Happy New Year!

It's inevitable, when the new year rolls around we reflect back on the previous year's wins and challenges, and set goals and plan for the coming year. As such, here is my gratuitous contribution to the new year noise; looking back on where things went right and wrong in my voiceover career last year, and drawing lines in the sand pointing in the directions I'd like to head as we move forward into the new year.

Year in Review

Most voice actors will probably share similar sentiments about 2023 being overall kind of slow, work-wise. My experience is definitely no different. Bookings were unfortunately pretty few and far between. But despite a small quantity of jobs, revenue was up over the prior year; so the numbers are moving in the right direction. Still need to add another couple places in front of the decimal point before I really feel like a successful voice actor or can even entertain the notion of leaving my day job.

Yes, it's true, I have another job besides voice over without which I could not keep a roof over my head, food in my belly, or continue expanding my training in the craft. However, no fear dear reader, I am fortunate in that I am able to pursue both it and my voiceover career full time, at the same time. The compromises I have to make to fit everything in do not affect quality of work, or availability in either space, instead they are around my ancillary business efforts around marketing and bringing in new business for voice services. I'm sure this is a part of the reason for my slow year; the other major reason is that I chose to leave behind all of the pay to play sites, which dramatically reduces the opportunities I'm exposed to but for a variety of reasons that juice was no longer worth the squeeze.

Notable 2023 Booking Wins

As I mentioned, bookings overall were a lot fewer and futher between than I'd prefer, but there were some notable wins worth mentioning.

First Quarter

Q1 was punctuated with a residual usage payment for a national streaming campaign for Gillette that I'd recorded in the fall of 2022. My contribution to the campaign consisted of two radio spots that aired on Pandora for a total of about 6 months. They were really fun scripts; not quite character driven, but involved some almost over-the-top acting. This was a SAG job, and my first booked with the Stars agency.

Another nice little surprise in Q1 was an unexpected renewal of my very first SAG job from Q1 2022, a nice little promotional video I had worked on for 3M. Ongoing residuals, renewals, and usage fees are really wonderful and one of the most compelling reasons for me to work union jobs. After all, I'm in business to make money, so a mechanism that facilitates ongoing payment for prior work completed is definitely attractive. However with so much voice over work being non-union I've not yet opted to join the union- I will have to next time I book a union job though.

Second Quarter

I completed and delivered my first full-length narrative fiction audiobook, Eden's Lie by Aiden James. Consisting of around two dozen unique characters covering a variety of ages, accents, genders and even species, with a final runtime of eleven and a quarter hours, this was an absolute marathon of effort. Apparently I found a good flow though, as after delivery I was only asked for seven small pickups across the entire duration of the book. Pickups, if you're unaware, are the term for re-recording a part of a project. In this case each of the seven were just one or two sentences of text. While I don't have a large body of work to compare to, I imagine so few pickups is much better than the average.

I've never really enjoyed reading. Something probably a little strange for a voice actor to admit. These days I think I can attribute it to the fact that I have aphantasia, so there are no pictures conjured in my head from the words on the page. I don't know whether that has always been the case, but I definitely became very aware of it when I started pursuing acting since the default direction lobbed at actors is, invariably, some form of "picture yourself in this situation" ... well, I can't.

Q2 brought two other notable firsts. I received my first direct inquiry leading to a booking via my website, and I booked my first job through my agency, DDO NYC. The direct job was an English narration for an industrial promo video for a package manufacturer in Mexico, and the agency booking was another national streaming radio job, this time a very character driven spot for Little Caesars Pizza.

Third Quarter

Q3 was pretty quiet, but brought another significant booking from my agent, this time an explainer video for a new developer-centric product from Cisco. I was also cast in a couple of small roles in the English version of the anime audio drama, Legend of Glaive, which has the distinction of being the first anime audio drama dubbed in both English and Japanese with original soundtracks.

Fourth Quarter

Finishing out the year strong, I added not one, but two radio imaging clients to my roster, both in greater New York. Everyone who works in radio imaging says that if you add one station per year you're doing really good. My imaging coach admit that it took him six years to land his first. So two within a month of each other tells me that this is definitely one of my best niches, and very strongly confirms the efficacy of direct marketing as both were the result of direct email outreach. If you happen to be in the Albany area you can hear me between virtually every song on Loud Media's 93.9 WABY, and if you find yourself on the NY/PA border near Binghamton you can hear me on Equinox Broadcasting's 95 The Drive. I also, finally, after talking about it for quite literally a year, recorded the first few episodes of my new podcast with my colleagues, Victoria Prather and Al Moulliet, The VO Bar podcast, available on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, and everywhere else people find podcasts.

Training, Networking, and Recognition

Throughout the year I attended several conferences, including VO Atlanta in March, One Voice USA in August, and That's Voice Over in December. I also attended the virtual eVOcation conference online in September. These conferences each include varying degrees of ongoing training in a variety of voiceover genres and various business topics, as well as plenty of networking opportunities with other voice talent. I'm pleased to have had the opportunity to attend so many conferences, meet and befriend many colleagues, though four is a lot, and I probably won't be attending as many in a single year again moving forward unless I've been invited to present or there is another more compelling reason to attend.

In Atlanta, along with a lot of programming available across several tracks of focus, there are also many extra workshops offered daily, for an additional fee of course. I splurged a bit and signed up for five of these, which then presented the opportunity to work in a small group setting with casting directors; Terry Berland, Mary Lynn Wissner, and Tina Morasco, study local automotive with Cliff Zellman, and discuss working internationally with Stephane Cornicard. Afterwards I did some additional coaching with Cliff and produced my automotive demo. I also reconnected with Cliff again at the end of Q3 to produce my video game demo.

At the One Voice conference I took some extra workshops on various, mostly character-centric topics led by fellow talent including, Jenn Henry, Rick Wasserman, and director Randall Ryan, and (at the time) Disney casting's Kristin Paiva (who has now ventured out on her own). Plenty more networking opportunity presented itself here, and the included programming - like VO Atlanta, but on a much smaller scale, was quite good too. In addition to the conference, there is also an awards gala at One Voice, which I'm proud to say I attended as a nominee in the 'Best Radio Commercial Male' category. Unfortunately I did not win, but a nomination is forever, and the recognition is certainly appreciated. The nomination was for one of the Gillette spots I did in fall 2022 that I mentioned earlier.

Outside of conferences I continued my coaching with Nancy Wolfson for all things commercial, and took several other classes, courses, and workshops on a variety of topics and genres related to my voiceover business. I recorded new demos in the commercial, promo, automotive, radio imaging, video game, and political genres.

Looking Forward, Goals for 2024

First and foremost, I'd really like to book a lot more in general in 2024. The work I booked in 2023 was wonderful, I'd just like to see a lot more of it this year, across the board in all genres.

So, here are my goals for the year. Some probably aren't as well defined as they ought to be, but here we go:

• Add a few more radio stations to the imaging roster. Perhaps in other genres? Guess I'd better get busy on some more demos!
• Book lots of political work! It's a major presidential election year, so there ought to be plenty of opportunity. The quantifiable goal I have for political work is that I'd like it to fully fund a new (at least new to me) vehicle. This seems very achievable.
• Book lots of commercial work, local and national! Some of this might overlap with political, but I guess I'm mostly considering this to be made up of non-political products & services, like the previous commercial work I've booked. I really enjoy commercial work.
• Book some animation. I guess 'more' but I've only done a very small amount of small youtube channel animation work to date, I'd love to really sink my teeth into something more substantial; a series guest role perhaps? I won't say no to series regular in something, of course!
• Book some video games. I feel like I've got a lot to offer in this genre, but haven't had a lot of opportunity present itself yet, I aim to change that in 2024.
• Book some elearning. Again 'more' is the operative word, I've done a little bit, but this is a bread and butter genre for a lot of voice talent, and I'd sure like to eat a bigger piece of this pie.
• Start landing automotive clients. While working on my demo Cliff asked me repeatedly, "why aren't you already booking this work?" Well, because I didn't have a demo, and wasn't pursuing it. I did a little bit of marketing mid-year 2023 without much luck, I need to really get after that this year and start building my automotive client roster. It's a fun genre, and I feel like my voice could help move a lot of metal.
• More training, networking, and a lot more marketing. This one is a constant. But especially on the marketing front, I really need to step up my game. I get plenty of great opportunities from my representation, but certainly not enough to sustain a career alone, and having ditched all the pay to play sites, I need to provide my own opportunities. I know it works from the results of my radio imaging marketing efforts during Q3 and Q4, just need to scale that effort out across other genres.

There's always more to learn, see and do. Once again I'll be attending VO Atlanta in March. I haven't decided yet about One Voice, maybe that will depend on whether or not I wind up nominated for an award again this year... I will be travelling to Ireland in October, for one of J. Michael Collins' "Euro Retreat" events. Staying in a lavish resort and working in a small-group setting for a solid week with several coach/casting/agent/etc folks.

As for goals outside of voice over, I'll begin pursuing my private pilot license with the goal of completing ground school and passing the requisite exams before the end of the year. I anticipate the actual flight portion of training to take longer between its time and monetary commitments, but ultimately I'd like to seen enough revenue from voice-over work by the end of next year to fund purchase of a small plane.

Anyway, time to get on with it. Let's dig in, and make some vocal magic in 2024! If you're ready to talk about a voice for your project, whether that is a commercial, an explainer video, corporate narration, e-learning, an animation or video game, or even simple phone messaging. I'd love to hear from you. Let's connect and discuss how we might help each other this year. I wish you health, wealth, and happiness throughout 2024.