Have you ever started doing something new, but then given up when you start to realize how far ahead of you other people are? And how much WORK it’s going to take to get to where you want to be?
A few months ago, in response to my weekly email where I mentioned how I had a really difficult (yet surprisingly productive) week, one of my students from the AACC replied:
“Well, I WAS feeling good about having sent out 25 auditions last week... until you mentioned that, on top of everything else you're dealing with, you sent out 73.”
My response to them was this:
“That's definitely NOT where I started! My first year in VO, a good week was 7 or 8 auditions. Then it was 20.
I started upping my auditions once I got more agents and once my % ranking on V123 was solid enough to get away with doing more. I struggle some weeks to hit 70, but its a lot easier to get to those numbers if you've got 7 agents and 2 P2Ps, plus are on multiple post-production rosters. It takes a LOT of time to build up to that, both just in practical terms, and also in terms of the stamina to do that many auditions per week.
In May, it will be 9 years that I've been doing voiceover. That's a long time.
You've got this. Just keep going! Slow and steady wins the race!”
I was inspired to share this with you all, in the hopes it will help. It’s easy to look at where someone else is and feel discouraged because of the distance you perceive between where you are and where they are.
That’s no way to attempt any difficult journey!
If you continually look at where you are NOT, rather than where you are, you will be tempted to quit many times over. Instead, you must set smaller goals along the way to that goal, and seek continual improvement.
Continual improvement, in terms of auditions, means a few things:
Improving your audition skills—being able to analyze a script, connect emotionally, and nail the tone being asked for
Always seeking new sources of paid auditions: P2P sites, agents, post-production rosters, networking, etc.
Continually working towards greater audition efficiency—the less time each audition takes, the more auditions you can do
Striving for a better booking ratio and higher paid jobs, so you’re less likely to burn out
The case for doubling my weekly auditions
As I mentioned above, I have now been actively booking work as a voice actor for NINE YEARS.
That’s a LONG TIME! And for the first 4 years, I was still working in restaurants to support myself. Then a year and a half of pandemic unemployment, and then a year and a half of working a part-time WFH job.
Then in March of 2023, I was laid off from my part-time job and forced to go full-time. Nothing like the pressure of only having a few months worth of unemployment available to light a fire under your ass!
A few months before that happened, I had seen voice actor Jenna Pinchbeck speak on a webinar. At the time, she was only about two years into her VO career, and she was making a LOT more money than I was. What she shared about auditioning, plus what I later read about studies on quality vs. quantity, changed my entire approach.
Jenna started in voiceover by absorbing as much information as possible. Blogs, podcasts, free webinars, etc. And in doing so, she told us, she had figured: it’s a numbers game.
At the time, during the pandemic, she was attempting to scale her VO work as quickly as possible. She didn’t have a job at the time, and so she made auditioning for voiceover jobs her job, and aimed to do 200 auditions a week. That might sound like a lot of work, BUT if every audition takes 10 minutes on average (being pretty generous) that works out to about 33 hours of work per week—still under the 40-hour-a-week threshold.
I’m pretty sure at the time I heard this, I was doing somewhere between 20-40 auditions a week. Not nearly enough to make a full-time living doing VO!
In Atomic Habits, James Clear mentions the experiment where professor Jerry Uelsmann tested quantity vs quality in an experiment with his photography class at the University of Florida. Using the results of this experiment as inspiration, I decided that if I ever wanted to have any hope of becoming full time, even if I was working 20-30 hours a week at my part-time job, I would need to really focus on increasing my audition numbers.
Not to 200 a week, though. That’s a LOT of talking. And the week that I did 116, plus all the talking for my part time job, plus a few voiceover jobs, I pulled a muscle and strained my voice, which set me back a few months while my voice healed.
In order to know how many auditions is right for you, you need to know a few things:
Your booking ratio.
How much your average job is worth.
How much you’d like to make from voiceover.
How many auditions you can realistically do in a week.
Booking ratio
Your booking ratio is how many auditions you have to do to get a single job. So, if you book 1 in 100, your numbers will look very different than someone who books 1 in 30.
Average job value
Add all of your jobs together and divide by the total number of jobs to get your average.
Voiceover income goal
How much do you want to make this year from VO? Whatever your VO income goal, the math will tell you if you are being realistic or not.
Realistic audition goals
Figure out realistically how many hours you have each week to devote to auditioning. This number will be different depending on your life circumstances, so be kind to yourself. Also, the newer you are, or the less sound-proof your space, the fewer auditions you will be able to do per hour. (Ask me how many times an hour I used to have to pause for airplanes 🤬) Truly, this number should be under 5 minutes per audition, but when you’re starting, maybe estimate 4-6 auditions per hour to be safe.
If you haven’t booked any jobs yet, then you either need to do more auditions OR you may need more training. If you’ve done more than 500 auditions and haven’t booked anything, please seek help from a professional.
Not sure what you’re doing wrong? See this post to figure out what step of the VO journey you’re on.
Let’s do the math
Let’s say you want to make $120,000/year.
Your current booking ratio is 1 in 100 and your average job is $250. (My booking ratio is 1 in 100 across all sources, so this is realistic, but I’ve heard of much better and much worse)
Without any pre-existing clients already sending you jobs, you’d need to do 480 jobs to make $120K and you’d need to do 48,000 auditions to get there (480x100). That’s 4000 auditions per month, or 1000 per week…which at 10 minutes per audition is 167 hours per week. Given that there are only 168 hours in a week, that makes it…possible? If you do nothing else BUT audition.
Even to make $20,000 (if the booking ratio and average job value stay the same), you’d need 80 jobs, which means you’d need to do 160 auditions a week, which would be 27 hours of auditioning per week.
I can already hear you saying already “UGHHHHH….I did the math, and there’s no way I’ll ever succeed at this rate!”
Bear with me. I’ve got you.
Here is my argument for doing as many auditions as you are capable of doing:
Because OVER TIME YOU WILL IMPROVE. Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be getting coaching!!!! But doing as many auditions as you are capable of doing without half-assing them, and slowly increasing that number over time as you get acclimated to doing more, is going to help you get better faster than if you’re doing the bare minimum. Your performance will improve AND your efficiency will improve.
Because you are not the best judge of what you are best suited for; just do the work and let the market decide where you belong.
Because…the algorithm. Sad but true, on certain platforms AHEMVOICEONETWOTHREECOUGH—excuse me! On certain platforms, you need audition to please the algorithm. There are strategies to this, and they can be learned, but if you decide to go in without a strategy, you could crash and burn. (If you decide to join V123, I recommend V123pros help)
Because you truly don’t know who is going to book you, and you do not know which $200 job will turn into thousands. IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. If you are judging an audition from the outset, you are doing yourself, and your pocketbook, a disservice. Use the GVAA rate guide and learn to negotiate. I promise it is WORTH IT.
Because it isn’t about the single job you get from this one audition. It’s about that client coming back to you for revisions. Or another spot for the same campaign. Or asking you to do the same job next year, and the year after. It’s about the single job that leads to ongoing monthly work. Or to a referral to another client. Or to the spot being extended for another year. The more clients you have, the more chances you have to have them come back to you over and over when you do a great job and make their life easy.
THIS is how you eventually create a career.
When you do more auditions:
-You get better
-Your audition efficiency improves
-Your booking ratio eventually gets better
-You start booking higher paid jobs and jobs that lead to more jobs
Are you ready? Start small and keep working up to full speed.
You got this!