Want to make $200,000+ a year from professional voice acting? Bet I’ve got your attention now! Bad news, it’s a lot of hard work, but the good news is that it’s entirely possible. I do it, and I managed to get to this point in my second year of trading.
Whether you’re an actor looking for a side hustle, or just someone stuck in the 9 to 5 with no acting experience whatsoever, voice acting may be a good career to explore. It’s something you can do from home, or wherever you have a quiet space, and if you’re willing to put in some hard work, the payoff can be huge! It really can change your life.
If you take a moment to think about it, voiceovers are everywhere: TV, radio, airplane announcements, video games, public transport announcements, audiobooks, phone menus, award ceremonies, and the list goes on.. and on… and on. We listen to voice actors on a daily basis and we might not even be aware of it.
There is an abundance of work out there and plenty of avenues to find it. So if you think you have a voice that could fit in one of these genres, why not give voiceover a go? In this article I’ll share some tips and tricks to show you how you can make a LOT of money from voiceover too.
What is voice acting?
Voice acting seems like a simple concept but I find it is often misconstrued. When I say I’m a voice actor or voice artist, the first question people ask me is “have I heard you in anything?” What they mean is, have I heard you in any movies or cartoons. But voice acting is much broader than that. To explain it properly, let’s start with a brief history.
The first voiceover was performed in 1900 by Reginald Fessendan, a Canadian inventor. He built on Alexander Graham Bell’s new device, the telephone, and created a way to remotely communicate without wires. Thus, the beginning of wireless.
His first broadcast was a radio weather report he made whilst working for the United States Weather Bureau. So the very first voiceover was not a cartoon at all.
From the 1920’s voice actors started to gain popularity as Walt Disney and Warner Brothers started producing cartoons and using voice talent to voice the characters. Even today, the voice actors who are most well known, are those who voice animated characters. However, there are so many other facets to the voiceover industry.
Broadly put, voice acting is the art of doing voiceovers. You are providing a voice for use in a professional piece of audio. You can then use other terminology to more specifically describe the types of voiceover in the voice acting world:
- A voiceover announcer introduces people or programs, such as for award shows, talk shows, and sporting events.
- A voice actor primarily performs voices of characters. These can be in movies, video games, TV series, radio dramas or puppet shows, but also includes dubbing.
- A voiceover narrator is someone who specialised in narration. That can include audiobooks, documentaries, explainer videos, medical videos, or audio tours.
- A voiceover artist is a performer who works interchangably between numerous categories.
- Voice talent is a catch all phrase used to describe all voiceover performers.
How do voice actors make money from voiceover?
The changing landscape for professional voice actors.
These days the world of professional voice acting is changing. A lot of industry veterans are not happy about the change, and I completely understand why. But markets will move as supply and demand changes, and sometimes there isn’t much that you can do, aside from learn how to best work with the change.
That may have sounded a little vague, so let’s dive in in a bit more detail. Go back to a time 15 or 20 years ago. The internet and a lot of social media was very new, if not non-existent. Facebook was launched in 2004. YouTube was registered in 2005. Instagram wasn’t created until 2010. Netflix only started streaming in 2007.
Prior to that, majority of advertising was only done on TV or radio. It was expensive and most people couldn’t afford it. Animation shows were produced by a limited number of large networks. You had a small pool of talent who voiced these projects who were all represented by agents. Casting had to go to agents and pay a premium for these actors. The client also had to pay a premium to develop their project obtain the air time. These voice actors would be taken to a recording studio, and would work with an audio engineer in a live session. They weren’t expected to have any technical audio skills.
Fast forward to 2022. With the rapid advancement of the internet and social media, advertising has become easy and much cheaper to do. Anyone who isn’t on the internet is missing out on huge work opportunities. Gone are the days when you could advertise in a local paper or rely on word of mouth.
With the advent of streaming services, there is so much content out there and a huge demand for professional voice actors. It’s simple economics. When there is an increase in demand but supply stays constant, prices will go up. If people then see that they can get paid a lot of money for starting a voiceover business, they will jump on board.
This is what I believe we are seeing happen. People have realised how lucrative it is. Voiceover platforms have started popping up left, right and centre. Every man and their dog with a voice wants a part of the action. That means, if all else stays constant, prices will go down.
Then the dreaded Covid pandemic happened. This made the shift even more drastic. Most actors with side gigs in hospitality and retail were now unemployed, so there was an influx of talent looking to get a piece of the action. It also became impossible to get voice actors into recording studios because of lockdown restrictions.
People had to start setting up hight quality home studios. They had to teach themselves about recording equipment and essentially become audio engineers. Clients realised how easy and efficient it was to work directly with talent from a good quality home studio (with video conferencing), rather than forking out additional money on an engineer and studio. A lot of the older generation of voice actors were left behind because they weren’t as technologically savvy as the younger generation.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I completely understand their grievances. We are seeing voiceover rates decreasing. However, the good news is that there is now a lot more voiceover work around.
You can easily make 6-figures as a voiceover actor without any representation or qualifications, and you don’t have to sell your soul and take on work for ridiculously low rates. If you approach voiceover like a business, you will be well on your way to 6-figures in no time.
Find your niche.
If you want to turn voiceover into a full time career you will need to find your niche. Finding a niche isn’t anywhere near as scary as it sounds. Generally the advice in the film and TV world is to drill down on your niche and then once you break in, you can show everyone the other roles you could play. That couldn’t be further from my recommendation in the voiceover world. In voiceover you want to cast your net wide.
This Venn diagram perfectly sums it up. You eventually want to find your sweet spot (A.K.A. niche). It will be the intersection between the projects you like doing (passion), the projects people are willing to give you money to do (pay), and the projects that you’re good at (power).
Essentially, you let the market determine what work you do. Once you find that work, and you’re sure it’s something you like doing, you then push hard in that area. But to find that area in the first place, you need to give everything a go.
You also need to keep in mind that some areas may be harder to get into than others. These days, commercial and corporate work is very easy to break into on your own, but if you don’t have the right voice for that genre, then it may take you a bit longer to build your voiceover business. That’s not to say there is any right voice for a genre, it just may be the case that your voice and talent is best suited to other genres.
The best advice I can give you is to just keep going. If one genre doesn’t seem to stick, either look for more training to improve your reads, or try a different genre of work. To give you a starting point, here is a list of some of the types of work you may come across:
- Commercials (TV, radio, online)
- Explainers
- E-learning
- Video games
- Animation
- Audiobooks
- Movie trailers
- YouTube narration
- ADR and dubbing
- Audio drama
- IVR
The last thing to keep in mind is that no one will have the perfect voice for everything. This is why you should cast the net wide and try as many areas as you can.
Learn the technical side of things.
As I mentioned earlier, these days a voiceover actor is both a performer and an audio engineer. It’s definitely going to test your multitasking abilities, but unfortunately you just have to get good at both jobs.
In my work, I’ve found a lot of my clients mention that they hired me because they were impressed with my audio quality and setup. You could have a golden voice, but if your audio sounds dreadful, you won’t work anywhere near as much as you could.
It’s also something voiceover agents are now looking for when they sign talent. They can advertise that you have a home studio to prospective customers looking for voice actors. A very appealing trait as it saves the client money.
You don’t necessarily have to go to university and study audio production. Everything I know I’ve learnt from a combination of books, YouTube, trial and error, cold emailing, and befriending audio engineers whenever I am on set or go in studio.
Even if you do a drama degree, they won’t teach you the audio engineering skills you need to turn voiceover into a profitable stream of income. You have to learn these things for yourself. It definitely is difficult, but it can be done.
Make some demos.
What’s that dreadful catch 22 of the work world? We are offering a job, but you need to have experience to apply for the job, but we won’t give you experience so go find it somewhere else. This is the roadblock people tend to come across at various points in life when it comes to employment.
To be entirely honest, you’re going to face this issue in your voiceover work too. And you’ll notice that once you get over that hurdle, start working and you have some reviews under your belt, the work will start rolling in. It’s a snowball effect.
The strategy I’ve always employed to overcome this roadblock in the film and TV industry, is to make it look like I’ve done more work than I have. I’m not saying you have to lie, but you can certainly make things appear a certain way without saying anything at all.
In any creative profession you need a portfolio of your work. People that want to hire you want to (a) know that you’ve worked, and (b) want to see or hear that work. Interior designers need photos of their designs. Fashion designers need sketches or garment samples. Similarly, voice actors need voice demos.
This is where we go back to that heinously vague statement about making things appear a certain way. If you have good technical knowledge and can produce good quality audio, you create clips that sound like real projects, to showcase your work. No one has to know that they weren’t real jobs.
I had no experience whatsoever when I started. I churned out 5 demo reels with various clips on each to showcase different styles, and made it look like I had been working. If you know how to produce your own demo, then there is no reason the client shouldn’t trust you to do a good job on their project.
You can hire someone else to create your voice demo for you, however I always advise against this. Producing your first voice demos may be tedious as you learn all the skills. However by doing it yourself, you’re preparing yourself for work when you start to book it. You will also have the ability to reproduce the demos or create new clips as your voice ages and changes, or as your technical skills improve and you can make it sound better.
Getting work.
There are so many ways to get work as voice talent.
The old school way of getting work is to sign with an agent, and have them put you up for auditions. Whilst I call it ‘old school’ it is still very much a good way to get work, and often the higher paying and more coveted jobs will run through agents. However, getting an agent can be a headache in itself.
You really don’t have any control over whether an agent takes you on or not. They are running their business and if they don’t think they can get you work, they won’t take you on… even if you are already working.
You also can’t expect to get a lot of work via an agent. I have friends who are represented and get a job every month or two, and are still coming to me (an unrepresented voice actor) to ask how they can get more work.
Your next option are pay-to-play sites (P2P). P2P sites elicit a mixed response from professional voice actors. A lot of people hate them because you have to give them money for the privilege to audition. Others love them because they give you an avenue of finding your own work.
P2P sites are, as the name suggests, websites you join where you buy a membership to access auditions for voice jobs (e.g., Voices.com, Voice123, Bodalgo, etc). Every site functions in a slightly different way but the P2P nature of them is the same. Essentially, you are able to put down auditions for a long list of jobs in the hopes that the client selects you to work on their project. You do have to churn through a lot of auditions, especially when trying to land your first job, but the budgets on these sites tend to be higher than freelancer sites.
A great way to start on P2P sites is to sign up for a free membership and get your profile comprehensively set up, and only spend the money on the membership fee when you’re ready to do auditions. Otherwise you’ll be wasting a week or two of paid membership getting a profile properly set up and missing out on all the auditions.
I wouldn’t be where I am today without P2P sites. When agents wouldn’t give me a look in, I forged my own path by starting on P2P sites. They worked for me but they might not work for everyone. It really depends on the type of work you are best suited to and the accent you have.
Another avenue for voice acting jobs is freelancer websites (e.g., UpWork, Fiverr, PeoplePerHour, etc). I personally like freelancer websites, however if you speak to most other voice actors, you won’t get the same answer.
Overall the quality of work on these sites seems to be lower than P2P sites such as Voices.com and Voice123. This is because the barrier to entry is much lower. By much lower, I mean free. Yes that’s right, free. You can join up without having to spend a cent. As a result, you end up with a lot of inexperienced voice artists creating profiles and offering voiceover services for very low prices.
This is where I think the opportunity lies. You may have to start offering voiceovers for lower rates than you usually charge. However once you build up some reviews and you start popping up on the first page of the search consistently, you can jack up your prices. You may get less work, but even if it adds another job a week to your plate, that’s a significant increase in your revenue overall.
The common misconception is that everyone who uses freelancer websites is looking for a bargain. Whilst this is true to an extent, you do come across many clients who agree to industry standard rates. The great news is that these clients come to you without you having to audition.
Another way to get work is via targeted emailing. There are an abundance of companies out there in the world who need voiceovers. If they find a reliable voice actor that they like, they will keep coming back to that voice actor time and time again. If you are that voice actor… you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. This applies in every facet of the industry.
You can use a variety of resources on the internet to find the appropriate person to email and start forming relationships. If you’re interested in audio books, find specific people within publishing houses who work on the sorts of books you’re good at. If you are great at corporate work or commercials, find the marketing manager at a company you like and send them your work. You never know what could come from these emails. You may not have the right voice for their current project, but maybe down the road they’ll reach out for something else. Just remember not to get disheartened if they don’t reply. Having a thick skin is part of the job.
A more indirect tactic to getting work is to make sure people can find you in as many places as possible on the internet. As a voice actor, if you have your own site, you can display all your work and give clients a way to contact you directly. You should also try to set up comprehensive profiles on as many voiceover websites as possible.
Think about it from the clients perspective. If someone is looking for a voice actor and they go to Google and search ‘hire voiceover actor,’ what are the first results that come up? If you have a profile on every site that pops up, you have more of a chance of being found. In essence, the more web pages, the better.
There are a lot of avenues out there for finding voiceover work. No matter what language you speak, or what accent you have, you should be able to find voiceover jobs that fit your voice.
Setting your rates.
One of the hardest parts about being a voice actor is setting your rates. When you’re first starting you have no idea what a reasonable budget would be. You often base your rates off what you see others doing. Hence why freelancer sites like Fiverr have such abhorrent rates.
If you’re already getting a decent number of jobs monthly and want to make more money from your voiceover jobs, the easiest way to go about it is to increase your rates. I’m not saying to overcharge, as that will drive clients away, but if you educate yourself about industry standards, and learn the art of negotiation, you can end up with more money from doing the jobs you were already going to do.
If you’re unsure where to start, a great free guide can be found on Gravy for the Brain. For North American talent you’ll find a handy free guide on the Global Voice Academy website. These guides can be used by any voice actor to help set their rates, and are also great to send to clients if they have no idea how to price a job.
Network.
At the end of the day, voice talent are business owners. It really baffles me that when you go and do an arts or theatre degree they don’t teach you anything about business. It’s so important you know how to run a business because if being a voice actor is the career path you intend to take, you’re going to be a contractor running your own business.
One of the most important parts of running a business is networking. The more people know you and your work, the more work you’ll end up getting. This is of course assuming you. There are so many resources online that you can use to get your work out there. The more avenues you explore, the more likely you are to find work.
What training do I need to be a voice actor?
Being a voice actor in the modern world is a two sided job. So don’t expect it to be easy! You have to be comfortable reading copy and you have to know how to produce good audio. You’re a performer and an audio engineer. Unfortunately that’s just how the industry works these days.
In terms of the performance side of things, you do need a good voice to be successful with voiceovers. However, the term ‘good voice’ is subjective. I mainly use that phrase to indicate that you need to have good technique so you don’t strain your voice.
Taking acting classes or voice/speech classes is a good way to strengthen that skill. You will learn a lot about tone, style, and working your voice in a healthy way. Singing lessons could also help you too. I’ve found that a lot of voice actors have spent time in theatre or musical theatre and so already have that strong vocal training behind them. There are so many classes out there so you just have to find a teacher that works for you.
If you have a very strong accent or want to branch out and work in another accent, you should look for an accent coach. You could also find an app that helps with accent reduction or offers accent coaching to get you started at a fraction of the cost. My only advice with an accent coach is to look for someone native to the region you want the accent to come from. I.e., my British accent coach was born and raised in the UK.
The technical side of things is more complicated. There are not a lot of voice actor specific audio courses out there. You can learn a lot by reading books and watching others on YouTube. One of the best books recommended to me by an audio engineer was Recording Voiceover: The Spoken Word in Media by Tom Blakemore. Then once you start working, you’ll learn more and more with each job.
One of the biggest problems people have when they first start in the voiceover world, is that they can’t hear the issues they need to be aware of in their recording. They don’t know what reverb sounds like, they can’t hear minor reflections, they don’t know what someone means when they refer to muddy audio, etc. For all those newer voices I’d recommend ear training. If you want to dive down a rabbit hole and really improve your skills, take a look at Audio Production and Critical Listening: Technical Ear Training by Jason Corey. It’s a dense read but there is free software you can also access to help you develop these skills as you progress through the book. If you spend an hour a day doing this training for a few weeks, you should notice a difference very quickly.
If you want to start producing finished spots for clients, you may also want to invest in an audio or music production course. If you can learn to work with music and sound effects you can jack up your prices even more as you’re offering more than one service.
Finally, something that isn’t mandatory but is very useful, is business training. I spent 6 years at university doing a commerce degree and a law degree. While that was most certainly overkill, I think it’s half the reason my work took off as fast as it did. I didn’t approach things like an actor, I approached it like a start-up. I put a good accounting system in place (that I knew exactly how to use), I diversified the platforms I was on and did cold email outreach, and I presented myself in a professional way in all my marketing videos and photos. You don’t need to go do a degree like I did, but it may serve you to invest some time learning about how companies run, accounting, and sales.
How do professional voice actors find work?
There are an abundance of ways to find work as a professional voice actor, many of which we’ve discussed already. So to summarise it all up, these are the main ways to find voiceover work:
- Through an agent.
- P2P websites.
- Freelancer websites.
- Cold email outreach.
- Referrals from other talent.
Most of the projects you book will be as a result of auditions. As is the case in all facets of the performing arts industry, clients will expect talent to put down auditions. This is so that they can listen to a variety of voices read their script before making a decision. It’s also great because if they listen to you reading their script, it is less likely they’ll come back for revisions when you don’t initially nail the tone. Even when you connect to people directly they may still ask for auditions. It is common practice so you need to be ready for it.
If you’re struggling to find projects that you’re suited to, it may serve you to spend time doing some research. Listen to material that is currently out there in the genres that you want to work in. These are the people being hired. You may need to change what you’re doing to fit better into that genre.
The one thing to keep in mind is that there is no right voice for voiceover. Your voice will fit into the industry somewhere. As long as the client approves of it, you’re in the clear. It’s your role to figure out where your voice fits. If you can work that out, and you lean hard into that niche, you will most definitely be able to make decent money from your voiceovers.
What equipment do I need for voiceover?
First and foremost, if you want to be working as voice talent you need a voice. I’m not saying you have to have the perfect voice. There is no such thing as the perfect voice. You can speak in any language and with any accent, but you need to be confident in your own voice and know how to best use it.
The next most important thing is your recording space. Even if you have the best equipment in the world, it won’t matter at all if you don’t have a professional space to record in. By learning the basics of sound, you’ll be able to transform any space into an environment conducive to recording professional voiceover.
Finally you need the equipment. At minimum, you’ll need a computer and a microphone (assuming it is a USB microphone). The more professional entry level setup would also include an audio interface. This setup can get more and more complicated as you progress through your career. With more skill comes more of an equipment headache!
In addition to all this, it’s useful to have a good phone or internet connection. These days a lot of sessions happen from home studios via video conference or phone patch. If you aren’t able to accommodate that, you’re less likely to book paid work.