The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. It's often insightful seeing people's journeys and I thought to share my voiceover journey to hopefully help someone out there. This was originally posted as a Twitter thread so I’ll share the outline of my steps below.
Steps
0. I wanted to make audiobooks.
1. Learned from all the free resources provided by ACX.com.
2. Signed up for a website that had a range of lessons for a monthly subscription fee and went through all the beginner lessons.
3. I joined a few monthly zoom meetups with other voiceover artists, took advice on equipment from the course and bought a microphone and audio interface - Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 pack.
4. Learned how to build a makeshift vocal booth with duvets, pillows and a laundry trifold.😎
5. Started auditioning on ACX.com with my set-up and got a few Audiobook gigs
6. I also practised on my own with a few practice scripts I found online and posted these to a SoundCloud playlist with my contact details
7. Moved to a pay-to-play site and auditioned for every appropriate job I was offered to build experience and get faster and better at editing to specifications.
8. I got great client feedback which encouraged me to keep going.
9. I invested in a better microphone and another pay-to-play site with the money I had earned from voiceovers.
10. I continued auditioning and getting paid gigs.
11. Somewhere along the line I bought a course on how to use LinkedIn to market yourself for voiceover and implemented a lot of the strategies proposed.
12. I started getting enquiries from a few people who found me on LinkedIn.
13. Somewhere along the line I also created a website to showcase what I could do and make it easier for people to contact me and send enquiries.
14. I also started uploading voiceover sample excerpts of books I read or liked.
15. After a client said they really enjoyed working with me and asked if I did voiceovers in other languages, I started offering voiceovers in French too.
16. I got asked to speak on a panel at a voiceover conference.
17. I got asked to do the voiceover narration for an author whose first book I read and loved in the past. That was a full-circle moment for me.
18. At some point I started coaching a few people on how to be voiceover artists. Let me know if this is something that might interest you.
19. By the way, I've been providing voiceovers under a company rather than just me as the entity but more on that in a story for another thread.
20. The voiceover journey continues…
TLDR Summary
* Learn as much as you can from free resources
* Start practising very early on and often. You don't need permission to do this.
* Audition as often as possible. Focus on learning from the process first.
* Reinvest money you earn into your craft and equipment.
* Create your own sample content and share on your social profiles
* Make sure you are findable and contactable wherever you post.
Subscribe if you'd like to learn more about my journey as a voiceover artist, entrepreneur and a few of the other things I get up to. Or just drop a DM to say hi 👋 Twitter: @OreApampa. I'm off to do more voiceovers.🏃🏾
About the author
Hi 👋, I'm Ore Apampa. I am an entrepreneur and voiceover artist based in the UK but I do love to travel so I'm not always there. I share stories about my experience being a voiceover artist whilst doing a PhD and being a startup co-founder. I'm hoping sharing the things I learn on my journey will help other people a few steps behind me on their journeys. Subscribe to my newsletter - Ore's Gist to be notified when I post something new.
