I hope I’ve written something like this before about the voice over industries preeminent e-zine, Voice Over Xtra! but if not, here it is: you darn well better be a subscriber if you are in this industry.

Should you needed any more convincing, look no further than the post its editor and my friend John Florian put up yesterday. He got voice over talent Jennifer Vaughn to write a fascinating article that financially analyzes and compares her 2009 efforts auditioning and securing business on both Voices.com and Voice 123.

As the voice over industry’s two primary pay-to-play sites who together have changed the landscape on how clients and talent get new voice over business (the argument about whether for better or worse will be held over for another time) this is really a great comparison and a startlingly honest report by Vaughn.

Thanks Jennifer for that and thanks John for everything.

Tags: casting, commentary, voice actors, voice casting, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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i-posts are short updates written on my i-phone using my wordpress blog app.

Things like this always happen. October 24 when I’ll be in Atlanta at a Marice Tobias workshop (which I am very much looking forward to) there will be a networking mixer in Toronto hosted by Voices.com.

But just because I’ll be unable to attend doesn’t mean you should miss out.

Below is the link to the facebook invite I received. If you’ve never been to Toronto, it’s a great excuse to check out a great city.

http://m.facebook.com/event.php?eid=163317597160

Tags: i-post, social networking, voice actors, voiceover, voiceover meet-ups, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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We’ve all heard tell and maybe even personally experienced the kindness of strangers in our lives and it often gives us hope for humanity. We usually quickly get over that hope but it was ours for a minute to savor. Kind of like hitting a great golf shot: reality usually sets in on the very next swing but we had that moment.

So finally after months of nit-picking the text to death (I formally requested nit-picking and damn near personally picked the thing to death) I published The Voice Over Entrance Exam yesterday.

Now obviously just posting a web site page isn’t enough to let people know it’s out there, besides, my marketing sensibilities wouldn’t let that happen so I relied on the kindness of weirdoes.

weirdo (weer*doh)
n. pl. weirdos Slang
1. A person regarded as being very strange or eccentric.
2. A deranged, potentially dangerous person.

To be clear, I refer to definition 1 not 2 here. As an example, I am a weirdo as are all my peers in the voice over profession. It’s really one of the qualifications for getting in the business, actually.

I’ve always been terribly fond of almost all my fellow weirdoes but today my appreciation runs deeper than I can articulate.

That won’t stop me from trying to articulate.

Since the book was about the industry and for use by those in the industry or wanting to be in the industry, I went to the industry in my marketing. And since the book was free to download, I used Social Media tools as my primary marketing channels because they too are free.

The following maybe a helpful “how to” guide you can apply to your business when promoting your product or service. Obviously, you’d have to adjust the audience (unless it’s the voice over industry). Also, it helps to have some established credibility with your audience to get more immediate support as outlined herein. It only took me 27 years to establish mine, but your mileage may vary. As always, enjoy the ride.

THE BLOGGERS
Step 1 was to get to the bloggers before the release. It was like a public relations story pitch except not that cheesy cause it was from me. Basically I let all the voice over bloggers know the book was coming out on May 5th, gave them an advanced copy and said offer any comments on the book as they saw fit (or ignore it too if they chose). But my feeling was to respect the primary on-line voices of the voiceover industry by giving them a first glance.

On the day of the book’s release, the reviews began. Ah, symmetry!

As of this writing, regarding The Voice Over Entrance Exam, the mighty Bob Souer (weirdo of the nicest kind and highest order) wrote on his blog: “In my opinion, Peter has written an excellent tool that should be must reading for anyone thinking about trying to do professional voiceover work.” Thanks Bob but now I feel bad because I’ve become required reading and that sounds like homework and I “disliked intensely” (as my Mother would say, she being opposed to the word “hate”) homework!

Over on Joe Szymanski’s blog, he thought “The title is spot on.” Thanks Joe, I kind of thought the title was cool too. It felt perfect when I thought of it and I was surprised as heck it wasn’t out there already. Score one for original thought, I guess.

Russ Renshaw noted with the release of the book that “A very cool and rare thing occurred on the internet today.” He called the book dense by which I think he meant thick and stuffed with knowledge, I think. Now if he had called the author dense there would be no arguing the fact. I sincerely appreciate the pub, in either case, Russ, thank you.

Always supporting the voiceover blog community, Stu Gray’s blog promises a full review of the book and knowing him it will fair and honest…that’s all I could hope for.

And the always prolific James Lorenz noted on his blog that The Voice Over Entrance Exam had “tons of useful facts about what to expect and how to proceed with a career in voiceovers.” Cool!

TWITTER & FACEBOOK
Glide over to Twitter & Facebook for Step 2 where I “teased” at about 9:00 a.m. ET on May 5th “Fun voice over announcement coming up from the Voice Over Workshop at 12:00 p.m today. And the word FREE is involved.” (the time when I had scheduled my web tools to go public with the book download page and media release on the web site news section and blog). While Stephanie Ciccarelli was kind enough to be one of the consultants on my book (and therefore knew what I was “teasing”) I was still gob smacked by her generous tweet that she “Is proud of her pal, Peter O’Connell. You’ll hear more about why today. Awesome! @audioconnell”. Very, very kind!

When I tweeted that afternoon on Twitter and Facebook: “It’s live and seems to be a hit: The Voice Over Entrance Exam…oh and its FREE” the response was totally a surprise. I expected, as with most of my tweets, followers would click the link to see what it was about. That would have been plenty good for me.

As burgeoning Twitter expert Dave Courvoisier (also a consultant on the book) noted in his Twitter-centric May newsletter (also released yesterday), a retweet is praise of the highest order. And I must say in totally honesty I was not expecting the retweets and was truly humbled that these great talents felt strongly enough about the book to share it with their followers. So my thanks to (again) Stephanie Ciccarelli as well as David Houston, Joe Rodriguez, Kara Edwards, Liz de Nesnera, Voices.com, Jamee Perkins, Justin Barrett, Linda Ristig and Terry Daniel via Twitter.

Over on Facebook, Kara Edwards again, who likely used some FriendFeed-like aggregator, offered her retweet garnering a very kind response from Amy Snively. If women liked me this much in high school I might not have ever left! But if I hadn’t left I wouldn’t have met John Luttrell, a respected radio programmer (yes there are still some out there, thank God) and a friend from my WVUD-FM days who sent a nice note via Facebook as well. Erik Sheppard also plugged the book has his daily notice on Facebook.

MEDIA RELEASES
Step 3 would be old school PR with a new media twist of an electronic media release to targeted outlets. It may be a day or before I see/hear any payoff from that activity but again – no tree or postal worker’s back was harmed in the use of this marketing tool (i.e. it was free).

PROFESSIONAL NETWORK
Step 4 would be direct communication to the voice over community that has reached out to me over the years and whose names have grown exponentially in my address book. Now there may be an oops in this one as the link to The Voice Over Entrance Exam web page doesn’t work for some but most I guess just copied and pasted the address in their browser tool bar and the page worked fine. Nice to hear from Caryn Clark, Tom Donahue, Chip Joel, Dan Hurst, Kitzie Stern, Bobbin Beam and Alexis Williams (“I’m so glad you did this book!”).

ON-LINE FORUMS
Step 5 includes communicating to lots of voice talent out there who I either haven’t connected with in real life or via social media. So I made sure to post the media release about The Voice Over Entrance Exam on Rick Party’s Voiceover Universe which in just over a year has taken on a life of its own. My voice over home away from home, D.B. Cooper’s VO-BB has a “Learning” section and I posted a link in there as well.

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
Step 6 involved uploading or emailing the media release to the web site of the professional association I have memberships with like MCA-I; they have news modules on their sites and some produce paper newsletters and they now have my information. Look, association newsletters and e-zines need content too!

SUMMARY
Was all of the effort worth it? My goal was to make as many people as possible aware of the book so that hopefully they will find it interesting and download it.

On May 4, 2009 I had 24 visitors to my web site.

On May 5 as of this writing I have had 148 visitors to the site and 105 of them went right to The Voice Over Entrance Exam page. So I’m guessing since it’s free, the book has had over 100 downloads on its first day. With all that link love and promotion, the book brand and the audio’connell brand got lots of web time too…the outcome of that has yet to be determined but I’m guessing much good can come from it. Stats for today won’t be up til tomorrow, I think they’ll be good too.

Not a dollar was spent promoting it (except for my time, which does have value) and hopefully lots of people benefited from what I (obviously) think is good information.

My respect for my fellow weirdos grows by the minute. Thank you friends.

Tags: advertising, blogs, commentary, radio, voice actors, voice talent, voices.com, WVUD by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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This marble has been in my brain for most of the day and I feel I need to get it out.

The Voicey Award winners were announced this week by their producers Voices.com.

My congratulations to the winners.

I also renew my objection here to the award’s title which I find silly – and I expressed this sentiment some years ago to Stephanie Ciccarelli so I am not speaking out of school. It’s OK, she thinks I’m silly.

Don’t ask my what my great idea to name the awards was because I’ve forgotten it but I know it was a helluva lot better than Voicey! 😉

And speaking of silly, he said in his professional segue kind of way, I was visiting a message board today and came across two things on the board.

1. A recent and long thread complaining about Voices.com
2. Kudos and shout outs (from a couple of the complainers, I believe) to the winners of the Voicey Awards

This led me to imagine the face-palm moments taking place at Voices.com where they have voice talents complaining about their service (in some form or another) on one page of a forum while these talents merrily praise the Voicey Awards and their winners on another page.

Yes, the kudos were offered in support of those honored and that’s as it should be but considering this juxtaposition I was chuckling all day with this thought:

Voice Talents – you can’t live with ’em but you’re not supposed to shoot ’em.

Thanks for reading.

If you haven’t already, we’d be honored if you subscribe to voxmarketising – the audio’connell blog and podcast by clicking the “subscribe” button on this blog.

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Tags: commentary, silliness, voice talent, voiceover, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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I was pinged this morning (and I think we all know painful that can be – ba-dum-bump) by David Ciccarelli who, with his wife Stephanie, own Voices.com. David asked if I would review, post and comment on his annual “Report on The Voice Over Industry 2009”.

OK then, a review with some general perspective and information upfront.

• While I am not a fan of the pay-for-play voice over model upon which Voices.com, Voice 123 and others have built their business, I have stated that if I were to choose one service of that ilk it would be Voices.com because even before I knew the Ciccarellis personally, the customer service and responsiveness their Voices.com offered me when I was an early member was better than any competitor.
• This is at least the second if not third year David has done this report and I give him great credit for seeing an opening for information sharing and promotion of his own business and going for it.
• I also give him credit for daring to ask the opinion of a loud mouth putz like me ’cause he knows I pull no punches on industry issues or in reviews. He and I must ascribe to the same theory that some publicity is better than none at all.
• Over the years I have become friends with David and Stephanie and know them to be honest people whose opinions and talents I respect. Others in their business, not so much.

So enough preamble, on to the meat-

The 23 page report is more PowerPoint than e-book with each slide offering one or two nuggets of information ranging from various market overviews to drilldowns on pertinent business segments.

My likes:

• I like that David’s established an annual tome that summarizes the industry. It adds credibility to the business but to be taken seriously it needs some additional info (see dislikes).
• I have seen “state of the industry reports” or prognostications from Voices.com’s competitors and comparably this is the most credible and informative of all of them at this moment in time.
• Information like $4.05 for the ad word voice over on Google is good to know (a stupidly high price to pay when its competitors who do most of the clicking on such ads but let’s not kill the messenger here)
• I like the format for both conveying information and for its readability.

My dislikes:

• The content has only a few bits of information that I think are new or enlightening to the industry. To become a must read it has to reveal trends and statistics that offer more insight for voice talents and producers. That requires a great deal more research which this document does not have and it shows rather clearly.
• Some topics struck me as grossly self-serving: a report on Social Networks conveniently notes the growth of a Voice.com sponsored group on Facebook and the Time Spent Online chart had Voices.com’s site crushing Voice 123’s statistically and visually while also noting most industry players spend most of their time on Voices.com. This smacks a bit more like a sales presentation than a industry report.
• The salary statistics chart – probably the most important page for both talent and producers – had no quoted sources for the stated figures (which were much too broad) and was only one page (versus three pages on podcasting). This was a big miss.
• The Touch Graph tool wasn’t simplistic enough or easy enough to immediately digest key information (like a good graph should). As just one (possibly self-serving in keeping here with a developing theme) example this graph had the audio’connell web site listed on the web site graph on “voiceovers” and on the same graph an Oxford biography link to Peter O’Connell who I think is a professor or a Bishop but sure ain’t me (no, I do not believe there are any other Peter O’Connell voice overs but me). The graph was gimmicky and not informative.

In summary, I believe that this report reads more like a sophomore’s term paper rather than a senior thesis. What it can, should and I truly hope will be in the future is a report that has a lot more facts in it, much more pertinent data and more information to help talent and producers manage their businesses. It will take much more time and research from Voices.com to make this annual report a widely respected annual state of the industry. Today, the report is not yet there but there is a foundation of a good idea.

We need that “stuff” as well as the promise of what this report could someday be.

Tags: audio'connell voice over talent, commentary, facebook, google, internet, social media, voice 123, voice over podcast, voice talent, voiceover, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Everybody’s favorite voice coach Pat Fraley is in town this weekend courtesy of Toni Silveri’s All Coast Talent (of which I am proud and founding represented voice talent). Pat was in a couple of years ago to do a character voice seminar which I attended; he did an updated version today which I didn’t attend, though I will be in attendance on Sunday for his audio book class.

But three who did attend the character voice workshop today are some of my favorite folks from north of the border. I stopped by the seminar on their lunch break today to visit with them.

Elaine Singer and I first met at the first Podcamp Toronto a few years ago and I was very pleased to hear she caught wind of my announcement of the seminar from this blog and reserved her space. While not exclusive to her voice over talents, Elaine explained to me how she was looking to increase her Herbrew-based voice work. She enjoys it quite a bit and it occurs to me know I’ll have to have her send me her demo for the International Voice Talents page.

David and Stephanie Ciccarelli drove in from south of Toronto, London, Ontario to be exact, taking in Pat’s class and sharing some of their insight on the voice over world gained from their business, Voices.com. David and I spent a good bit of time reviewing some of the proposed changes they’ve alluded to on line at Voices.com, which I assume will result in the usual impassioned debate. From what he told me, I think they make sense but I’ll let David and Stephanie unveil it to the masses. Wonderful folks, the Ciccarellis.

I’ll post later how things went at the Fraley audio book class.

UPDATE: Here’s my Fraley review

Thanks for reading.

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Tags: announcers, blogs, commentary, international voice talents, peter o'connell, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog, voiceover meet-ups, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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