The VO Meter Episode 15, The Audiobook Roundtable

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 15 of the VO Meter…
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
So we are very excited because we have our Audiobook Roundtable coming up in a few minutes, but we have an interesting episode for you today because several of our little mini-shows, I guess, our questionable gear purchase, our current events, and our VO Meter stick are all related. So why don’t you start this off, Paul?
Questionable gear purchase.
Okay, well, we always like to start with current events, and current events for me was attempting and poorly to improve my recording space again. So I found this ridiculous price on a double walled enhanced whisper room that happened to be located in Beaverton, Oregon. So obviously that’s a little bit further, a little bit of a distance from Baltimore, Maryland, let’s say.
And I had to have it shipped out here. It was a sale on eBay that I found. And because I’m me, I just went ahead and bought it and paid the money and said, I’ll figure out how to get it here.
It’s a great price. Who cares? I’ll figure out the shipping later.
Then I started to do a little research on just how freaking heavy and big an enhanced Whisper Room is. And one found out that it weighs just about 1200 pounds. And that’s about double of what my current Whisper Room weighs.
Makes sense because it’s almost the same size. The one I was buying is a 3x5x5. And the one I’m in is a 4×4.
This is feet. So because it’s a double walled booth, it makes sense it’s about double the weight. When I started to look at where I would put it in my house, I came across some structural engineering issues.
So queries. Right. It’s something I had in the back of my mind.
I have a local friend who’s a contractor that lives up the street. And we talked about this before, that if I were to build something, I had to be careful of that because I keep my booth on the second floor of my house. Really no other option because the floor, the ceilings in my basement are pretty low.
And plus, because of impact vibrations where people are walking on the floors, it never would work in my basement with my three kids trampling around all the time upstairs.
So I want to back up a little bit, though, Paul, because I remember when you first told me that you got this, my first question was, why? Maybe you already have a booth. And most of our listeners probably are assuming, like, that’s the end game, right?
Like, you’ve got a booth, you’re in. That’s just when, like, that area of your studio upgrade should be done. Is that, like, how is that not the case for you?
Well, I’ve talked ad nauseam about the giant highway in my backyard, and the vibrations from that that creep into my recordings, and they still do. I use an expander on my Apollo Twin interface to keep it somewhat at bay, but I’ve been doing, I’ve been engineering a book for another author, I think I mentioned, and in listening to those files back, when it’s not my own voice, especially, I can hear that vibration creeping in through the expander during the dead spaces, and it’s just annoying. I’d like to be able to somehow end it once and for all.
So that was my thinking anyway. So that’s why I thought double-walled booth, and also I should mention, in doing some consulting with our friend George Widom, he had told me at one point that he thinks a double-walled whisper room would be enough to block all that external highway noise based on what he’s heard in my files. So that was my motivation.
And so people who might not… As you can guess, not all ISO booths or even whisper rooms, which is a brand of vocal isolation booths, are created equal. Of course you’ve got different height and length and size dimensions and weight, as you can tell.
There’s almost a 600-pound difference between the single wall that Paul currently has and the double wall that he was looking into. But what that extra mass does is it increases the amount of acoustic dampening that you have of sound isolation. And so as he was pointing out, it would actually hopefully get rid of those vibration problems that he’s been fighting for almost two years now.
Yeah, to eliminate sound waves from penetrating your space, you need mass, whether it be concrete, wood, lead would be the best, but I’m not lining my house with lead.
And it would save you from Superman.
So the denser the material, the better it is at blocking sound. So back to the structural design. In looking at the code for most US states, every state is different, sometimes even counties have different building codes.
The amount of weight you’re supposed to have on a residential floor, second floor, is about 30 pounds per square foot or 40 pounds per square foot if you’re a little bit more conservative. Or sorry, the other way around, 30 pounds if you’re conservative, 40 pounds if you really want to push it. And doing my math, my calculations, it seems that it would be more like 50 pounds per square foot for this 1200 pound booth on my floor.
And those weights that are based on the building code are usually based on moving weight, not dead weight. So a booth is, in my opinion, is an issue because it’s dead weight. It’s going to sit in one spot forever or until I no longer do this job, which hopefully is not sooner rather than later.
But that’s just dead weight that’s going to sit there forever. So people will argue, well, you don’t panic when you have 30 people in your house for a cocktail party. True, but they’re moving around and they’re getting drinks and they’re getting food, they’re going outside.
They’re not standing in one spot 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. So ultimately I decided this was not going to work. And I called up my good friend Sean and said, hey, you’re near Oregon, or at least closer than I am.
Why don’t you buy it?
And at first, I will say I got very excited. I mean, this was an amazing price for, because like we were saying, a lot of people have gotten these single wall units from either Whisper Room or someone else, and they weren’t satisfied because they didn’t completely get rid of the noise issues, which is why most people get an isolation booth in the first place. So it’s very unfortunate when people have to make that additional upgrade or even sort of like add a room within a room to the existing space to get rid of that extra sound.
But I mean, for me, I was so excited. I thought it was similar enough to the current setup I have that it wouldn’t be too disruptive. So I had the same concerns about weight.
And but after talking to a few engineer friends who were kind of able to like to calm my fears, my dad and I started measuring out the dimensions of the potential dimensions of the booth. And we just couldn’t find anywhere in the house that would have been an ideal working space. I mean, if I wanted to be surrounded by like the furnace vents in the laundry room, then yeah, I could have gotten the booth and put it in the basement.
But I’m like, the whole point of having that office, that studio space, is to sort of have like a very creative, conducive atmosphere, you know? Isn’t that what we all want who are trying to pursue this full time? So, unfortunately, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I realized that maybe now is not the best time to put a booth in here.
And I mean, my house in rural Washington is pretty much quiet 90% of the time. So I don’t have a lot of the noise issues that say someone in a larger city might or who’s near a freeway might have.
Right. So, the worst part about this whole thing was that I had already put my booth on for sale on a couple of the voiceover groups and on Craigslist. Some of you may have seen it.
This is very telling of your personality in general, Paul, or both of our personalities that we handled this.
I got some people’s hopes up, including our friend of the program, Bob Johnson, who is going to come on and talk to us in a few minutes about the experience as part of our VO Meter shtick. Shtick.
Okay, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick.
What did he say?
It’s time for the VO Meter… Oh, never mind.
The VO Meter shtick?
Oh, got it. So we are here with Bob Johnson on the VO Meter shtick, and I’m here to talk about, or talk more about the ridiculous booth purchase that never was, because Bob, as I think we talked about in the intro, was on the other end of the transaction, or at least supposed to be, where I had posted my booth for sale and was going to sell it to Bob who lives not too far from me. It looked like a match made in heaven, and then I done went and blew up the whole thing.
So Bob, I wanted to first apologize in front of the whole world, or at least our 3,000 listeners, and say I’m sorry for reneging on the deal, but as you’ve heard, it just couldn’t be helped.
You absolutely do not have to apologize, but it is kind of Johnson luck. Have the opportunity to get a nice whisper room at a decent price, and then all of a sudden, it devolves into a discussion on floor loads and things like that. So, we learn a little bit more in the industry, and I am still looking for a whisper room, so to speak, but no, you absolutely do not have to apologize.
Well, it’s funny, it actually sort of became a value add for the entire industry. I’m not sure if you followed Sean’s post in Facebook, where he was asking people about structural load in his house, and other people jumped in and said, wow, I never thought of that. And that thread has now grown to like a hundred responses with people adding…
I did see that, and again, after talking to you about it, and then seeing Sean talking about it on Facebook, I’m thinking, wow, maybe this is something that people do need to pay attention to. And again, I’m the same way. I didn’t really think about floor load or things like that.
I’m fortunate that I record in the basement. Again, the only thing I was worried about, of course, I wasn’t worried about it, my wife was worried about the aesthetics of our basement with a whisper room in it. So that devolved more into how can we spruce up the whisper room to make it look more amenable to our downstairs area.
Yeah, I think Sean admitted in the intro that that was part of his decision, too, that he’s living with his parents. He’s much younger than you and I, and he’s back with his parents while he sorts out what he’s doing long term, and they weren’t too keen on having the big black monolith in their living room either.
I did agree that we could put a window box outside of the whisper room as well as a welcome mat, and I’ll put some plastic trees around it, so at least it’ll look like a little, as I call it, my retirement home.
Well, that’s fantastic. Well, I will certainly keep an eye out for other deals. As fans of the show know, I’ve actually done this before.
This time last year, almost. Sean and I had almost an identical discussion where I purchased a booth and was trying to unload it onto him as he was coming back from Japan. And it’s because I was looking for one up in the northern part of New York, and I actually put friend of the show, Patty Gibbons, onto it, and she ended up buying it.
So that story worked out. Hopefully there’s still some way we can work things out for you and see how it goes.
No, I’m okay now. And again, I’m just looking for the whisper room specifically. You know, just to improve the room tone a little bit, but also in my quest to upgrade microphones as well.
I tend to do this in a stair step method. I don’t want to go high end microphone, but not have the proper sound area for it. So I’m fine with where I am now.
As we said on the phone, you know, it’s not a priority for me, but at the same time, I think many of us, especially at my level, are always looking for a little bit more to improve. And that’s why I like listening to the VO Meter. I’ll give you guys all a shout out as well.
As well as a voice over body shop as well. I mean, you learn so much from that. Some of it’s really technical, some of it’s baseline, that it helps a little bit of all of us in the industry learn and continue to develop.
Well, thanks for the kind words. And it sounds like you have taken some of that stuff to heart, talking about not getting a good microphone until you have the space to record it. We’ve been preaching that, and George and Dan preach that as well.
Just makes perfect sense. But tell us a little bit, Bob, about your professional resume and the environment you do record it in now. We’d be curious to hear.
Actually, I’ve been in the voice over business for about 10 years. I kind of started differently from most people. I was already in the federal government, in the Intel community, and used to do a lot of their classified narrations, documentaries, e-learning.
So kind of started from the inside. And then when I retired three years ago, I decided to do much more on the outside, which has proven a little bit more difficult than I thought.
We’ve all found that out.
Many people in the voice over world. For me, it was more the technical side though, because I was recorded more of a classified nature, everything I did was in a studio. So to actually step out from that world and have to create my own studio environment in terms of recording, editing, mastering, and all of that, that’s proven to be much more difficult.
But at the same time, something that I’ve actually enjoyed learning how to do. So right now, I’m surrounded by AuralX panels in a five-foot cove inside of our downstairs in our basement area, which actually is a great recording area because I have three solid walls. So really, I only have to fill in one that I use with some AuralX paneling.
I have two four-foot AuralX panelings that I use behind me. And the sound floor and the noise floor is usually pretty good. I do get a little bleed in from either whatever is happening outside, whether it’s the pressure of the house or the temperature of the house.
So in that way, with a whisper room, I want to be able to control that just a little bit more.
Well, Bob, like I said, I will still be on the lookout for you, see what we can do. There’s always deals popping up, and hopefully we can work something out for you. But I do appreciate you being on and sharing your story with us.
No, and you don’t have to apologize. And again, I thank you and Sean for all that you do for the voiceover world. And I always look forward to tuning in to you guys every other week and Voice Over Body Shop, as well as Julie Williams.
I mean, I listen to her podcast. So there’s a lot of people out here who are not really that active on the Facebook posts. But at the same time, there’s a lot of people on the sidelines who learn quite a bit from you guys.
Fantastic. Well, we’ll try and keep up the good work.
All right. And I appreciate the apology, and I appreciate you looking out for me.
All right. We’ll talk to you soon, Bob. Take care.
Thanks. Talk to you later.
Bye. Later.
So Bob, once again, my apologies. I’m glad you’re still a friend of the show and willing to talk about it and talk to me. But in the end, it all worked out because Bob is pretty happy with his recording space at the moment, and I was able to get my money back from the person I purchased it from on eBay, more importantly.
And last I checked, it’s gone off of eBay, so it looks like he must have sold it, and probably for a better price than he gave me. So, as they say, all’s well that ends well in love and more.
Well, we both had learned a lot from it, I think. I mean, like something I’ve learned from you, Paul, is to always have to be on the lookout for not just incredible deals on boosts, but on audio equipment in general. I know you’ve frequent your local guitar center and have been able to like gotten some incredible deals on mics and interfaces that way.
So it’s good to have like your sort of finger on the pulse if you’re looking to upgrade, because you can usually save quite a bit of money if you’re a little patient and persevering.
Yeah, indeed. So my plan now is to sort of retrofit the existing booth I have, because the other thing I thought about is that one of the worst experiences of my life was lugging this whisper room into this second floor all by myself. And I don’t want to do that again.
So at least I’ll try and reinforce what I have in here. Maybe either some extra MDF that I can buy myself or some plywood and see if I can at least mitigate the sound enough that I can expand it out with the Apollo and hopefully we’ll be done with it. Stay tuned.
Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I think, like, I’ve hired you out for narration projects and thought it sounds fine. So, like, so I think we both kind of realized that maybe we were trying to solve a problem we didn’t necessarily have or just was trying to find the wrong solution for it.
Yeah, it definitely could be the case.
All right, so that pretty much covers everything for questionable gear purchase and VO Meter schtick, but we don’t want to keep you guys away from all of the awesome information you’re about to hear during our Audiobook Roundtable. Now I have to give some credits to Paul. He really did his homework and gathered some people at the top of their game.
We have some A-list narrators like Scott Brick, Sean Pratt, Andi Arndt, some Audiobook Producers like Steven Jay Cohen and Debra Deyan. And we just got a really nice, well-rounded panel who’s just filled with so much experience and insight into the Audiobook industry today. So without further ado, let’s take you to the Zoom room.
Welcome everybody to episode 15 of The VO Meter. And we are so excited because we have our Audiobook Roundtable. We scheduled this some time ago, and we are so excited to have a distinguished panel of Audiobook narrators, producers, and even coaches.
And we want to get right to it. So starting, going clockwise, I guess, on my screen. Why don’t each of you tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got started in the business?
So Andi, would you please start?
Well, my name is Andi Arndt, and I am a narrator and producer and coach. And I have a background in both public radio, and I say public radio because public radio tends to value an authentic voice more than a morning zoo, boomy voice. And I also have a background in theater.
I taught acting and voice at James Madison University theater and dance department for 12 years. So to me, theater plus radio is like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup that adds up to audiobooks. So that’s how I got into it.
I mean, that’s not the actual first job I got, but that’s the background that I have.
Fantastic. And Debra, Debra Deyan.
Oh, hey there. Yes, I am a producer in Los Angeles and been in the audiobook business since 1990. My husband, who’s since passed away three years ago from ALS, Bob Deyan and I got into the business together after we were first married.
He worked in radio and he had an extremely long commute once he decided to marry me and move to where I live. And so in those days, he used books on tape and recorded books, were selling an abridged book, like taking a book and abridging it down to three hours and having two cassettes in a package, 45 minutes on each side. And they were also doing unabridged books on a rental basis.
So Bob wound up getting a copy of This Present Darkness, authored and read by Frank Peretti. And he listened to it in the car and came home shaking the package and said, oh my God, this is what we’re going to do. And so I sat and listened to it that night with him and he said, well, I don’t know how we’re going to make this or how it’s made, but let’s figure it out and let’s be part of this thing.
It’s going to be big. And I said, okay, so we studied the package and it said that it had been produced at Mark Rau Studios in Burbank. And so we called, Bob said, oh my God, I know that guy.
I met him at a party, you know, so he called him. You know, this was over the weekend. And so we called him on a Monday morning and Mark actually remembered who Bob was.
And he didn’t think he was crazy for asking him how we were going to make this thing. So Mark taught him his craft for six months. And then Bob went off on his own.
And thanks to Jessica Kay, you know, who at the time owned the publishing mills, she helped us to buy our first equipment. And we then built her, you know, little by little for it, or actually, you know, took it off her invoice. And the rest is history, you know, back in those days, it was reel to reel, you know, machines and razor blades and blue tape.
And then the digital age didn’t come until much later. So, yeah, it was a lovely start. And we were young in our 20s.
And it took about 18 years of going to bed every night and wondering how in the world we actually paid our rent before audiobooks hit, you know. We didn’t even find a name for audiobook until 1994. It was a committee of people who decided that it would be an audiobook rather than a recorded book or a book on tape or whatever, you know, people were calling it, all sorts of things.
Well, that’s fantastic. Thanks for that backstory. And Sean Pratt.
Let’s see here. I was in Washington, DC in 1994 doing a play at the Shakespeare Theater. And one of the actors in the cast was an audiobook narrator.
David Hilder is his name. He’s a playwright now in New York. And one day we were in the green room and I said, what do you do when you’re not working?
And he said, I do audiobooks. And I was like, wow, that’s really cool. I wasn’t really interested at the time.
I was just more curious. I was working off Broadway at the Pearl Theater as a company member and doing classical theater around the country. But about two years later, I moved to Washington, DC.
And he introduced me to Grover Gardner, who is a real icon of our industry. And I tell people that the main reason I got into audiobooks was I was tired of hanging sheetrock because I had lined up all this theater work to see me through when I got to Washington, and it all fell through. So I really wanted this thing to come through.
So I set up an appointment with him at his house. We talked and had a really great day-long discussion about books. And he cut a little demo, and he said, I’ll shop this around, maybe send it to a few people, see what happens.
And Grover is a very good friend of mine, and I always joked that if he had known what was about to happen to him, he probably should have thrown me off his porch. Because I was so desperate to get something going, you know, I saw the potential immediately, just as a performer. You know, I’d grown up and showed business like, oh, I could do this at home, I could make good money.
It’s really interesting. It’s challenging work that I cajoled and, I don’t want to say bullied, but I’d show up at his house in the afternoon, oh, I just happened to be in the neighborhood with this bottle of scotch. Would you like to have a sip and let’s talk about audiobooks?
I pestered the poor man to death until he finally contacted Blackstone and BOT, Books on Tape, and said, oh, for the love of God, give me something. This guy’s driving me nuts. And Blackstone and Books on Tape were my very first two clients.
And I started narrating at his place. He had some booths that he would rent out for time. And that was the beginning of it.
That was 21 years ago, and 935 books.
My goodness. Wow, thank you so much.
My name is Steven Jay Cohen. You can find me online at stevenjcohen.com or the new business name. It’s now spokenrealms.com.net.
And there will be a.org eventually. All those things are happening. It used to be under the title, Listen to a Book.
And we’re doing a whole sort of pivot rebranding with that. How I got started in the business. I actually came up in this business.
Well, I came up in stage and sound, actually. So my first professional work was, well, where a lot of people in New York, who would be trying to make it in the theater would have a day job working, driving a cab or waiting tables, my day job was doing lights and sound. So I was auditioning part of the time, and then I was behind either the light board or the sound board, the other parts of the time.
And so I’ve kind of been doing that work all the way through. I did that on Theater Row and up into Symphony Space and did some work on selected shorts and some other pieces there before life kind of took me in lots of different directions. And maybe about, yeah, about nine years ago now, could be 10, some people who I was still doing some sound editing for said, you know, we had a lot of fun when we would act with you on stage.
Have you ever thought about getting back into acting and coming back to this side of the mic? And I did what I needed to do and ask people a lot of questions and said yes to a lot of things and slowly found my way into working with some independent publishers on ACX and from there into some of the other publishers and built that out and slowly worked from there towards becoming a publisher and distributor on my own. And that’s what Listen to a Book and what is now Spoken Realms is about.
Awesome. And finally, Scott Brick.
When I got started in the business, mumble mumble years ago, I can tell you the day, it was June 10th, 1999, when I did my first job at Dove Audio. There’s a very different landscape. You could get in back in those days without doing a demo.
You could just go in and audition for someone if you knew, you know, if you had some kind of connection to the people who were doing the auditions. A buddy of mine from UCLA that I played baseball with every Saturday, Bob Westall. He was working for, he was working for Stefan Ridnicki and Gabrielle Decure, who now do Skyboat here in Los Angeles.
They were running Dove Audio at the time. And so he got me an audition. And I thank God for Bob every day.
I’ve taken him out to so many dinners. And you know, I thought you drink for free around me from now on, because I wouldn’t have a career otherwise. Stefan and Gabrielle gave me my first job.
I did a couple of short stories for them. And that day, Dan Musselman, it was Dan Musselman, who is the executive producer of Penguin Random House Audio here in Los Angeles, he was leaving Dove Audio. He used to work with Stefan and Gabrielle.
And he had been hired away by this company called Books on Tape, which wound up being bought by Random House Audio. And he said, hey, it’s your first day, it’s my last day. I’m going off to make audiobooks for a new company.
Gonna go build a studio, why don’t you give me a call? And he gave me his card. And I thank God for that.
I have every day since because, I don’t know, 850 some odd books, I’ve probably done easily over 500 of them have been for Dan.
So thank you everyone for your personal history getting involved with audiobooks and a little bit of an abridged history of the audiobook industry itself over the last 20 years. So now is really an interesting time for audiobooks because I feel like they’re more popular than ever before. Everyone’s listening on their commutes or when they’re doing their errands at home.
And everyone is interested in pursuing it from all walks of life. So I’m curious, based on your experience, how do you recommend someone new to the business try and get started today?
Well, the first thing I get in email, at least an email a week, if not more, from people literally around the world. Some who have English as a second language even, who are interested. And I kept getting asked about this for years and years.
And so finally about maybe 10 years ago, maybe I guess, I made a little video on my YouTube channel. And on it I have what I call the test. So when people contact me, I say, go take the test.
And if you pass, then contact me and we’ll talk about something. And basically the test is, you know, get a book you like, set up a small space to work in, a confined space, and read out loud for two to three hours a day for 14 days straight. And, you know, and if you make a mistake, start the sentence over.
If you hit a word you don’t know how to pronounce, go look it up, you know, and read it to someone, don’t just mumble your way through it. And I say, if you can pass that, then you might have the temperament to be an audiobook narrator. Because I found over the years that not only in show business, but in audiobooks, it’s not the talent factor that’s, to me, the deciding thing.
It’s their temperament. Can they direct themselves? Can they stay focused when they’re working by themselves?
Can they work in a confined space? I get emails all the time from people who’ve taken the test, who say, thank you so much. Now you’ve inspired me.
I’m going to go on to ACX and see what’s there. But I also get emails from people saying, I took your test and you have absolutely positively convinced me that I never, ever, ever want to do this for a living. And I feel like I’ve done a good service as a coach.
I’ve saved them a lot of heartache and money. And so that’s what I do. That’s what I do.
And anyone expresses any interest. I’m like, go watch the video, go take the test.
Anybody else have a comment on that?
Yeah, this is Andi. I actually am in the process of selecting a small number of students to start from scratch with this fall because I put something on my Facebook page, my narrator page saying, you know, I’m going to take a small number of students and here’s how to apply and what to send me. And so the first test is actually, do they meet that deadline?
Because we have to meet, you know, it’s a deadline driven business. So if they can’t meet a deadline for me, then they’re not ready to put out a shingle and say, I really do this professionally. So I heard from a handful of people, and actually two of them are like, Debra, I’m going to be sending them your way in short order.
They’re like really amazing. Yeah, I was so impressed. I’m really excited to work with them.
And another one is fine, I think, talent wise, but was talking about wanting to sort of make extra money on the side doing audiobooks. And my perspective on things is that it’s not an extra money on the side kind of endeavor. It takes so long to get any traction, to get a foot in the door, to get your name out there, that it just takes a higher level of commitment than that.
Excellent. Debra, any thoughts?
Yes. Sean and Andi are absolutely amazing teachers and coaches, and I highly recommend them. We actually have a school as well, Deon Institute, and PJ Oakland is a teacher out here in Los Angeles.
And he does a great job teaching intro, intermediate, and he does a dialect class, and he’s just terrific, just terrific. So I recommend that people that are new to the business, they really need to get into class, they really need a coach, they really need a business coach. There’s a lot to this, and Andi’s right, it takes a lot of hard work to get your foot in the door and to get rolling.
It takes a lot of effort, a lot of marketing effort and a lot of going to events and being involved.
It really takes having a personal relationship with the different publishers and the different producers. It’s not enough to just hang a shingle or work off of the ACX system and think that you’re doing it. There’s a lot of work involved.
Nowadays, obviously, totally different landscape, and it is vital that you have a demo nowadays. My advice is to learn as much as you can before you go into the booth, because especially if you’re coming at this from another type of voiceover, you exercise different muscles in every different type. I work with DJs a lot, people who have spent their time in radio for decades, and they assume that they can just keep using those same muscles and those same skills when they do an audiobook demo, and it’s totally different.
I would say, whatever ability you’re able to learn, sometimes financially you can’t afford to get a coach, but there are so many free resources online, YouTube videos, you can watch interview shows. VO Buzz Weekly is a marvelous gift to any kind of voiceover artist, whether you want to get into audiobooks or promos or what have you. They interview professionals in every aspect of voiceover.
So you can watch a two-hour interview, hour and a half video, an hour and a half a video of hearing people who do it talk about the craft. Then go into the booth and sit down and create your tracks. You know, start sending out submission emails, query letters basically, and just one little word of advice.
Make sure to link directly to the page with your demos. Don’t go to your main page and then have them click again to get to the demos. You never want to be more than two clicks away from that person hearing your voice.
Wow, that is really insightful and something I had never thought about before.
Yeah, people lose so much interest so quickly. And the more clicks that you make them, the more hoops you give them to jump through, the quicker they’re going to lose interest.
So, Scott, a lot of our listeners are new to the business. That’s why we asked that first question. But a lot of the people that we talk to that are just coming in look first to ACX as a way to sort of get their foot in the door or maybe start in the business.
Do you see ACX as still a viable option to either start in the business or even to continue a career in the business?
I think, and this goes contrary to my initial thoughts about ACX, when I first heard about ACX years ago, and I think a lot of veteran narrators, let’s say, people who are already into their career, a lot of us shied away. Jeffrey Kafer, when I remember taking him out for a drink afterwards to say thank you, and he gave me the best advice. He said, if you are not using ACX as a way to put out royalty share books, you are leaving money on the table.
So I have absolutely revised my thinking on it. When I took the advice that Jeffrey Kafer gave me that night, it had an immediate financial impact on my career and my bank account. I think it’s absolutely a viable way to get in.
And I say this as anything derogatory about ACX, I say the same thing to people who work for one company all the time, even if it’s a major publisher. Always have an exit strategy. And by that, I don’t mean stop working for them.
By exit strategy, I mean a way to transition from working full time in this realm as you’re cutting your teeth and getting your sea legs under you, whatever metaphor you want to use. Once you’ve done that and you’re ready to work with the major publishers, the independent producers, what have you, always have a goal in mind about how to transition out. And absolutely, you can break in at ACX and you can make your career and your finances thrive on ACX.
Steven, how about you? We were talking about new people to the business approaching ACX as a way to break in or get their foot in the door. Is that still a viable option or is ACX still a viable option in general as a way to promote your audiobook business?
And what other ways are there for narrators to seek out work for themselves?
What I’ve noticed over time with ACX is that in the beginning, when the platform first opened up, there was a huge backlog of demand that simply had no place to go. Couldn’t figure out what was going on, and suddenly there was this marketplace. So there was a lot of really high value product that suddenly became available, and it was like panning for gold during the gold rush.
Whereas now, anyone who looks at ACX and is purely looking at it as a place to audition is missing at least half of what’s really there. Whether or not what’s sitting on ACX right now is something that you think is worth auditioning for, what ACX gives you by having an account is your own personal publishing platform. So you getting out and going to things like writers conferences or other things and being the one audiobook narrator in the room, you get to actually have the conversation and when the person says, and how are we going to distribute this, you have the answer in your back pocket.
So yeah, there are other things that are coming out now. And part of that is the longer that it goes on where Audible is the largest player, the more people start talking about alternatives. But also, the longer that goes on, the harder it becomes for somebody to build an alternative of scale, something that can handle that.
And we’re seeing some of that with Kobo coming on the scene, and we’re seeing Findaway, which for a long time was a business-to-business back-end system. They were responsible for a long time for moving audiobooks outside of Audible. In many cases, Findaway was responsible for how those books made it into the libraries, or make it into the little kiosk in a truck stop, and all different things like that.
Findaway was responsible for a lot of those other pieces, and now they’re turning around to be a place with their voices division, where they’re trying to reach out to authors. So it’s going to be interesting looking in the next couple of years as these different alternatives start to crop up, because the talk, when you talk to independent authors, is about what alternatives are there to Amazon, the parent company behind Audible. That’s really what I see is that when people simply look at ACX as a place to audition, they really are missing most of the value that’s there.
One thing that often does happen, though, is people will come to me and they’ll say, I want to do this through what was Listen to a Book. Of course, as of today, probably many of you have seen this, we’re going through a rebranding and moving the content under the new business name, which is Spoken Realms. The audio production network is what was Listen to a Book.
If you still have old links to listentoabook.com that still works, but you can go over to spokenrealms.com, spokenrealms.net, and see what’s going on there as the content is being migrated and things show up. But often people will come to me with a project that’s actually more appropriately an ACX project, and they’re kind of surprised when I turn them back towards ACX because I understand some more of the ins and outs of the platform and can point out where by doing something else, they may be leaving important information, data, money, something on the table. And, you know, the last thing I would like to do is just, you know, you come to me and I take your project and then six months down the road, you figure out there was something better.
If there’s a better fit, I’d rather focus on that. So really, what was Listen to a Book that’s now Spoken Realms, we’re focused a little bit more on projects you cannot do through ACX. So whether that means you’re working with material that is not available as an e-book that you can claim is your own.
So that could be you want to do a public domain work. It could mean that you have a script that is not originally a book and you’re trying to get it into the same marketplace. It could be that you want to do something that doesn’t fit for a different reason, like you’d like to do a dual narration piece, but you’d like to do it as a royalty share, and ACX doesn’t have a mechanism to pay to narrators.
So all of those kinds of projects are the kinds of things that can be done through spoken realms, through the audio production network, that you cannot do through the other platform. Personally, with what I’m doing and how I like to work, it made more sense to try to… You know the square peg in the round hole metaphor?
When I built the system that I built, I built a square hole so that way you don’t have to try to shove that square peg into the round hole. So when somebody comes to me, if they’ve got a round peg, I say, you really want to go over there.
I would say if you go on to ACX right now and look under just the wide open, how many producers have listed themselves there, it’s like 46,000 producers, which is really, really daunting. But then you start to look at the samples that people have uploaded, and the amount of not following directions that weeds out, I don’t even know, maybe a third of those people right off the bat, is stunning. Like people who put a car commercial demo up on ACX, or they’re reading something and you can hear a dog barking in the background, or there’s just not a sense of market with a lot of the people who’ve listed themselves there.
So you can really give yourself an advantage by thinking about who’s looking for narrators, not car companies, and what are they looking for, and what is your… If you work with a coach to know your brand, your niche, your sound, then you can actually leverage your ACX profile in conjunction with networking with authors who write in the genre that you might be interested in. Then they have a reason to go look at your profile and not just the entire ACX site and go, eh.
Excellent. Sean or Debra, any thoughts?
That’s really good advice.
I think so too.
Well, the other thing I would say, one of the things that I do personally and that I teach my students and I’ve taught… I’ve used to teach classes on the business of show business for years at acting schools and with acting groups. And I said, you know, it says, you know, your question is, is it still a viable option?
Well, that implies that you have a goal in mind. And a lot of people get into show business without a specific goal. And I stress to my students that they pick…
I always pick five goals for the year. And I work those goals throughout the year, and then at the end of the year, I can then see, well, how did I do this year? And that’s the only yardstick I use for my own success.
I don’t judge it against anybody else. And so what I try to tell them is that oftentimes, when they get to ACX, they may not know what ACX can do for them. They may have an overblown sense of what its possibilities are.
And I try to sort of lower those, especially with my narrators who come from a performance background. I tell them initially they should be thinking of ACX like if you’re an actor doing summer stock theater or black box theater, where you’re going to work your butt off, you’re not going to make any money, but you need the resume credit, the experience, the connections. And that’s just part of the learning curve.
You know, I said, yeah, go ahead and audition for the per finished hour stuff, but just know that your recording and your experience level now will be going head to head with someone who’s got 30, 40, 50, 60 books on there. So, you know, you should be thinking about, in my opinion… Now granted, you want to do books that are of a certain quality.
You’re not going to just take anything that comes your way. But you should be, to me, more focused initially, if you’re a raw beginner, on getting the experience, you know? So some of those books may not be, you know, they ain’t all Hemingway, but at least you’ll have the experience.
And so if you start out looking at ACX in that direction, and then as you get more savvy as a narrator, savvy as a business person, and savvy about the site, then you can begin to start picking and choosing and navigating the possibilities that are out there. But initially, you know, think of it more as that, you know, like I said, working in a black box theater in Brooklyn for ten bucks a show or something. It’s a learning experience more than it is a revenue stream.
Well, excellent points, everyone. It really helps kind of… So apparently, yes, ACX is still a very viable if misunderstood option for people who don’t realize the potential value it could have for them and their audiobook business.
And so, Steven, I love that you went into such detail because very often you find that as narrators grow their careers, they often become publishers in their own right. And so, a lot of people assume that, like other areas of voiceover, audiobook is all about the performance, it’s all about the voice, but the truth is that there are a lot of other skills involved, particularly technical skills. So I’m curious just how much technical skill is required to start, and is it really essential to have a home studio for people trying to get involved with audiobooks?
Yes, unless you live in New York or LA.
Simple enough.
I know. Anyone else want to weigh in?
All right.
Let’s phrase it a different way. How many of, in this case, Andi and Sean and Scott, how many of you actually still work from home and what percentage of your work is done in your home studio versus at a production house or a publisher?
Well, I don’t live in New York or LA, so I have done all but two of my books from my home studio.
Yeah, from my experience of the 930-something books I’ve done, probably a handful, maybe five in 20 years, because it was just an accident of geography. I became an audiobook narrator based out of Washington, DC., which is arguably one of the nexus points of audiobook narration because of Library of Congress and Learning Ally, and they needed narrators there, and out of that was the natural pool of talent for the audiobook companies when they were looking for home-based studio narrators.
So I started out working in a studio, my own booth, from the very beginning. So I’m really an autodidact. I taught myself everything I needed to know over the successes and failures of doing that on your own.
So you do need it for that reason, because that’s also where the industry is headed. It has been heading for many years now. The other thing too is, this gets back to say like demos on ACX, you do need to have a quality studio.
So the sound booth itself has to meet a certain standard. The equipment needs to be a certain standard. And there’s ways to talk with people and get that to that standard.
But also things like demos. Whereas in commercial VO, you go into a studio and they do all this really cool, sexy stuff with music and sound effects. And you have a really great producer who puts it all together for you.
In audiobooks, ultimately, you need to be doing your demos on your own mic in your own space, because that’s what they’re hiring in the end. Because if you went to an expensive studio in New York to get a really cool audiobook demo put together, you know, and then suddenly the quality of your studio where you do the book is radically different, it’s a bit of bait and switch. So yes, having your own studio is part and parcel with the industry, except, like Andi said, if you’re in LA or New York.
I never advise somebody to leap into a voiceover career, and first thing you do is get a home studio. I always say, test the waters. Make sure you have enough work to justify this expense, because depending on how intricate or detailed and really involved you want to get, you’re going to be spending a thousand, five thousand, I know people who spend a lot more than that on their boots.
And why do that if you don’t have the right skill set, or you’re the best in the biz, but nobody will listen to your demo? I mean, I hate the idea of spending all that money in your studio lying fallow, basically. So what I always say is, even though it might mean less profit up front, if you’re getting your per finished hour fee and it’s flat, there’s no leeway, there’s no wiggling room, that you spend part of it and you find the cheapest, best option for you to use somebody else’s studio.
And you use part of that per finished hour fee to do that. And then when you start getting those phone calls and emails a lot more often, and the publishers or whomever you’re dealing with is knocking on your door a lot more, especially when they start making inquiries like, hey, I’m curious, do you have a home studio? Ever thought about putting in a home studio?
Let that be your sign. Yes, go out. But it’s the same way that I always say, people ask me what kind of microphone, how much should they spend?
Should they pop for a really expensive one up front? Say, get one that makes you sound professional. And then at some point in your career, when you want to be taken seriously, when you want to be taken seriously as somebody who’s moving on to the next level and working for the majors, that you invest more, and you invest a little more into a better microphone.
Again, I hate the idea of somebody going to a great deal of expense up front. And the same goes for the technical side of things. It depends on how steep the learning curve is.
I know just enough about the technical aspects of audio to be dangerous. I knew that the learning curve, that’s not where my skill set is. So, you know what I want to do?
I want to rely on the people who really know their stuff. I want to rely on the best in the business. And there’s a part of me that’s just like, hey, you know what?
I’m an American. I get a lot of benefit by being a member of society. And I don’t want it all to go one way.
I don’t want to just take the benefits. I want to give some, too. So I hire editors, and I hire proofers, and I hire engineers.
You know, I can… If I focus on what I know how to do, rather than spending money on training, or spending time on, you know, watching a ton of YouTube videos, if you want to, by all means, do it. I know a lot of narrators who do, and they thrive on it.
Simon Vance loves playing around, you know, and doing his own editing. That guy, God, that’s an extended yawn for me. So it makes me happy that I’m hiring people, and I’m putting money into the economy, that I’m helping my associates, my peers, the people who really know their stuff.
I think it is all dependent on the person. What is your learning curve? What is your level of interest?
Also, what is your level of fear? I work with a lot of retirees who are trying to, as they come to take my classes, they want to reinvent themselves, and they don’t want to have to spend a lot of time or money because maybe they don’t have a lot of either one of those. I said, well, then don’t.
Do as much as you want and try working with others to get you to the next step.
Yeah, and to add on to where Scott was going there, and this is an open question for the room, how many people in this room knew how to fix a car or build a car the day they got their driver’s license? Still don’t. And this is the thing that most people think about.
They think, oh, I’m going to do everything. That’s the right way to go about it. When I first moved to the area that I’m in and I was doing some of this work, first thing I did was I contacted every studio in the area to see if anyone had actual experience either recording voiceover or spoken word.
I found a couple of studios that were semi-local. At least one had ISDN who said that sure, I could advertise that I’m an ISDN talent, and this is how I schedule time in the studio. And I work with him on and off to this day, not because I need that anymore.
I’ve got stuff set up here, but because we’ve become friends and we send work towards each other at this point. So there’s that component. And a lot of people make the mistake of trying to figure this all out at once.
And then when they go back to listen to their early work, they wind up with that cringe-worthy, oh my God, oh, you know, they have that feeling about what’s happening there. And this is one of the things… So when I…
I’ve called ACX a pay-to-play, but then people point out to me, you don’t pay a fee, so why do I call it a pay-to-play? I call it a pay-to-play because a royalty share, in a lot of ways, is them asking you to gamble whether or not you’re going to make money. You know, it’s a stock market.
And you’re paying your time.
You’re paying your time, right, your time and futures based upon your labor. And so people say, well, it’s not costing me anything up front. They’re not understanding that part.
There’s a lot of people who will do their first book without pre-reading it, and then only find out in Chapter 19 that the character they’ve been doing with that high squeaky voice is described as having a rich baritone. And they have to go back and re-record because there are things like that. So finding local studios, going into your local libraries and getting to know the reference librarians who are incredibly helpful because when you need to look up pronunciation…
Those are people who look up things for a living, and that doesn’t cost you anything, and neither of those things actually cost you anything. And when you are working alone, when you start working by yourself and you’re going to plan to work in a padded room talking into a little stick, you need to create those outside connections to the world. And so now there’s two local libraries near me, and when I walk in, about half of the reference librarians know who I am, and they’ll ask me, what book are you working on?
Because I need pronunciations of local names, of things like that, and they’re happy to help. So there are ways to plug in to the community around you to get things done. And again, going back to the, I didn’t know how to fix a car when I first got my driver’s license.
Why, when I get my first microphone, would I be expecting to do that? So absolutely, find a local studio, do your jobs there, but invest at that point in a very basic kit, and actually talk to those studio people as well as the online forums, people that you trust, anyone who will talk to you about equipment, and you’ll be able to get kitted out in professional equipment at home that you can use for quick auditions, because the thing that a lot of voice over people don’t really remember is that you don’t need the perfect space for most of your auditions. You need the perfect space for your job.
There’s an understanding that the audition is, you know, they’re listening for your delivery. They’re not listening at that point to say, ooh, his studio is noisy. If you’re the right person, they’ll hire you, and you’re pointing out that you’re going to be recording that in another studio.
So having an audition-grade studio, let’s call it that, at home when you start is a lot cheaper than running out and trying to figure out if you need a $10,000, $8,000, $12,000 booth in your home.
Can I also… there’s something else I’d love to point out, because the idea that our fellow narrators, our brothers and sisters, I think are being taken advantage of in one particular way, and it drives me crazy. This isn’t a thing about the technical aspect of audio, and yet nevertheless, it is something that can so easily be outsourced and solve one of your problems.
Some publishers, they will have, you know, they’ll offer a job, let’s say they’re offering $200 per finished hour for a book. Okay, great. You take the job.
Then they tell you, oh, you know what? If you want to do all the research yourself and handle that part of it, we’ll make it $250. Or $225.
Let’s say it’s $250. And what do we do? Like lemmings, you know, like sheet.
You know, we go, great, I want that extra $50. And what a sucker’s bet that is. Oh, my God.
And I understand, my friends are, you know, the publishers in some cases are my friends who are making me this offer. And I’m looking at them going, oh, my God, you’re so taking advantage of us. Because think about it, right?
You’re getting, let’s say, $50 extra per hour, per finished hour. You know, if you’re making $50 per finished hour to do the research, but you’re making $200 per finished hour to do the narrating, why don’t you pay somebody $25 an hour to do that research for you? And you make $200 an hour in that same hour on a different book.
It’s outsourced. Please, God, you know, I haven’t done my own research in close to 10 years now, because I can make more doing what I know how to do.
And Debra, you work with producers and narrators within your award-winning studio. What percentage of your work is done with narrators in-house versus in their home studios?
Yeah, yes. You know, we’re in LA. We’ve got two studios in LA.
One has four booths and the other has five. We run them seven days a week, double shifts. So we’re doing quite a bit of work in our studios.
But Sean is absolutely right. The industry is moving towards home narrators. Of all the work that I receive from clients all over the world, 80% of it I’m still hiring a home narrator to do the work in their own home booths.
20% of the work that I’m doing is done here in my studios or in studios in New York, London, Toronto, big cities. Authors wanting to read their own books are still coming into studios. They obviously aren’t going to have their own home booths.
Celebrities, actors like Broadway actors, we hire a lot of those. So those people are recording in studios in New York or here in LA. But yeah, if somebody is serious about doing audiobooks and they don’t live in Los Angeles or New York or London, they really have to have a home booth.
It just is the way it is.
Yeah, and I would also add that I have done shorter form voiceover work. And when I was doing a two or three minute commercial and my neighbor was using a chainsaw, I could, you know, quick fit it in when he went in to have a drink of water. But if I’m trying to do an eight hour book, which takes me the better part of a week to finish, and my neighbor’s having a chainsaw party, I got a problem.
Yeah, that makes sense. So we talked about doing work in a production house, like Deon Audio in LA. How does a narrator who’s looking to partner with such a business contact them?
Or what’s the best way to market yourselves to production houses?
Yeah, in regards to production houses and publishers in general, everybody on their web, all the publishers have on their websites exactly how you can become a narrator for them and work for them. Every single publisher operates differently. Sometimes that can be frustrating for actors, narrators to navigate, but it’s really, really clear on every single publisher’s website how to contact them, how to upload your samples, how they work, how they hire.
I’m really clear about how I do it. All they would have to do is email me debradbra.deonaudio.com, and we have a very clear set of instructions on how… People don’t…
There’s kind of a bit of a myth about ACX. People seem to think that they have to have some sort of… A bunch of credits in order to get my attention or the attention of the publishers.
It’s absolutely not true. And sometimes it’s really frustrating because somebody will have… Will work really hard and get 60 credits or something crazy, some big body of work on ACX.
And will do all these kind of royalty share kind of things and do a bunch of free work and thinking that if they do a bunch of free work, that they’re going to somehow build up all these credits and get my attention because they have a lot of credits. I feel sorry for people who are misguided that way because I would have listened to their sample without any credits to their name, and I would have decided whether I like them or not based on their sample. So I don’t know about other people and whether they feel like they need you to have a bunch of credits or not, but I can tell you from my perspective, I do not.
I know what I like. I know within a few seconds of hearing you read, if I want to hire you or not, it’s that simple for me.
Excellent. So sort of going on that question, Debra, do you critique demos for people who might not, who are just asking for feedback, not necessarily wanting to be hired by you?
I’ve never done that, really, because people that are contacting me want me to hire them. So I do critique a lot of people’s demos, but not for the fun of it.
Oh, I see. So everyone’s pretty much… Is this hireable?
Is this bookable?
Yeah, if they’re contacting me, they want a job. And rightly so. We’re the world’s largest producers of audiobooks.
I stopped counting. I had produced 15,000 titles four or five years ago, and I just stopped counting. We do thousands a year.
If they’re calling me, they’re looking for a job, and I don’t blame them. They should be calling me.
So what is sort of the etiquette for contacting a production house or a publisher? I mean, you mentioned that they all have their own idiosyncrasies, but since you are a producer yourself, what do you look for when someone reaches out?
I’m just simply looking for somebody to write me an email that says, Hi, I’m looking for a job, and how do I go about working with you? And we write back very clear instructions on exactly what they need in order to be asked to be part of the roster. And then once they’re asked to be part of the roster, we start looking at them as a possibility of someone who can be hired.
Somebody has to be on the roster in order to get hired, because it’s just too complicated for us otherwise to remember who you are and it’s just better for us. We have five casting people working here, and that’s what they do 40 hours a week. So it’s too hard for us to meet somebody at a party or whatever and to remember who they are.
It makes much more sense for us that if they give us their headshot, their bio, their demo, then once we have a marker for them, a banner, then the relationship part starts. I saw somebody at a mixer or somebody participated in APA speed dating or some other form where I somehow see their face over and over and they become ingrained in my memory and hiring them and for them to be able to stand out. And that’s what Sean had talked about, your brand, and who you know.
Andi had said knowing who you are and how to market yourself and what your brand is, and that’s all true. You have to stand out somehow.
Absolutely. You can approach anybody. You the narrator, be bold.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined. Let’s put it this way.
Think about it from this perspective. Every single one of those publishers and every single one of those independent producers, Deb can tell you, you know, Deb Deyan can tell you that they are always looking for new talent. Always.
They may not have the time based on the, say, the budgets, the timetables, the deadlines that they’re dealing with on a certain project to go find somebody right now, but they are always on the lookout. It is always on their radar. It is always on their radar.
Find the new guy. Find the new woman. And you, basically, you do so by writing a query letter.
Do a Google search. Query letter. I used to write them when I was writing magazine articles all the time, and I had to approach a new publisher.
And I would basically say, this is who I am. This is what I’ve done. You know, attached are some clips of things, you know, attached are some articles I’ve written in the past, or in this case, you know, you’ll see a link here to books that I have narrated already, and those obviously are ones that you’ve done on ACX, or, you know, whomever you start your career with.
And you say, I think I would be a good fit, because, and you point out that, you know, well, Blackstone Audio, they don’t do a whole lot of young adult. They do some, but they do a whole lot of, you know, whatever it is. You point out, you know, I’ve noticed you do a lot of romance.
I’ve noticed you do a lot of erotica. If you’re talking to Random House, you say, I know that Listening Library, I know that your Listening Library imprint does, you know, by far the most young adult books in the industry. And you find these things out by doing the research.
And you basically, you’re showing them when you send an email like that, or a letter if you want to get old school. You’re showing them not only that, with your links, hey, I do what you do. When you show them that you know about their company, and you’ve taken the time to research it, that you know about the industry.
You’re basically saying, I’ve done what you do, I do what you do for a living, and I can help you. Look at all these other people that I’ve already helped. It is in your best interest for me to help you too.
That’s the subtext of your letter. Write a very good query letter, have somebody read it, vet it for you, make sure that your spelling and grammar are perfect, because you know what? This is the publishing industry.
And start submitting. Now, you may not get traction with Simon and Schuster. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this for coming up on 18 years now.
The first 15 years of my career, they wouldn’t answer my phone calls. I should say that. They were always very polite, but they were like, Yeah, we’re not looking for anybody right now.
And then finally, I started working with them. Remember, the same thing happened with Harper. I only started working for them less than a year ago.
Remember that every person that you were approaching, every company that you’re approaching, always keep in mind, this is still an audition. And when you do your first, when they give you your first chance, whether it’s one of the voices in the multi-voice recording or a short story in the collection that they’re doing, whatever it is, remember that that first job, you may have booked the job, but you haven’t booked the publisher yet. You haven’t booked the room.
You haven’t booked the casting person. They’re waiting to find out how you execute the chance that they’ve given you. And I always say, keep that in mind with every single new person you’re approaching.
And I think if you go into it with that intent and with that knowledge, things usually go well. They definitely go better.
Fabulous points. Wonderful. Any thoughts on that, Steven?
I think when you’re doing that outreach… I’ve heard people do this, and people have a hard time really celebrating the work that they’ve already done. They tend to minimize.
And so writing that query letter can be a very hard thing. But I want to point out that if you look at any ACX book, not a single one of them claims that ACX is the publisher. ACX is simply the platform, in that case, where you as a narrator have connected with a rights holder, and the book has gotten done.
So you have done zero books for ACX. You’ve done a whole bunch of books for some independent publishers. And so if you’ve done 12 books for eight different rights holders, then describe it that way.
Talk about how you’ve done something for this indie horror label, and for this LGBT label that does mysteries and other things like that. Realize that all ACX did was introduce you to somebody who needed a book to get done. You’ve done zero books for ACX.
You have done books for these independents. And yes, when you talk to people, you’re going to do that with as much confidence. Your portfolio is you, and you want to be hired.
This isn’t about you being a shrinking violet, but this is about you saying, Here’s what I can do, and here’s how what I can do can be a service for you.
Andi and Sean, any advice on approaching publishers specifically?
Sean? Well, it’s a complicated thing. I mean, just as Debra has her philosophy, other publishers are different.
You know, there was, I won’t name names, but at the recent APAC conference, there was a casting director at one of the forums who said, Don’t send me anything. I don’t want to hear from you. I don’t want emails from people.
I don’t want anything. And you’re like, well, how do you find new talent? You have to be…
Debra’s taking, in my opinion, the correct approach, which is, I come from the theater background. I grew up in the theater. And like it or not, if you’re in casting, for a theater or casting office in general, you’re going to be inundated with talent, trying to reach out and trying to say, Hey, I’m new.
Pay attention to me. I think I could be an asset for you in some way. And so you have to be open.
That’s just… It comes with the territory. It comes with the job description.
So that being said, learning about marketing and advertising, the nuances of that, about putting together a resume, about showing them some of your reviews, about having a very good demo to showcase your talents, learning the nuances of that are tricky. You know, it’s not something I can answer in a… in just a quick response to this question.
It takes finesse, it takes time to learn how to package yourself, your brand, what are you special at, and so on. But all those pieces are out there. You can learn all of that stuff, not only from coaches, but it’s free on YouTube and on the web.
There are videos and articles and things you can actually spend the time to read and learn from that teach you how to craft an image, how to craft a good resume or a good demo, and how to get it in front of the right people.
I have a, like, don’t do this type story that’s not a very long story. I was at a networking event, an industry event, and I was speaking with somebody who hires narrators from a particular publishing company, and we were talking about something I had produced that he listened to that had not anything to do with what he produces, just something he personally likes, and we were talking about some funny parts of the book and blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden, someone came and broke into our conversation, so there’s already, like, lack of sensitivity to the fact that two people are having a conversation, and just started talking about himself and shoving the business card in the guy’s face, and talking about, well, I want to do business books.
I want to do all these business books, and I just wanted to say, do you realize that the person you’re talking to never, ever produces any business books? And if you had done your homework, this would not be a connection you’re trying to make. He’s in a totally other part of the industry, and this is not a good match for you, and you made a really bad first impression because you just interrupted a conversation that we were having.
And that man’s name was Sean Pratt.
It’s like if we were at some kind of… Yeah, I didn’t want to blow his cover. He was having a bad day.
Thanks a lot, Andi.
He’s so considerate.
I wasn’t saying it was you.
He does a lot of business books.
So, I guess if you go to a networking thing, pretend it’s dating, right? And, if you see two people talking, don’t break in and start French kissing that one other person. It’s like, common sense.
They’re having a conversation. Wait your turn. And, who is that person?
Do you need to meet them? The first networking event that I went to, there’s this summertime thing that’s a lot of fun. The first time I went to it, the host of the event sends out the guest list the night before.
And you better believe I was on Audible looking up all these people. What do they record? You know, I was completely stalking people.
And what I found was that there was somebody who narrated a book set in the town where my daughter was born in China. And I was like, oh my gosh, I read that book. I love that book.
So now I can talk to that person about that book. And there’s one person I can talk to tomorrow.
So the theme is it’s not different than marketing yourselves in any other business.
Right. Do your homework. Be savvy.
Yeah.
And I love that you had such a proactive approach to it. Because yeah, I mean, with any new business endeavor, there’s a level of unconscious incompetence where you don’t know what you don’t know. But there really is so much research and sort of building of a skill set behind the scenes that you can do before you make a fool of yourself like that.
So what I’m curious about is because some of you either work with students or hire narrators or do both, what kind of skills or mindsets do you look for in a narrator or a student?
What I’m looking for is temperament. I always interview my… When someone reaches out to me, I have them fill out a questionnaire and I review it first.
And if I see… I’m looking for a background, preferably with some level of performance, because, like it or not, performers just do better as narrators where they have an acting background of some kind. There’s a general statement.
But I like to… I always interview my potential students. I want to get a feel for them.
I also tell them what to expect when they work with me. I’m a strategic coach. I’m not a tactical coach.
A tactical coach… You can learn a lot from a good tactical coach. Someone like Johnny Heller is an excellent tactical coach.
Scott Brick is too. Isn’t that right, Scott?
Sean Pratt, you are a master of the transition. I tell you what I do. What I look for when I’m…
When I’m basically auditioning talent, trying to figure out, you know, who would be a good fit. I don’t do a ton of it, but what I do, I want to make sure that, you know, obviously it’s the right voice for the authorial voice. Does it match?
And… is when I listen to somebody’s stuff, I listen to several samples, and I make sure that their style changes with each author. Because every author has a unique authorial voice, and we, you know, we shift what we do to match it.
You know, my version of… of The Red Badge of Courage shouldn’t sound like the Nelson Demille books that I do, right? They’re both fiction, but they are by no means the same kind of fiction.
So, you know, the Vampire Detective series that I did for Blackstown, the Charlie Houston books, they don’t sound like any other books that I did. So, I basically look for… and I can see it in…
when I’m working with a student in the studio, in the classroom, and I can hear it when I listen to samples. I know when a narrator is connected, when the narrator that, you know, the person I’m working with or listening to has connected to the text, because you know what? It is axiomatic.
When we connect to the text, the listener does. It’s 10 times out of 10, 100 out of 100. And that’s the moment where you reach them and where it becomes personal for us.
And I always listen for that. Is the sample that they’ve sent me, does it show that? I think we need to pay attention to that when we’re clicking.
I think we need to pay attention to that when we’re choosing the samples that we put up for streaming on our website. That it’s a section of the book that really choked us up, or that we really connected to and were able to make it funnier, because, oh God, this has happened to me. Because it’s those moments that make people go, oh wow.
And the very first time this ever happened was with Alex Hyde-White. I knew I wanted to work with him, because in class one day, he read an exchange in a book about Truman Capote. And there was somebody in his life, I want to say that he called Big Mama.
And Big Mama said, I love you, Truman. He says, no, you don’t. Big Mama said, no, Truman, I absolutely love you.
And he said, no, you don’t, you can’t. She says, what do you mean, I can’t? And he says, because nobody can love me.
And he did it, and he was so… God, he just connected to it. I don’t know how to…
and I don’t want to imitate it. But I went, oh my God. And I gasped when I listened to it.
Because that was the moment. And I knew that when he said that, he was remembering a time in his life when he felt like that. Because I’m telling you, everybody who hears that line remembers a time in their life when they felt unable to be loved, unworthy of love.
And I went, that’s the moment. He connected? Great.
I want to connect with him. I want to work with him.
And Steven?
In my case, when I’ve had people coming to me, I’ve had more success casting people whose work I’m more familiar with than just their demo sample. And sometimes, it may be that I have only heard the demo sample, but then I’ve actually had enough interactions with the person that I have a sense of who they are. Because sometimes you can have a really wonderful demo, but sometimes that person has a hard time delivering on a regular basis what they delivered that one day in the studio with the director right there with them.
A good example of a wonderful match that works in this way is not a case where I was casting a project that came to me, but I had listened to Johnny Heller’s The Education of Littletree, which, done with Crossroad Press, it was beautifully done. It was just so amazing. And the next day after that was done and it was reflecting upon how that story went, I just kept saying to myself, he would do a wonderful Huckleberry Finn.
And so the next time I was in a place where I could mention that, I reached out to him and I said it and he thanked me for it. And about nine months later, he said, I really want to do that Huckleberry Finn. So we made it happen.
And so what will happen for me is it’s either in direct interactions with people or it’s the fact that I’m an avid listener of audiobooks myself. And so I’ve had authors contact me to help get their stuff done and I start running through people in my head who I’ve listened to who feel like they would fit the project. So in a lot of ways, I’m doing that work the same way Scott is because the memory of those feelings is like, ooh, I’ve really got to call Sarah Moller-Christensen.
I really have to call Tim Campbell. So it’s when you hear about the project and the passion of the project from the rights holder’s point of view, sometimes that right fit of a narrator will just come back up because of the direct experience of having experienced their performance.
Yeah. And so the idea is that a tactical coach deals with what they have right in front of them. You’re doing the read.
They say, do this, try this, try this, do a different thing. And that’s not how I work. I work as a strategic coach.
My stuff is about here’s the concept, here it ties it to the material. Now go away and you have to teach it to yourself. I walk you through that and answer questions and give them examples, but I come from the school of thought that you only really learn something when you have to suffer through it on your own, as it were.
And so when I talk with them, I’m giving them a heads up about what to expect when they’re going to work with me, and I can tell immediately whether or not they’re going to be receptible to that. The other thing I’m looking for is a certain level of temperament, a realistic outlook about what they could be doing, how long it’s going to take. I get this question a lot.
Well, if I work really hard, do you think I’ll be making X amount of dollars in a year? And my response is always the same, which is this is show business. There is nothing that is certain.
And if you actually encounter somebody who tells you a dollar figure, then you should put your wallet in your pocket and get the heck out of there because they’re about to scam you. You can work six months and make a fair amount of money or work six years and just limp along. There is no structure.
And I want to make sure they know that going in. I want to align their preconceptions with reality and also introduce them to the way I teach. And then, I guess lastly, it’s just a matter of temperament.
Do I feel like they have the temperament not only to work with me, but to hang in there and do this? I keep coming back to that word, but I’ve just been in show business a long time. Talent is not the ultimate arbiter of your success.
It really is about that tenacity, that temperament. Can you hang in there? Can you stay focused on it?
I’ve had a lot of friends who were very talented who left the business. They just couldn’t handle this other part of the… the other demands of temperament and tenacity.
Jumping off from that, I think, Sean, I would probably be more of the tactical type of coach. Most of who I work with are people who are already working narrators who have run up against a problem. For example, women wanting to strengthen their menu of male voices that they do or people feeling like they’re in a rut or they’re maybe exploring a genre that they think I’m familiar with, like romance, for example, and they want some coaching in that genre.
But this week, looking at these possible new students, I was looking at much the same thing, for sure, and I had them make me an MP3 that was just two minutes. The first minute was, tell me about yourself, and the second minute is, read me something. So I wanted to hear if there was a difference between their connectedness telling me about themselves and was there a disconnect when they started reading, because ideally, I want to feel like they’re telling me a story, not that they’re holding me at arm’s length and lecturing to me.
So I was listening for those kinds of things. But usually when I coach, I start my session with working narrators by saying, you tell me what we’re going to work on today.
And that’s fundamentally different from what I do. I have a curriculum. Every time we meet, it’s a new idea, there’s a structure, and also as we move through the stuff, I go back and say, well, are you working with this concept now?
Are you working with this one? And there’s a great deal of value in both kinds of coaches. But Andi put her finger on it.
If you’re going to work with a tactical coach, you need to be a savvy enough student to know what you need to work on. You can’t expect Andi to know your weak points. That takes time, a long time to figure that out, back and forth.
So if you’re going to work with someone who has the skill that Andi or Scott or Johnny has, or PJ as well, if you’re going to come in and work on accents with PJ, you should find out which ones, where is your weak point, and know that’s what you want to work on and focus on. Because there’s only so much you can pack into a 60-minute session.
So awareness of self is certainly a useful skill to have in that situation. So Debra, you’re much more in the hiring professional narrators rather than working with students. What kind of skills do you look for in the narrators you work with?
I’m really looking for an acting background. I really, really love hiring theater actors. You know, I’m looking for people to give me a sample of what they love to do.
Because I think, you know, what Sean was saying is, you know, people either stay in this business or they don’t. They either have it for the long haul or they don’t. And I find that people have to love this thing in order to stay in it for the long haul.
And I can tell you that my husband, Bob, who’s now gone, that he and I love this with every breath. You know, we jumped out of bed every day and, you know, love this thing. And we were just, you know, poured to the bone for almost two decades out of sheer love and out of knowing that it was going to be big someday.
We just knew it. We just knew it. I think that that’s something that I’m looking for.
And when I hear somebody greeting, I just hear it. I hear the love in it. I hear the theater background.
I hear something more than just the talent when listening.
So let’s flip the table a little bit. When someone is looking for a coach, what are the qualities they should seek when they’re shopping to maybe be their first coach? Or like Andi said, if they’re looking for some sort of hurdle to overcome as an established narrator, what are the qualities in a good coach?
I was looking on a platform where you can look up any subject and take a course about it, and I wondered if that platform had audiobook lessons. And so I entered audiobooks, and indeed somebody had put up a course, and I looked her up on Audible, and she has two books. So, you know, I wouldn’t want to learn from somebody who has barely done the thing I’m trying to learn how to do.
So I would look up their professional reputation. I would look up what other people have to say about working with them as a coach. I would see if they offer a group workshop-type classes, which tend to be less expensive because the cost is spread out over, you know, 10 to 20 people instead of you working one-on-one, and try them in a group environment.
And then maybe if you feel like you would work well with them one-on-one, approach them about the one-on-one coaching. But prepare to settle in for regular coaching. It’s definitely not the kind of thing where you just, like, it’s been an hour and you’re like, yes, I’m ready to do all the books.
I couldn’t have said it better, Andi. Absolutely.
Well, I would just… There’s one thing I would say is that in general, Andi put her finger right on it. But that being said, learning to be a coach is a different skill than learning to be doing what we do.
There’s a… When I decided that I wanted to coach, I’d been doing workshops, and they were a lot of fun. I had a great time doing them.
But I’d done workshops, like I said, on general show business topics for 20 years. And I felt like I needed to learn how to be a coach, especially because the kind of coaching I wanted to do. So I talked with friends who were coaches in different, you know, other walks of life, who coach people on different kinds of things, and got ideas from them.
I read books. I practiced and built slowly over time my own skill, because especially with audiobooks, it’s mainly a self-taught experience. And so if you master the craft, whether it’s audiobooks or woodworking or gardening or whatever, that’s one thing.
Learning to teach it is a totally different skill set. You have to learn to go, all right, what is this thing I’m doing intuitively? Let me isolate it.
Let me describe it. Let me give a name to it. Let me create an exercise to show a student how to use it.
And then how do I respond to what they do and teach them in the moment? There’s a number of steps involved. And so I’ve seen some narrators, or I’ve been in the room with some narrators, who have a great deal of experience as narrators, but they didn’t come off as very good coaches.
They weren’t very articulate. And it’s that old Einstein quote about, if you can’t explain a complex idea simply enough, then you don’t understand it well enough yourself. And I’ve seen on occasion someone who has years of experience, they need to go and learn how to be a good teacher.
So there’s… I think… So getting back to the bigger question, ask around.
That’s what private messaging is for on Facebook. Ask other people or start a thread. Say, hey, I’m interested in working with such and such a coach.
If you have thoughts or opinions, please contact me privately and let’s talk about it. I encourage my students when they contact me. I give them a list of former students and I say, do your due diligence.
Don’t just take their word or a couple people’s words for it. Go find out some from other people. In fact, I…
At the end of my meeting with my prospective students, I don’t allow them to say yes or no. I say, go away and take 24 hours and think about this. There’s no special two-for-one sale here.
There’s no you get a pony. I’ve laid out what it’s like to work with me. Go think it over and then if you’re interested, then send me an email.
And also that’s a nice sort of, I think, a graceful way for them to really think it over. And if they realize it’s not for them, because I don’t take brand new students. I mean, people, they have to have several books under their belt because, in my opinion, narrating non-fiction well is just more difficult than fiction.
And if you don’t have any experience at all as a narrator, the stuff that I teach is going to leave you just running in circles. So I want to give them a graceful way to acquiesce and say, you know, I don’t think this is right for me right now. So those are some things to think about too.
Excellent responses. We hear some of the same themes over and over again. You need a very specific temperament of tenacity and perseverance to really…
or just passion for audiobooks. It’s not a quick, rich scheme by any means. And you might be shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not fully invested in it.
So with that, I just wanted to thank our wonderful panelists for coming today and give you the opportunity to say goodbye, promote your services, maybe even provide contact information for people who might want to get a hold of you.
Sure. You can find me online at seanprattpresents.com or send me an email directly at SeanPratt at comcast.net. You can follow me on Facebook at SeanPrattPresents or on Twitter at SP Presents.
I’m always available to be contacted through any of those platforms.
I’m Debra Deyan, owner and producer at Deyan Audio Services. That’s spelled B-E-Y-A-N, audio. You can send me an email at Debra, D-E-B-R-A, at D-E-Y-A-N audio.com.
I’d love to have you on my roster if you’re ready. And we certainly have some great classes and coach available to you through the Deyan Institute. You can follow us on Facebook, Deyan Audio.
You can send me a personal friend request on Facebook. I’m under Debra Deyan, D-E-Y-A-N.
You can find me on the web at andiarrndt.com and there’s a contact form right there on my website to send me a message. My narrator page is on Facebook at Andi Arndt narrator and my Twitter is at Andi underscore aren’t. So I’m happy to hear from people with questions or help in any way that I can.
Very kind of you to ask. My website, you can go to scottbrick.net or brickbybrickaudiobooks.com or scottbrickpresents.com. They all go to the same place.
You can reach me through my website. You can, you know, if it’s teaching related, shoot me an email at scottbrickteachers.gmail.com. And yeah, connect with me on online and social media as well.
And finally, Steven.
And you can find me at stevenjaycohen.com. You can also find the newly reorganized business at spokenrealms.com and.net. If you go to both sites, you’ll see some slightly different points of view on what’s there.
You can find me on most social media with my full name spelled out, steven with a V, jaycohen.com. That counts for Facebook, Twitter, and almost anything else you can imagine. If I’m on it, usually that’s the handle that’s there.
I love that name, by the way. Spoken Realms. It’s fantastic.
Well, thanks again, everyone. Like I said at the beginning, we were so excited to have this discussion, and you guys did not disappoint. We thank you all for your time and your wonderful services.
Thank you.
Oh, thanks so much.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
So that was some fabulous discussion. We want to thank all of our guests once again. We can’t thank them enough for being with us and donating their time.
So our audience can be more clued in about the world of audiobooks.
So I don’t know about you, Paul, but I mean, this really got me more motivated to more actively pursue my own audiobook work. And so some of our listeners might be wondering ways that they can get involved too. So we have a number of events coming up, some as soon as next month.
So a lot of our narrators or members on the panel today are a big fan of fellow narrator named Johnny Heller. And he’s got a retreat, an audiobook retreat coming up in October 13th. So that’s actually going to be in Rhode Island.
And you can… I’m not sure if registration is still open for it right now, but this is an annual event that you should really look into because it gives you a very… It’s not so much like a very large conference atmosphere.
Like you’re actually at a sort of resort retreat with maybe less than 50 people who you can really network with and get to know better and improve. And it’s just a wonderful opportunity to kind of improve all aspects of your audiobook and voiceover career.
Steven did say it was called the New England Narrators Retreat.
Yeah, it has a couple of different ones. There’s also Johnny Heller’s Splendiferous Relaxathon. It’s kind of an inside joke among the narrators.
But usually it’s called Johnny Heller’s New England Narrator Retreat. So you can find out more information about that event at Johnny Heller’s website. That’s johnnyheller.com.
johnnyhelleralloneword.com. And definitely check that out. I had the pleasure of meeting him at VO Atlanta last year, and he’s an incredible character as well as narrator.
Well, the other big event that most narrators would want to mark down their calendars is APAC, and that’s the Audio Publishers Association Conference. And that is on May 31st, 2018 in New York City, the location to be determined. But that is part of the Audio Publishers Association, which is an organization I highly recommend everybody join if they’re serious about doing audiobooks.
There are special events that only members can get into at APAC. So definitely look into that. If you want to join the APA or, like I said, Audio Publishers Association, it is at audiopub.org.
Definitely check that out. I think all of our panelists are members of that association.
And certainly advocates of it.
Yeah, exactly.
And you don’t have to be a member to go to APAC. So if that’s something you’re worried about, you don’t have to be. But like Paul was saying, you do get some extra perks for being a member.
And you even get some discounts for the registration of the event itself. So definitely look into that if you’re really serious about pursuing audiobook work full time.
So that pretty much wraps up this edition of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We want to thank all of our guests for the Audiobook Roundtable. Scott Brick, Steven Jay Cohen, Debra Deyan and Andi Arndt, and the irascible Sean Allen Pratt.
So thanks again to our wonderful panelists today. We learned so much, and I feel so invigorated, and I’m going to start narrating some chapters right now. So on behalf of our guests, Paul and myself, I hope you all have a wonderful day, guys.
Bye, everybody.
Thanks for listening to the VO Meter. Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vomete