Casting Voices

One of our voice talents who is also a client at InteractiveVoices (soon to be Voices.com) submitted an article that will give you the inside track on how to get the voice you want at a lesser cost.

Julie's commentary is written from the perspective of a full-time voice talent who uses the Internet as a tool to find voice-over work.

Seeing through the eyes of a talent will become a major asset to you, so read on!

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5 Ways to get the best Voiceover Talent for Less Money

By Julie Williams

As you post your job on a voice talent web site, you know that you will receive a lot of replies. But quality is more important than quantity, isn’t it? After all, you’re typically looking for the BEST talent—the one that’s suited to your project—Not the MOST talent, right? Wouldn’t you agree that it’s best to have a good talent, rather than a mediocre one, for the same money?

Although you will receive a lot of responses to your posting, many of them will be from people who have never done a VO before, or those who really are not good at what they do. I know many great talents who will not even respond to certain postings—and you’ll never know about them because they didn’t respond!

So how do you Encourage the best talent to respond? Easy! Make us like you. We work for ourselves. We can work for less if we like you. Here are some easy ways that you can increase the caliber of talent who respond to your postings—simply by understanding the talent’s processes and seeing things from their point of view.

1. Respect the talent’s time

Don’t demand a custom demo right off the bat. The inexperienced, or non-working (because they’re not good enough) talent will reply immediately with a custom demo. And you may be impressed—till you hear a great talent do that job!

A seasoned, experienced talent is busy doing voiceovers… and will not always have time to send a custom demo if you catch them on a busy day.

Note: For many great talent, every day is a busy day! By all means, attach a sample of the copy. But don’t be offended if a talent responds with a demo rather than a custom read for you.

Frankly, I am not always the one submitting my auditions. My assistant may be submitting them for me while I’m in the studio! Before the Internet, we’d send demos out and a select few would get a “callback.”

A callback means, “I think you have the sound I’m looking for…may I please hear how you sound on my copy?”

2. Leaving your job open till the end date

I have many friends who subscribe to web sites like these for leads. We used to do custom demos as often as we could. Then we’d get out of the studio and go to submit the custom audition—that we worked on especially for a client—only to find that the client stopped the lead. Please give us the courtesy of sticking to your deadline…as we will meet your deadlines! Many of us (and I’m talking about the better talent on these sites—who are very busy working for high paying clients because they’re good) have stopped doing custom demos because of this.

3. When is it worth it for the GOOD talent to make time during their busy VO recording day to fit in your custom audition?

Depending on how hungry the talent is (mediocre talent are hungrier than seasoned talent) and how busy we happen to be that day… if the job will pay at least $500—if not $1000.

When I go into the studio… my priorities are:

a. Jobs that are due today
b. Pickups from jobs I’ve done that need a slight change.
c. VOs from repeat clients who I have a good working relationship with
d. Auditions for people who have specifically asked ME to read their custom copy after having heard my demo and decided they think I may have the right sound for them.
e. Time permitting, auditions for bigger jobs—IF I haven’t already just sent them a demo assuming that it’s better than nothing because they might close the audition before I get to it! ☺

4. Pay in a timely manner

Again, it’s courtesy. It amazes me that some clients need us to rush and make their recording a priority—and yet we have to jump through hoops to get paid. You don’t want to wait 6 weeks for your audio, talent don’t want to wait 6 weeks to get paid. There are practical reasons for this. Most talent are one-person offices.

A few of us have had to hire assistants to keep up with the volume of work and still give excellent service—which is important to us. But keep in mind that most talent do it all… marketing their service, voicing your jobs… re-voicing pickups till you’re 100% satisfied, Invoicing, and collecting. More amazing is that my experience shows that clients paying $2000 or more usually ask if they can pay all or part in advance, whereas clients who I did a $75 job for take months to pay!

If your project is important enough to hire a professional talent to do it, Why not put in the posting that you’ll pay immediately upon receipt of audio?

THAT will get most talent’s attention.. and the caliber of talent responding to your posting will be better. While most talents don’t take credit cards as I do… many of them do have PayPal. Or, they’d love to have a check mailed out immediately.

To encourage clients to pay in a timely manner, and save me collections time, it’s worth it to me to give a discount for this. That’s why I routinely give a “quick pay” bid and a regular price bid. The “quick pay” rate is typically $50 less than the regular rate—IF a client pays immediately upon receipt of audio, by VISA, Mastercard, or Paypal.

Sometimes, if the job is very low budget… the “quick pay rate” may actually be less than half of the regular rate! If I see that a low budget job (anything under $300) would be easy to do and I have time, or I love the copy, or it’s a ministry that I want to support—I’ll cut my rate WAY down… IF they’ll do me the courtesy of quick payment.

5. Respect what we do

I know that there are beginners on these web sites that you’ll have to sift through to get good talent. But there are a lot of great talent on sites like this! (I know—I’ve hired them! Or trained them! ☺)

What we do in unique. And we do it because we love it and we’re good at it.

You pay us because hiring a talented professional IS WORTH IT! It will increase the professionalism of your product. If that weren’t true, you’d voice it yourself. Most people have a voice that’s good enough to do VO. What most people lack is the ability to connect with people, presenting a message in a sincere or effective and believable manner—on a recording!

I include this in my list because, on occasion, I see postings that say (and I suppose this is to try to get us to work for less money) something to the effect of: “I’ll pay what you want as long as it’s not over $50 because I know it won’t take you more than 15 minutes to do it.” or “There are a lot of good talent out there who will work for less so if you want $500 per hour, don’t bother” (yes, I saw that!) That’s a posting I’d delete because if he doesn’t respect what I do, why would I cut my rates so much for him? I don’t like him.

Those postings will receive responses from hungry talent… and the clients will hire them, not even knowing that there are even better talent out there who deleted his posting.

However, were a person to post something to the effect of, “I know your time is very valuable and your abilities are worth more… but I only have $100 to pay for this project. However, I will pay immediately by paypal, or check. Please reply with your demo if you would be willing to do this project for me at this rate,” My demo just might be the first one they receive! Why? Because I like him! I know the same is true for many of my extremely talented VO friends!

I hope this list has been helpful to you. I know there are reasons that people demand custom demos. I know there are reasons that –especially large organizations with lots of red tape to go through—take a long time to pay. But I hope that seeing a little more through the eyes of the talent will be an asset to your future talent searches.