Whenever people ask me what I do, I’ve been confidently telling them, “I am a voice actor” because I don’t want to advertise that I’m a 33 year-old college graduate who still waits tables and barely makes minimum wage. Because then they ask me what restaurant I work at and where it is and try to sound interested, but I bore myself in talking about it and find myself trying to change the subject to whatever the nearest potted plant is. Or something.
As of lately, I’ve been trying to see what other voice actors (VA’s) do full-time when they’re trying to get into voice over. Many of them, like me, have a full-time job and try to squeeze in a few auditions every night when the kids are asleep. And it seems like the most common phrase I hear is “Just keep at it” or some variation thereof.
And that’s encouraging. Sorta.
I know these things take time. I have been “doing” voiceover since just after the Covid-19 pandemic made it impossible to work as a server (which was somewhere around October 2019) and I am the type of person who has to be good at everything I do or I am a failure (another downside to having ADHD), so I have been keeping record of each and every client that I have worked with in any voiceover capacity to see how much I’ve earned and I’ve also recorded costs to see how much I’ve spent on supplies so I can prove to myself that I can do this and that it will be worth it.
As of now, it doesn’t seem like it. And that’s not encouraging.
When I decided to start this arduous task, I had a long talk with my wife about finances and she reluctantly agreed to let me spend upwards of $4,000 on voiceover training, supplies and two voiceover demos (to be paid in low, monthly increments, of course). It sounds like a lot, but I did my research, and I got what I paid for, for sure. My voice coach, Tim Powers, is great and we still keep in touch. He’s been awesome even through his move to a different state and having to basically start his VO connections from the ground up.
But I digress. I spent a lot of money on VO stuff with the hope that I would be making it back in abundance. I wasn’t.
I was discouraged. My wife was discouraged. She had been working extra hard at the salon to make up for my lack of income since my restaurant had shut down. I started looking for other means of income and seemingly the only people hiring was Shipt – a grocery delivery service. Yup, I started delivering groceries to people. It is a humbling experience when one has to buy overpriced food for wealthy individuals, bringing it to their clearly expensive doorstep and pressing their little camera-doorbell and then driving to the next order in my borrowed car.
I felt like a loser. I had so many skills to offer and there I was (not using a single one of them) pushing a grocery cart around for people that couldn’t or didn’t want to do it themselves.
Eventually, the pandemic came to a more tolerable state. People started going to the grocery store again and then the orders stopped coming in. I was out of work. Again.
I told myself that this is my chance to really get into voice acting. I had no choice. I HAD to succeed at voiceover!
Then I got it! My first real gig on voiceover. A local political campaign spot for Greenville, South Carolina.
My buddy Roy (who was a sound tech for the play I had done months before) remembered me and asked if I might be able to do it. The spot wasn’t anything spectacular. I spoke about a road in Pickens county that was in desperate need of repair due to the amount of traffic accidents.
I was so excited to get my first gig. I mean, I had just spent several thousand dollars on professional voice over lessons and I started to feel like I had wasted my money. But this was it! This is how it would start!
I didn’t.
I made $128 in 2020.
Needless to say… Well, it goes without saying so I won’t.
Christmastime came around and I was starting to get all the good, happy feels that accompany my annual pumpkin dessert madness, watching Christmas movies, and buying funny and meaningful little gifts for my wife and son.
I told myself that I would focus on getting work after the holidays and that I would just be with my family right now. Yep. After the new year, I’ll go ahead and get a real job. I’ll just earn the money back at my ‘real’ job and pay off the voiceover stuff, and just let it sort of fade into the background. I gave it the ol’ college try and spent a year on it. I mean, that’s what everybody says, right? “Give it a year!”
“Oh, well.” I told myself. “I can’t be great at everything. I’m sure this interest will pass. I’ll have some other interest later on that I can obsess over. I wonder if I’ll be any good at the drums.”
But the interest wouldn’t pass. And guess who noticed. Go ahead, guess! No, really. You can probably guess. Remember? She’s really good at these things. Remember how I told you that she already knew that I was ready?
My wife (ugh, I love this woman) bought me a brand spankin’ new laptop for Christmas. She wanted to help me be more efficient at recording. She was so sneaky all year and hid money away so she could do that. For Me!
My wife believed in me. And I didn’t.
I was ashamed of myself. I was getting ready to give up. Me. I never give up. I always see things through. What am I doing?
Now, I really have to succeed. No, I get to!
This is something that Mara is really good at: Encouraging you when you suck. Not in a cheesy mommy type of way. But in a way when she truly, without a doubt, believes that you can and will succeed in a thing. I believe that’s why our son is the friggin’ genius that he is.
So, after all the gifts and hugs were given out, Mara and Rylan played with their new toys and watched Christmas movies while I went straight to clear out my closet so I could build my recording booth and do this thing the right way.
And I did. The new year started and I made sure to get back into a part time job (yes, at a restaurant. It’s easy, shut up) so I could save up some money to get a real mic. I had been using a Blue Yeti USB mic that was gifted to me by my gamer brother-in-law (Thanks Nick!). That old mic had been getting the job done, but it had reached its last leg. So, after months of saving and looking at a bunch of different options and reading reviews, I was ready to become of man and get a real XLR mic just like the pros. *Tim Allen Grunt*
But, I’m also an adult, so I paid the mortgage instead.
And then, after several more months of serving old people wine and tomato pie, I had done it again. I was ready to finally become a man. And in September, I went on the interwebs and got me a sexy little number that goes by the name of Audio-Technica AT2020.
I wanted to make sure that I could start off with a bang, so I made sure to audition as much as possible and even did the thing where you go on the internet and find important people who can afford to give you money and then you ask them if they will give you money for talking for them in a pretty way, but you don’t actually talk to them because you’re typing a letter to them on the internet that goes from your electronic mailbox to their electronic mailbox and then you hope they read it. It’s pretty nifty. Like forty percent of the time.
I told myself that I was going to try and double my VO income from last year. But this time, I was going to have to do it in a month! And boy, let me tell you: as hard as it was to make $128, I was going to have to really grind. So, I made a voiceover account with Fiverr, Audible, Voices123, Upwork, PeoplePerHour and a bunch of others so I put my voice in as many places as I could find.
None of these websites individually gave me massive amounts of work or income, but I did take a look at my earnings over the last year and at the time of writing this post, after hundreds and hundreds of auditions and thousands of emails, I earned just over $3,000 from voiceover work.
Now, that number doesn’t seem like much over the course of a year (it isn’t), but it is really good to see that I’m making progress. All I can think of is that episode of the The Office where Pam wins the employee of the month award for “doubling her sales” from 2 to 4 (Yup!). So, I consider this year to be a win for me. I have learned a lot vocally and technologically. And I even made some money too. But what I think of the most as I write this is that this is all a constant reminder that…
…my wife was right.
Yeah, I think I’ll keep her. 😉