Happy President’s Day! Enjoying those white sales?
Working in restaurants for many years as well as being self-employed has made me “immune” to holidays. I just never know when they are! Usually I don’t know it’s a holiday until I get to the bank or the post office and wonder where the hell everybody is…
First off, my blogroll is back! If you want to be on it, just reply to this post with your name and the URL of your blog. I’ll be adding them soon…
The blogroll was one of many “tweaks” on my website, including adding smartphone-friendly demo players and some new videos to the Samples page. Go to my website to check them out!
Thanks to everyone who attended my Edge Studio Webinar “Rates, Negotiating, and Invoicing” this past Thursday night. We had a good turnout! I think my next one will be about filing your taxes as a voice talent. Does anyone have any good VO tax tips to share?
“Infoquake”, the first of that audiobook trilogy I booked, is coming along nicely. I’m narrating about 15 pages per hour. For me that’s a great pace. Some books, like that Glenn Beck bio “Common Nonsense”, I was averaging about ten pages per hour. Why the big difference? For one thing, I’ve noticed that non-fiction takes longer than fiction. The script tends to be more dense. You know, blocks and blocks of thick paragraphs on every page. In fiction, there is dialogue. Sometimes an entire line of the script contains only one word! That obviously makes it go faster.
TIP OF THE WEEK: Determining how pages you can narrate in an hour is pretty important when doing an audiobook, especially a long one. The more accurate your estimate, the easier it is to schedule your recording sessions, whether it’s at home or at a remote studio. For example, “Infoquake” is a 375-page book. If I narrate an average of 15 pages per hour, that means it should take about 25 hours of studio time to narrate. I can comfortably narrate for about four solid hours a day before I burn out. That means “Infoquake” should take about six to seven four-hour sessions to record, not including breaks, of course.
More importantly, you can give your client an accurate time-frame for recording the audio book. That makes you look more professional. Now that I think about it, it actually DOES make you more professional!
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: There are probably few more obvious emblems of soulless success than a children’s beauty contest. David Rooney
STUFF!: J.J. Abrams “Star Trek”. What a great film! I love the fact that they were able to “de-nerdify” it and tell a great story that has mass appeal.
From Tom Dheere’s apartment, this is Tom Dheere, GKN News…