Or a Voice Actor, I suppose. I googled this in my past, and I know for a fact (due to form submissions on this site) 100s of others are googling it too.
The strange answer is.. there’s not a huge amount of voiceover-ing or voice acting involved. Sure, you have to be at an acceptable level, and your equipment needs to be passable.. but further than that, to be a full time, proper, professional voice actor you mainly need sales and marketing chops.
Something that unfortunately I am rubbish at possessing. So, if you can be better than myself at this, you’ll be further along than me in this wonderful career and can start writing these blog posts for me (cheers).
Emails, calls, postcards, pigeons.. but mostly emails. It was a heavy realisation I had when I got to a stage of voice capability that I was really, really happy with and my days weren’t chock full of work instantly. Dawning on me slowly was the hard truth: however good you are, if no one knows who you are or where to find you, you have nothing.
Darn.
Don’t be like me. Develop your marketing skills, develop your sales skills at the same time as your voicework proficiency. That way, when you’re really proud of your voice product, you can actually make use of that skillset.
Luckily, word of mouth keeps the mortgage paid and the self esteem acceptable, but this is a word of caution from someone who has no regrets in life.. apart from this one.