While it’s true that I celebrate every booking with a happy dance,
the booking is even sweeter when you have the luxury of that dream client. What is that secret sauce? Well, first they offer you the job without you doing an audition read based on either your demos or finished work on your website. Next, the pay they offer is commensurate with industry standards. That is really huge because we can loose a lot of time with back and forth negotiations.
Another thing that makes a client ideal, whether they be a production house or video game producer, or any sort of audio engineer, is when they are very specific with their specs up front. Telling the talent whether they want a WAV or an MP3 and which spots they liked and want emulated from the demo they listened to enables us to give them the exact sound they are looking for right away. Specificity means everything. The more specific the client is, the better the voice talent can do their job.
Transparency is another biggie. If the client is open and upfront about all expectations at the start of the job everything will go smoothly. If a price has been agreed upon and then the client starts asking for all sorts of extras, like multiple rounds of edits, or sound effects and music to be added it, it changes the terms of the initial proposal and the job must be renegotiated mid-way. Sometimes this can’t be helped, but sometimes the client knows what they need from the start and for whatever reason decides to save it. It is really not a fun surprise.
As a voiceover actress, we work in a field where we often audition for a good part of the day without being paid. In a sense, the audition is the job and what we do matters very much. So when the bookings do come in, and we have clients who maybe haven’t worked with that many talents directly, it is our job to maintain professional industry standards that ultimately benefit us all.
