February is a wrap. 4 weeks never felt so short, or so long. As with most updates, there are things that I’m proud of and things that I’m disappointed with. This past week has probably been one of the lower morale weeks I’ve had, and yet I also feel somewhat accomplished. It’s not been as good as I was getting in December before the holidays, but I think I’m getting better.
What’s New?
New? not much. I’ve been doing mostly Voices.com auditions with a bit of Casting Call Club and ACX thrown in there. I posted a bunch of promo codes to Reddit for TUYO to encourage more people to listen to it and to write reviews for me. I want to know what I did well and what I could improve on. I’m also looking forward to hearing from the Author for TUYO that she’s getting close to being done with the sequel. I actually really want to narrate the sequel. The characters are awesome, and I’ve really fallen in love with them. I think I’ll do a better job with the sequel, and I know from listening to other audio book series that the performances get better as the narrator gets more comfortable. I’m hoping to see the same improvements in myself.
I’ve also recorded an audition for a book that’s been written by someone in my sword fighting hobby. Fear is the Mind Killer by Kaja Sadowski is a wonderful book, and several friends have suggested that I get in touch with Kaja and see about narrating it. No real expectation that she will want me to narrate for her, but I am giving it a try and look forward to hearing it as an audio book, no matter who winds up narrating it.
What’s Brewing? What will we see (hear) from you?
This week, I am going to take my free afternoons after I hit my magic 10/3/1 auditions, and script out and record lines for a mission I’m writing for Starship Horizons Bridge Simulator. The Mission I’m writing is called the “Hunt for Blue November” and is totally a rip off of the “Hunt for Red October”. But I want to take advantage of a bunch of things in the architecture of the game and record some lines of dialog for immersion into the mission. Other than that, I’m just putzing around this week.
If you tune into my Monday Engagements, this week I’m going to take the time to do some editing, and show off what it’s like to edit a recording. Personal editing is a completely different beast than if you record in a studio with a sound engineer. I’ve definitely thought about what it would take to pivot to being a sound engineer and editor. If the entire voice acting thing doesn’t pan out, maybe I should try for that…
Statistics? Auditions?
Alright, it’s the end of the month so here are some weekly and end of month statistics.
Voices.com: This week, I did 47 auditions, 34 were listened to (72.3%), and 4 were shortlisted (11.8% of listened to auditions, and 8.5% of all submitted auditions). And for the month of February, 141 submitted auditions, 99 listened to (70.2%), with 10 shortlisted auditions (10.1% of listened to auditions, and 7.09% of all submitted auditions). I was short of my goal of 50 auditions a week, at least in part due to skipping out on any auditions while I was visiting my parents the second week of the month. But I am happy with getting more short listed as a percentage of what I submitted. I would like to turn more short listed auditions into actual jobs, but I’m not sure how to go about doing that.
CCC: I definitely did not do as much work on auditioning here as I have in previous months. But I did at least 18 auditions for the month of February. There were a couple of additional auditions that I did from CCC that might or might not have been counted in the stats on the site, but almost every audition I’ve submitted has been listened to by the project owner and I’ve gotten a like on most of the auditions I’ve submitted. Definitely going to work at submitting auditions more regularly there in the future. Mostly because I get to have fun and if I don’t get the job I’m not too disappointed.
ACX: For February, I’ve done 12 ACX auditions, and have received 12 “the producer decided on another narrator” with a couple “The producer has removed this title and is not accepting new auditions”. Not all of the rejections were for things auditioned for this month, I still have 8 pending auditions. And I received a bunch of complimentary messages regarding auditions where they appreciated my production, but just didn’t choose my voice.
Timular
5 activities for this week, totaling just over 8 hours. Voices at just under 4 hours. Marketing at about 2 1/4 hours. ACX at 1 1/4 hours, and the last half hour between planning and CCC. So the numbers are down a bit. But understandable based on what I got done this week. I need to spend a little more time with planning and CCC, because spending time with planning will make other things more effective. But I’m excited to get started with this week and I think I’ll have more behind getting things done this week.
Samples!
I will get back to putting samples out more regularly, but this week will not be that week.
Plans for Next Week
Simple plan, Do the 10/3/1 auditions and go beyond that with things that are both productive and fulfilling.