David Radtke wrote an excellent article on rates, just posted on VoiceOverXtra called “Lowballing Hurts”.
I agree wholeheartedly with his argument. But even he admits people who lowball are often newbies who just want to get their foot in the door. Been there? yeah, me too. I had NO IDEA what to charge when I started out.
No matter how much you agree with David or Paul Strikwerda or any of a number of other erudite and well-versed apostles for this point of view, the low-balling will not likely stop. There will always be the poor. I”m not recommending that we give up the fight. Just prepare that the battle will never end.
Niche Business Model
I had an interesting chat yesterday with a guy who’s developed an enterprising business model.
He’s found a niche that would require the use of voice actors. The venue is long-format narrations, and he admits the pay would fall into the “lowball” category..that, after we had a talk on Skype and I explained it to him.
He’s not looking for excellent quality. But he’s pretty sure he wants human readers.
His idea is text to speech with REAL narrators, not the synthetic voices that are making inroads in some areas of our business. The copy is mostly business documents…pdf’s, spreadsheets, analyses, proposals, technical reads, and other content generated by any of an endless number of offices in an endless number of companies in hundreds of cities across our nation.
His argument is that most of the people who are supposed to READ those documents don’t have the time, and would rather have someone read the document TO them. He believes the listener is not too discerning, and won’t mind if it’s not a totally professional read.
Is he right? Is this the kind of thing a newbie should take on as an “intern”, for minimal pay, while he/she practices? Could a voice-actor take this on as a successful “niche”?
I’d like to hear what you think about it.
In the meantime, here’s the website to Convert Text Speech.
CourVO
