It has become apparent to me that while there is a significant amount of work available on ACX, those projects alone probably won’t sustain full-time Voice over Working. And if it did, it would be too much work. That is to say, most jobs don’t pay much!

There is an inexhaustible supply of Royalty Share projects or PFH projects in the $0-$0 range, but you can’t really make a living off of those works. An hourly rate of $35 sounds pretty nice, but remember that you first have to account for your Production Efficiency, and administrative overhead such as auditioning. If you do the estimating in a realistic way, you will likely see as I did that while it is better than warehouse work, it isn’t a comfortable living.

Let’s look at the rates a bit in the frame of reference of my recent experiences:

• If a Rights Holder has a book in the $0-$50 range, they don’t want to pay $50. If they were willing to pay that rate, they would go $50-$100 to get better visibility.
• You won’t find 1 in 20 Royalty Share books that will bring you any real profit.

Where are all these people making six figures in Voice over Working? I can assure you they aren’t making that through ACX alone. Where are they making it? I would suppose on places like VoiceBunny and Voices.com if they are working online, or they have actual agents and all that like a film or stage actor.

All that was much more long-winded than intended, and was meant to be the introduction to the topic of diversifying online for jobs. I have had no luck, as you know, with VoiceBunny and Edge Studios for me was a bust, so I have been dabbling on Fiverr, as I have mentioned before.

The process on Fiverr is agonizingly familiar, and if you have registered and looked for work on any of the sites in the field, this will be the same once again. While Fiverr does allow jobs to be posted, my review of those relevant to Voice over Work has yielded a bunch of not much. The main way of getting work on Fiverr to is to post a gig and wait for a client to contact you. It’s online, Voice over Work personal ads. Literally, you “post a gig” with “I will record an English VO” or this one which is actually right now the first one I see on Fiverr – “I will bass voice professional anything”. Whatever you do, don’t hire that guy to write your copy or proof/edit your script.

I have said before that ACX seems to be the Walmart of Voice over Work. To continue that theme, Fiverr equates to the local Bahamian children yelling at cruise ship passengers to throw a quarter in the water that they can dive after. If they still do that – I know they did in the late 70s, but maybe civilization has progressed far enough that there is no need for poor children to do that kind of thing. Maybe it is more PC to say they are the sidewalk merchants downtown trying to sell their knock-off Rolodex watches.

Ok, I am jaded because I had no success on Fiverr either. At some point in the future, I may be a Fiverr enthusiast. But my druthers are not to make a living $5-$10 at a time, recording 15-30 seconds spots. I have heard podcasts of people doing well on Fiverr, but it isn’t for me, and I will dare to say it isn’t for anyone looking to do well with long-form narration or audiobook production.

Categories: Voice over Work