Since Mr. Bunny didn’t accept me for their exclusive club, I started poking around the various Voice over Work web sites to see what I might find. I have been tempted to “open a gig” on Fiverr – I got so far as to the last step (which was to attach the required audio or video file) and left it unfinished. I am having difficulty in motivating myself to try to break into another market. And the Fiverr market doesn’t seem to support much of the type of content I am most interested in. I have become a fan of doing long-form narration, and as far as I can tell the majority of the work on Fiverr is very short. Most of the billing stats are based on 100 words, and I am going to hold of on that one.

However, I did “attend” a webinar from SuchaVoice.com this past week. This despite the warning from a couple different podcasts to avoid webinars! The warning hinged around the fact that many webinars are really just sales pitches for something the company is selling. But, against this advice, I spent the big bucks and signed up for this one.

For about $7, I got a little bit of useful information, a fair bit of name-dropping, and the expected sales pitch. They tried to present the webinar as a live event, but it almost certainly was not. It was conducted by the founder of the company, reportedly, and the end result was the option to sign up for a follow up email if you were interested in having further contact with the company.

So I did, and they sent an email with three different, short scripts and a link to schedule a call during which I would be expected to perform one of the scripts and get an evaluation of my ability and likely future as a Voice over Worker. Through the scheduling website I found an available time, and I chose a script that was basically a short news clip about the weather. Being warned not to become over-familiar with the script, I read it once or twice and now I am waiting for the call which will be later this week.

At this point, I don’t know that I would make a recommendation to you about doing or not doing this webinar. It might have been worth the $7, and maybe not the 90 minutes it took. I expect the phone call will have someone telling me that, yes, I could be a very successful Voice Actor, and all I need to do is sign up for some program they are offering and I will be on my way to fame and fortune. As always, anyone with experience with SuchaVoice, we would love to hear your opinions!

In the Cone of Silence, I gave up on the wireless mouse, since the 3″ thick walls effectively keep out sounds and keep in the radio signals from the mouse. It is getting more usable and more crowded in there! In addition to the iMac I just purchased to replace the aging laptop running Vista (this to use as the script displayer), I now have a host of wired connections passing under, over, and through the walls:

• USB mouse
• VGA cable
• Headphone extension from DAW
• XLR cable for microphone, of course.

And finally, for this week, I had thought maybe Trauma and Tenacity would be approved and headed to retail, but for the first time I have an author that has done a detailed listen through the audio and flagged every deviation from the manuscript. In a five hour book, there were probably 30 corrections to be made, and about a third of them were things like errors in their manuscript or words the author wanted me to fix pronunciation for. The rest were misreads on my part. I will get this book done sooner or later!

Categories: Voice over Work