided to run some commercials on a different radio station in the same small market. But, they wanted me to continue as their signature voice. So I contacted the production people at the other station, recorded the copy they sent me and delivered the audio and my invoice to them just as I had with the first radio station.

Four months later, I still hadn’t received payment so I sent a note to the production manager at this second station noting how overdue the bill was, reminding him that I had delivered the audio they needed promptly, and asking when I might expect to receive payment. It wasn’t a mean note, but it certainly wasn’t as kindly or nicely worded as it could, indeed should, have been.

In reply I received a rather sharp rebuke from that production manager, informing me that my payment would be sent by the station right away, that they would take care of billing the end client for the money but stating in no uncertain terms that I would never work with him again. And he has been true to his word. The check arrived a few days later and I’ve never heard from him again.

As a result of this painful lesson, I’ve changed my collection practices. First, I usually contact people well before things get so far behind. Second, I always give them the benefit of the doubt that some kind of mistake in communication or accounting or some other thing has resulted in my invoice being lost, etc. Third, I try to make clear that I want to do what I can to keep lines of communication open both about billing and future work.

Lesson number three: Always talk about deadlines right away. I’ve had a couple of near disasters in this regard as well, but the most vivid recent example comes to my from my friend Kelly, another voiceover talent here in Charlotte. She’d received an email the other day about doing a small narration project and indicating that a script would be coming from someone else shortly. The email came rather late in the day and Kelly figured that she wouldn’t have the script until morning.

Lo and behold, when she checked her email at around 11:00 PM, the client had sent her a note asking, “Where is my narration? And in the morning, Kelly got another email saying that someone else had been awarded the job instead. Kelly would have been more than willing to work late if she had known of the tight deadline, but the client didn’t mention it, so she didn’t know. I’ve made similar mistakes, so I try to always ask what the deadline is, or even more often I’ll reply with when I expect to have the job done, asking if that deadline with work and indication that if it won’t what does he or she need?

As I said, I hope these brief stories will help you avoid similar goofs in your own voiceover career. And if you have a story to add, leave a comment.

… you might want to find a different direction for your career. That’s the spot on advice from my friend Karen Commins in her blog post today Reading for success.

Karen is very kind to mention and link to me in that blog post so I thought I’d offer just a small insight into just how right she is that I love to read. When I was in Junior High School I read every book in the school library except the “girls” books, you know, the Nancy Drew and similar books aimed and young female readers. By the time I was in High School my passion for reading had grown even greater, so in those 3 years I read every book in the school library including the “girls” books. The only one I didn’t finish was Webster’s Third Unabridged International Dictionary. I wasn’t allowed to check it out and didn’t have enough hours during the school day to get all the way through it along with everything else I was reading.

How much did I really read? My grandmother was the librarian in the town library in our little village in Minnesota. I read so much that she, as a librarian, actually told my mother (her oldest daughter) that she thought I was reading too much! I didn’t stop me though.

Obviously, you don’t have to love reading quite that much. But Karen is right, to be a successful voice actor you do need to love to read, and especially you have to love to read aloud.

According to his website, Harlan and Elaine will do a double-team weekend voiceover workshop on November 15 and 16, 2008 in Bethesda, Maryland. My thanks to my friend Liz de Nesnera for posting the link to this on the VO-BB.

Update: Registration information is only on Harlan’s site.

My friend John Florian wrote me the other day asking if he could publish some of what I’d written here on his VoiceOverXtra site. I was of course happy to say “yes.”

If you’re not a subscriber at VoiceOverXtra, and you are serious about pursing voiceover work, think about it seriously. The price is certainly right. (It’s free!) And there’s loads of good information.

My friend and mentor Philip Banks has posted a photographic summary of the Secret to Success in your voiceover work on the VO-BB. Take a moment to click through. I think you’ll be glad you did.

Following up on my post yesterday about patience, and with thanks to the thoughts sparked by my friend Dave Courvoisier in the comment he left to that post, let’s think for a minute today about another vitally important character trait for the voiceover professional. Persistence.

President Coolidge’s famous quote about this subject is a good place to start. (hat tip to Sling Words for the quote.)

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

Being patient, as I mentioned yesterday, is vital. But you have to endure in that patience. This is where persistence comes in to play. I was asked during an interview a few weeks ago what’s the secret to being successful in voiceover work? My two word answer: “Don’t quit.” You must persist in your efforts at preparing, planting, cultivating and harvesting if you’re going to make a go of your voiceover career in the long run.

However, I need to sound a note of caution here, as well. There is a significant difference between patient persistence and selfish stupidity. If your children are going hungry, or your marriage is starting to fall apart, because you continue to persistently pursue a dream of being a successful voice actor … it’s time to make some changes. Do not destroy the lives of people around you while you are pursuing your dream. Do what you have to so that your family is cared for. This doesn’t mean you have to abandon your dream. It means you have to weigh the costs and pursue that dream prudently, not foolishly. The cost to your soul isn’t worth whatever fleeting wealth or fame you might achieve.

So, as President Coolidge said, “Press on” to your goals and dreams. Don’t quit. Patiently, carefully, generously prepare, sow, cultivate and then see what a remarkable harvest you’ll gather.

I received a very nice email over the weekend from someone who has been reading this blog for a little while. Someone who wanted to offer a word of thanks. It was truly a blessing to read.

The writer also mentioned being pretty early in the process of becoming a voice actor and commented that it was hard being patient, because of a strong desire to move forward quickly.

That comment triggered something in my mind, so I wrote back with some comments about patience. I’m not identifying my correspondent in this case, because I didn’t ask permission to quote anything that was said to me. However, what’s below is my reply, plus a bit of editing and clarification, and thus needs only my own permission to post.

Patience is indeed vitally important. I grew up on a farm in Minnesota. I think there’s a strong parallel between farming and voiceover work. You begin with preparation. You can’t just dash out into the fields in the spring and throw a bunch of seed around and expect to get a decent harvest. The soil has to be prepared, broken up and smoothed out. After that, you plant the seeds. And then you wait a while. Then you cultivate. Fertilize. Cultivate some more. And then there’s more waiting. The seeds don’t germinate, sprout, grow and yield a harvest in a day or even several days. It takes months of careful attention and cultivation and only then do you get to reap the harvest.

I don’t know exactly where you are on your voiceover journey. You may be just starting to explore this whole field. You may be a working professional. Or somewhere in between. Whatever the case, I’m sure you have to deal with this matter of patience. I certainly do.

If you’re new, you do because you want to see things get started. You want to start doing the work. What you don’t realize yet is that most of the time, even after you’re well established and working, you’re going to be preparing, marketing, looking for work. (Harlan Hogan said in his presentation at Dan O’Day’s Summit a couple of years ago that 98% of the time is spent looking for work and only 2% is actually spent in the studio doing it.)

If you’re a working professional, at whatever level, you have to deal with it too. Maybe it’s wanting to break through to a new level of the business. Maybe it’s getting into a different field of work. Animation. Trailers. Audiobooks. Network promos. ADR. The list is nearly endless.

In every case, there’s a whole lot of tilling, planting, and cultivating involved. None of it is fun. At least not in the traditional sense of the word. But, it’s all necessary to get you where you want to go. I don’t like it either. But, the harvest makes it worth the wait and the effort.

There are two differences between farming and voiceover work, though. The first is that you can prepare, sow, cultivate and harvest at any time of year. You don’t have to wait for spring to plant or fall or harvest.

The second is that, even at its hardest, voiceover work is a whole lot easier than working for a living.