voiceover

With just a few days left in the year, everyone’s looking forward to 2012 and making goals for the new year. Don’t forget that there are a few business days left in 2011, and now’s a great time to double-check that you’ve made the most of this year. Here’s a checklist of things to do so your business is prepared to take on 2012.

• Taxes

Do you know what your tax liability is going to be for 2011? First of all, if you’re brand new to voiceover and had a very modest year, here’s a little help to see if your business is still technically a hobby for this year. For everyone else, we’ve been turning a profit and it’s just a matter of how much taxes we owe the IRS. If you don’t pay quarterly or set aside a percentage of your monthly income, this can be a painful number to hear from your accountant in the spring.

Disclaimer: I’m not giving professional tax advice, this is just from one voice talent to another. Check with your tax professional before proceeding with any of my suggestions. Do your own research, there’s a lot you can learn on the IRS website about business taxes and deductions.

Before the end of 2011, you’ll want to double check to see what your tax situation will be, because there are a few things you can do for your business right now to help offset what you owe. To get a ballpark estimate, add up what you’ve been paid or expect to receive by 12/31 and find that total in the corresponding chart of tax brackets – tax percentage “x”. When people talk about freely spending money because “it’s a business expense” they may not realize that it’s not a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. It’s actually that “x” percentage that roughly will be the percentage of your legitimate business expenses that comes back as a tax write-off from your total taxes owed. Do you know you need a new computer, upgrades, or other gear in the near future? Consider buying it now and your 2011 tax liability will be decreased by approximately “x” percent of the cost of your gear. If you need a new computer but it hasn’t been released yet (Apple products are perfect examples) but you know about what it’ll cost, buy your business a gift card towards that purchase in this calendar year, even though you’ll buy the computer next year. Use these last few days of 2011 to dig around for donations – send money to your local non-profit food bank, drop off what you can to Goodwill, and request paperwork for all your donations. Some charities work with the state to provide a tax credit, as in a dollar-for-dollar write-down of your tax liability (for federal taxes you’re still working with “x” percentage of that donation amount). Again, check with your accountant now if you’re unsure of what you can or can’t do, this is just my personal experience and not professional advice.

• Managing Client Information

It’s a great time to do a major re-org of your data. If you’re using a backup system (RAID, external harddrives, etc) this will be easier for you. Are there projects you don’t need sitting on your main harddrive anymore? Pop these folders and files on another harddrive (if you don’t have one, buy one this week and do it!) Don’t delete your data because 1) storage is so cheap, 2) you could be surprised that your client lost their original files or 3) the client needs you to reference and match an old read for an update to the project.

Review who you’ve worked with this year and make sure you have their updated contact info in your computer’s address book, your billing software and/or accessible in the ‘cloud’ or on a backup drive in case something happens to your computer.

Do you have previous clients that you didn’t work with at all this year? Make a list and look into contacting them, remind them that you’re around and possibly send updated demo information to refresh their memories.

Is there anyone you don’t want to work with again? Slow payers and no-payers could easily be on the client-cut list. If you still have any outstanding invoices, send another reminder. The only good news I have for you is that if a client never pays, your accountant may include that as a tax write-off for you.

• Mark Important Dates for 2012

Grab your smartphone, sit at your computer, and find a pen and whatever 2012 calendars you received during the holidays and make sure you write down important dates for 2012. Things to note:

– contract renewals – with clients, voiceover pay-to-play sites, etc
– website domain renewals – hosting, domain names, etc
– seasonal clients – any time-specific events that prompt certain clients to call on you
– conferences and workshops – look online and see if there’s anything you’re planning to attend, and mark dates payment is due for registration, if it’s posted
– planned vacations – unless you’re thinking “what is that?” in which case maybe you should start planning a little time off
– automatic payments – advertising, paying off gear, anything that you don’t want to be a surprise to your business account

Now that you’ve gotten all that done, spend some free time (ha!) editing your Facebook timeline. It’s good to do a little maintenance on your social media accounts, make sure your descriptions and details are up to date and update any new skills you have on LinkedIn.

My next blog will likely be the first of 2012, and once we’ve cleared off all these last to-do projects from 2011, it’ll be time for goal setting. Until then, I hope you have a productive last few days of 2011!

This blog post celebrates another milestone in my life I’ve recently achieved: I’m happy to say that (officially as of early November) I’m now a full time voice artist + producer.

I don’t suggest anyone decide to quit their job on a whim when becoming fed up with it, or being impatient for a voiceover career to take off. I blogged about having to wait for the right time earlier this year. I’ve had my sights set on an independent career working for myself for quite a while.

Things were looking good business-wise for me, and I had actually hoped to reassess and possibly quit my job for my birthday this year. But, a few days before Christmas 2010 we were thrilled to find out that I was pregnant. This meant the smart thing to do would be to stay at my job as long as possible (making big decisions based on insurance coverage is such a first-world problem!) and take the time I’d have on partially-paid leave to decide if I really could do my part in supporting our family just on my voiceover work. So all this Spring and Summer, I worked extra long hours doing the footwork: building and working on the machine that is my business. I started my leave a few days after my due date in August. 11 days after my due date, we welcomed our daughter Amaya into the world.

Pretty quickly during my leave, the Universe sent me all the evidence and signs I needed to decide to quit my job and be a full time voiceover talent. The scales had tipped, and the income from my job didn’t balance out for the 40 hours it took away from my freelance and everything else. I’m so thankful that Andy and I unanimously decided this is what’s best for our family.

This is the life I’ve been working toward all these years. I didn’t want to have to choose to have either a career or a family. I have the joy of raising my daughter with my husband, both of us working from home for our own businesses. We get to show her by example that you really can be anything you want if you’re willing to work hard for it, and wait until the time is right. With Thanksgiving a couple days away, I have a lot to be thankful for this year.

I wanted to provide an honest look at what new audiobook narrators should expect, especially before they invest money in an audiobook workshop. This is info you’ll get once you’ve already paid to take a workshop but I feel that you should have it before you commit financially, to see if it’s really for you. I’ve also been inspired to write this by hearing many bad audiobook demos from talent who don’t have a studio suitable for recording books and – based on their performance – they haven’t had any training on how to properly approach this unique genre. I can hear it, so the casting director can certainly hear it. First things first – part 1 starts with your foundation, if you missed it, read here. Thanks for joining me for part 2.

As I’ll break down for you in the next section, you’re going to spend a lot of time in the studio recording. Since you’re running a business, and especially if you’re a full-time voiceover talent who depends on this income to pay your bills, you’re trying to maximize your working hours for profit. Let’s go over how you’re paid to do books. There are some publishing companies that work on the royalty payscale model. This means no money upfront, no money on completion, but all your money is made on the backend when (or if) listeners buy the audiobook. In general it’s either a flat percentage, a percentage until an equivalent PFH rate or total has been met and then a lower percentage from that point onward, or a structured percentage range. For example, ACX’s rates on their Royalty Share titles start at 25% of Audible’s net sales per title, and can go as high as 45% if the book sells over 20,010 copies. This can be a lucrative payment model if you’ve recorded a great title or a book with a built-in devoted fanbase.

Being paid through royalties of course isn’t your only option, but it’s the most widely available option for the brand new narrator. Most companies aren’t enthusiastic about being your “first,” so a pay-based-on-sales option works for them. Just because you’re not paid a set rate upon completion doesn’t mean it’s not a good book. Maybe it just needs the right narrator (you?) and good promotion, and then you’ve got a nice little income stream going.

The gold standard for audiobook payments is by PFH – per finished hour. If the book is 10 hours long and your finished hour rate is $200, you’ll make $2000 upon completing the book, no matter how long it takes you to complete it. Unless you’re working directly with an author or bidding on a pay-to-play site, for the most part it’s the publishing company who’s going to tell you what they intend to pay you PFH. There may be room to negotiate, or maybe even try to get a small royalty percentage on the backend, but good luck trying to call the shots before you’ve done a few notable titles or received positive industry reviews.

Okay… so how much am I going to make and how much time will I invest producing an audiobook? What’s fair to expect? I’m going to answer that based on the cumulative experiences of myself, friends who’ve shared their recording stats and other websites that suggest timeframes for the work.

This example is based on a 10 hour fiction audiobook where the narrator is responsible for providing clean, edited, proofed and totally complete audio for the book. Here’s where your time goes:

Reading the book

5 hours – If it takes 10 hours to listen to it, we’ll go with 5 hours to read, take notes on plot, characters and items that require further research, along with marking up the script anywhere something might be confusing (long sections of dialogue without he said/she said, for example).

Research

5 hours – There’s a huge range on this depending on content, accents required, unfamiliar words, cities and names to pronounce, or questions you need to ask the author or publisher and how long you spend preparing your characters (if any time at all). A few publishers even do the majority of the research for you! You can also ask the publisher if they have anyone available to help even just for a few hours. It doesn’t hurt to ask, and it would get the book completed a little faster.

Recording the book

30 hours – This is a conservative estimate, assuming a 3:1 ratio of studio time to completed hours. It assumes you’re adept with your software, you use punch-and-roll recording, you’re a very accurate sight-reader, and you are confident in your choices through each scene and don’t stop to revisit much. You could just as easily be at a 5:1 ratio, or 50 hours, just to record, if you’re not up to speed with these tasks.

Recording corrections and editing

30 hours – This is a somewhat arbitrary estimate, it depends on how the publisher wants corrections handled and how many corrections there are. It also depends on how you followed your recording guidelines from the publisher while recording in regard to breath preferences and pauses, and if the publisher has editors or someone to compile and master the audio in-house. As for the corrections themselves, no matter how accurate you felt you were, there will be transposed and misread words over the course of 88,000 words in 10 hours. ACX suggests that it takes 2-4 hours to edit each finished hour of audio to their standards (the standards for Audible.com). I’m rolling all studio work after the original recording into this one total and assuming 3 times the finished length should get all your corrections edited back in to the audio.

Proofing

20 hours – Of course, the only way to find corrections is for someone to listen to the book with the script in front of them. Sometimes that’s the company or author you’re working for, and sometimes that will be you (or a very kind friend.) If you’re proofing efficiently, add in twice the time of the finished book to your total – here, another 20 hours.

Total hypothetical time on a 10 hour audiobook: 70 hours (90 if you’re proofing, as well)

As a new narrator producing from home, if you opt for a PFH rate and not payment based on royalties, you’re looking at making $100-$175 per finished hour of the actual audiobook. You’ll make between $1000-$1750 for around 70 (or 90) hours of work. So on the low end that breaks down to $14.28 (with proofing, $11.11) per finished hour; on the high end – $25 (or $19.44) pfh.

I’m certainly not saying you couldn’t do a great job faster. If you’ve never recorded an audiobook before and are trying to enter the field, this is a reality check, but each person’s speed varies and each book will offer unique challenges. Sure, you could make the same money with a few short narration gigs or a couple local commercials and it would take a fraction of the time. You can’t pursue this line of work if you’re thinking that you’re going to make money hand over fist – that’s not how the industry is structured. PFH rates have only gone down the past few years as publishers lean on digital distribution and can’t keep up with the rates they were charging for selling CDs in bookstores. But also consider that you’re not going to be giving up your other (higher paying) work to work solely in audiobooks. Only the top names in audiobooks don’t have to supplement with commercial work, and they command very different arrangements with the publishers. Those of us who won’t be getting $500/pfh and upward really need to be better with managing our time so we can find a couple hours a day to work on audiobooks.

If after reading this you’ve decided that this is far more involved than you’d like, then put audiobooks on the back burner and come back to the idea in a few months, or a year. If you’re not terrified of all the hours involved, congratulations. You’ve got the heart and guts (and I hope time management skills) to become an audiobook narrator.

I just got a mass email the other day about how accessible audiobook work is, saying that many more books need to be produced and no-name narrators are grabbing all this great work. The email then goes on to suggest that you can setup a home studio at the cost of solely a $40 mic. There’s so much “anyone can do it” hype in this industry and especially surrounding audiobooks, and I wanted to offer up what I’ve learned to share with newcomers and anyone interested in pursuing audiobook work. There’s so much to consider that I had to break this topic into 2 posts.

As to my own experience, earlier this year a book I self-directed and produced from my home studio, Blood Angel, written by Justine Musk, was released, and I’ve done a few shorter pieces for self-published authors. I have friends who’ve done 8 or 9 books in the time I’ve done one, but they’ve worked harder to make that happen when I’ve put my focus elsewhere. So I’m not coming to you as an Audie nominee or someone with a ton of titles to my name right now, but as a peer who’s about 3 years down the road you’re interested in traveling. What I can tell you of value is information you’ll want if you’re curious about or considering audiobooks.

Here’s the first thing – not everyone is cut out for narrating audiobooks. It’s important to figure that out upfront as a lot of time is involved in getting your name in front of people and you don’t want to let them down once they’ve trusted you with a book.
Ask yourself:
1) Do you have (or are you willing to commit to) the training suitable to perform this specialized genre of long-form narration?
2) Can you record from home without a director?
3) Are you willing to do a lot more production and editing than you’re used to?
4) Would you accept royalties on sales in lieu of payment for the first book (or first few books) to get a few titles under your belt?
5) Once you are contracted to do a book for a set per finished hour rate, do you have a realistic idea of what you’ll make for all the time you’ve invested and worked, and are you happy with that?

The most important element of whether you’ll have a future in audiobooks is your level of performance, directly related to your training and preparation to do the work, and second to that is your demo. Most of the audiobook work done by non-celebrity narrators is done by you in your home studio, without a director. You’re wearing your director’s hat while narrating, and listening to yourself as a producer at the same time. There’s a lot of do’s and don’ts that you won’t know you need to do, listen for, or avoid without investing good money with an audiobook pro. Knowing the “rules” and giving a great performance are two pieces of the puzzle. How to perform will be covered in your training with a reputable coach – someone who has a history with audiobooks and perhaps some awards or nominations for a job well done. I’ve studied under Pat Fraley and he has another workshop coming up in LA, if you’re interested. Paul Alan Ruben directs and produces audiobooks with a different flavor than Pat and also offers personal coaching, although I understand that his style will be harder for beginners to grasp.

A good coach can also direct you and produce a solid demo for you. The casting director isn’t going to listen to an entire audiobook you’ve completed to hear if you’re going to do a good job for them. They rely on your demos, your resume of books you’ve done, and reviews when available (even if it’s just how many stars your audiobook received on Audible.com). Personal relationships and visibility are important in audiobooks just like any other industry, too, but your demo is your calling card, and it represents your abilities AND your studio quality. Make sure you can deliver what your demo is promising, and that it’s put together well.

Now, when it comes to recording the session and editing, this is where you’ll have to do your research to see what each company requires and what you’re willing to do (a phone call will get a faster response than email). Not every company will want you to edit your pickups back in to the original audio, and some of the larger publishers have editors in-house and you just need to send in a clean read and later send the corrections they request. But if you’re doing a book through ACX, production houses producing for a larger publisher, smaller publishers, or working directly with the author, you can almost guarantee you’ll do more editing on your own. You may even have to proof the audio for your own corrections, but keep the goal in mind. You need to find someone to trust you to record your first book. Do a little research to make sure you’re a good match for the company you’re submitting to.

This is leading me to payment and time spent per book, which is a big enough topic to save for my next post.

Because I have the tendency to be very detailed and write novellas instead of blog posts, here’s a short recap of my trip to NYC for the Audiobook Publishers’ Association Conference from May. My husband was there on business as well (meeting with photo editors, as setup by his agents and himself) so we hardly were able to catch up unless we had dinner together, otherwise it was sometime after 1 or 2am!

Saturday: Got into town that evening, saw my extended family and a friend came in to visit us from Boston.

Sunday: Lots of walking and just hanging out during the day (ate lunch at Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner building, yum!) Then, the conference unofficially started with the APA Mixer at 3 Monkeys bar that night; afterwards I got together with my audiobook crew and caught up after the mixer and had an early night in preparation for our busy day

Monday: APAC! Highlight: my one-on-one critique session with Bob Deyan from Deyan Audio. Elevated my read in a major way and encouraged me to keep pressing on and don’t lose hope that I’ll be working more in this industry! The conference was pretty good, and my friends surprised me that night with a baby shower in the hotel room!

Tuesday: BEA (Book Expo America) – lots and lots of walking, Gary joined me midday and we made the most of our time in the huge Javitz Center. Must have put a few miles on my shoes that day. Back to the hotel to update the rest of the girls on our day and then prep to head out for The Audies!

Tuesday evening: started at 7pm, ended at 2:30am. The Audies were a lot of fun and it was great to spend more time with people we’d met on Sunday and Monday. Everyone looked fabulous, and our group of narrators was no exception (I even found a lovely maternity dress to wear!) The awards were a lot of fun and we cheered on friends, narrators and the many producers we knew. We were invited to the Audies After-Party and of course we went, extending our evening a few more hours and having a lot of fun chatting with everyone.

Rachel Fulginiti, me, Amy Rubinate, Heather Henderson, Gary Dikeos; photo by Andy DeLisle

Wednesday morning: catch a cab at 7:45am to get to the airport! Did you read anything about sleeping during this trip? Didn’t think so. It was so totally worth losing sleep to make the most of our time we had with friends and new connections! We headed not home but ‘back home’ – to Raleigh, NC to spend 6 days with friends and family and have a little vacation time after going non-stop in New York!

I’ve just wrapped up a whirlwind trip to NYC for my 2nd APAC – Audio Publishers Association Conference, my 2nd Book Expo America and my 1st time going to the Audies. Since Saturday I think I’ve slept about 5 minutes, walked 50 miles and met 500 people. I’m still sorting out the overwhelming details in my mind. It was an amazing experience, even moreso than last year. I’m going to take a few days to wind down a bit while visiting family, friends and doing a little more business in the Raleigh, NC area but will have another post recapping the trip, including some photos, once I catch up on sleep.