As a voice actor, a good question to ask yourself when auditioning is, “Is this audition worth my time?” I did just that when I received an email from one of my agents that was also sent to 300 other talents! (I would think they would be careful not to show number of recipients, but in this case I’m glad they were sloppy.) My first thought was, “How do they have time to properly attend to 300 clients?” Another email popped into my in-box from my other agent—for the same audition. I know that this one went to far less people at my agency, but at this point I began to think, “How many other agencies have sent this same audition around to hundreds of additional voice actors?!” What is a voice actor to do? Here are my thoughts on how to decide if its worth it, or not.
What are the chances?
What are the chances I’ll book this one, I thought.(Zero, if i chose not too audition, but stay with me.) Here’s how I figured it out: Because I already knew that hundreds and maybe thousands of middle aged male voice actors were going to be reading for this, I ranked it as a lower than average chance. I use another metric too: is this in my range? By range I mean are you being asked to portray a character type or style of read that you are comfortable with, or not. If not, then the answer is a strong no. If yes, then it’s still on my to-do list, but less of a priority than others in the Que.
Some empirical data
A Twitter survey conducted by Voquent—an audition aggregator similar to Voices.com—came up with some staggering replies that were, in a word, depressing. The majority of responders—41.7%—said it took 75 or more auditions to score one booking. They go on to say that if you spend about 10 minutes on each audition, times 75, that’s 12.5 hours of auditioning work for one job. Let’s say that job is a $150 explainer narration. That means you’ll have made $12 per hour. Less than minimum wage in New York State, where I live. This is by no means the final word, yet it’s backed up by a similar article in Backstage Magazine.
Any good news?
That same Backstage article does say that available voice over jobs have increased by 900% in the last three years. That certainly sounds good but with the massive influx of new talent coming into the business day after day, a seemingly positive development may get buried in the numbers.