In the Australian voice acting market, everyone, whether union or non-union, quotes from the union rate card as a base. Non-union Australian voice actors are able to command the same rates for their work as union actors.
This chapter provides you with the knowledge and confidence you need to step into the arena and make a decent living as a voice actor working from a professional-grade home recording studio. Please note that the rates you charge are your own to set.
Quoting Your Pricing
A client wants to hire you for a voice-over job. To ensure you get paid what you deserve, you need to quote the client with the amount the project will be. Quoting is simply looking at the requirements of a project and determining how much to charge for the work. When quoting, you need to know how the client will use the voice-over, how long the client will use it, and also where the client will use it. The waters for quoting can be quite murky if you don’t know what to look for.
The goal for this section is to ensure that you can assess the work being quoted on and confidently present a fee that covers your costs while meeting budgetary constraints. When you quote, you want to be sure that you have accounted for your time, resources, and skill while meeting the client’s budget and expectations. These sections can help get you on the right track.
Determining your method of quoting
You can choose many different ways to quote for work. No matter which method you use, the fee ultimately should come out about the same. The following are different ways you can quote.
Different ways of quoting exist mainly because of the scope of a project or usage of the audio. For example, you would quote a commercial based upon the market, whereas you would quote an audiobook based upon a per-finished-hour basis. When you’re starting out, quoting on a per-page basis is helpful, which is better than charging on a per-word basis. You can make more money if you charge per page.
When working with your client, we recommend you charge 50 percent upfront with the remaining 50 percent due immediately upon receipt of the finished work.
Market size: This method is most commonly used for commercial radio and television spots that air to the mass public. Markets are determined by the audience size that will be hearing the voice-over. The market size largely determines how much you’ll charge for the recording. This kind of quoting differs from projects outside of broadcast television and radio. Commercials are about how many ears you’re impacting as opposed to how many words or for how long you are recording.
To clarify these two distinctions, you can break down the markets into three categories:
•Major: A major market refers to large centers such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal.
•Regional: A regional market covers a particular geographic area encompassing many cities.
Major and regional markets have target audiences with a potential count of more than one million. Furthermore, Internet/news media applications, documentaries, trailers, IDs, and in-house advertising are considered major markets, also sometimes referred to as national.
•Local: A local market serves a smaller population, and a message broadcast locally may not reach much farther than the city itself or its immediate surrounding area. If your project is distributed, broadcast, or displayed in a nonmetropolitan area with a population of fewer than one million, for internal training use, corporate videos, or telephony, then it’s considered a local market.
Some union rates apply in major cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Get the most recent rate page at http://www.voiceoverresourceguide.com/la/08union.html.
Per page: Use the per-page quoting method for lengthy scripts for an audio book, e-learning programs, medical narration, and technical tutorials. This method gives the client the ability to ballpark how much your services will be. Also, if the client suddenly adds another chapter to the book or another course to the e-learning program, you can refer to your initial quote that your services will be billed per page.
You want to have a standard method for measuring what constitutes a page. We suggest you determine that one page is a Word document, Arial font, size 12-point, double spaced. Setting a standard can eliminate any confusion and also let the client know in which format you would prefer the finalized script to be delivered.
Per hour: Having an hourly rate for edited material on hand is important. This rate includes voice-over and audio editing. The kind of work that falls into this category includes but isn’t limited to long-form narration for e-learning, audiobooks, and documentary narration. If the work is comparable to audiobooks, the going rate is between $200 and $300 per finished hour, so for a 20-hour project at $250 an hour, you would quote $5,000.
Per word: Shorter scripts such as voicemail messages, one-liners for a website greeting, or even a few sentences for a public service announcement may be best quoted by the word. Using this method makes is easy to perform a word count in Microsoft Word to discover the total number of words in the script, and then quote accurately using your per-word rate.
If you have a long project with enormous word counts, how do you know whether to charge per hour or per word? Here we show you how a per-word quote compares to a per-hour quote for a long project, when the script exceeds 100,000 words:
Script length: 126,000 words
Average words you can speak per minute: 150
Divide 126,000 by 150 to get the total number of minutes it will take you to record, which is 840 minutes.
Figure out how many total hours it will take to record by dividing the total minutes (840) by the total number of minutes in an hour (60) to get 14 hours that it will take you to record.
•So compare your per-word rate of 126,000 words or your per-hour rate of 14 hours. Doing this math can help you to know how long it will take to record so that you can accordingly schedule your sessions and give an estimate for how long it will take you to complete the project. The word count itself is a critical factor in estimating how long it will take you to record.
Recognizing billing cycles
When you quote, you may want to consider different billing cycles. A billing cycle determines how long you give a client to pay for services rendered. Billing cycles are commonly used for broadcast voice-overs, such as commercials. Following a billing cycle ensures you’re paid on time for your work in the cases where you have an ongoing arrangement, such as you may encounter in radio, where you’re paid in monthly retainers. You can set your own billing cycle, or you may need to yield to your client if he has a system in place.
Some different types of billing cycles you may encounter with your clients include the following:
13-week cycle: Most broadcast commercial campaigns run in 13-week cycles, roughly three months.
Seasonal license: Designed for advertisers to run targeted campaigns around a specific calendar event, such as Christmas or back to school.
One-year renewable license: An annual contract designed for committed advertisers.
You may also want to consider a full buyout. A buyout is the purchase of the entire holdings or interests of an owner. In the context of voice acting, a full buyout is royalty-free with no additional charges. Unless otherwise stated, most clients assume that they own the rights to the finished product after they’ve paid you in full for your work.
Saving time with a rate sheet
A rate sheet is a quick reference guide that details how much you charge for any given service. Figure 15-1 shows an example of a rate sheet. A rate sheet like this can save you time when trying to determine how much you should charge for work.
You can easily create your own rate sheet, based on what you determine to charge. You can keep your rate sheet private or make it publicly available on your website for prospective clients to consider when evaluating what you have to offer. Having
a rate sheet on hand saves time because you won’t ever be at a loss for what to quote if you go by your rate sheet.
Figure 15-1: A rate sheet shows what you charge for different projects.
Illustration courtesy of Voices.com
Negotiating your quote
Many clients are willing to negotiate rate; however, they appreciate being quoted an actual dollar figure for their project that falls within their stated budget range. Should your quote be higher than the range the client has selected, be prepared for your prospective customer to ask you to renegotiate your quote. Set your rates with a margin of flexibility in mind.
If a job is paying less than you think it should, you can quote what you would expect to be paid and appropriately explain to the client why you’ve quoted in the manner you did. They may reconsider and pay you what you’ve asked or meet you in the middle.
Sticking within the client’s budget range when you make your quote and renegotiate is often the safest way to go, though. Don’t be afraid to quote higher up in the range. From personal experience, we’ve hired voice actors who quoted in the top range and were more than comfortable doing so. Why? Because we were casting based on the voice and interpretation, not the price.
You’ll find that where a brand is concerned, there are fewer things more important than finding the right voice, even if that voice actor is quoting in the upper range or possibly higher than the client’s budget. Bearing this in mind, anything is possible, but you’ll need to take the chance to find out!
Receiving Payment: Cash, Moolah, Dinero
Getting paid is the single most important aspect of being a freelance voice-over professional, so make sure that you take your time and do things right. This section walks you through the steps you need to do in order to receive payment for your services.
Opening a business bank account
Having a separate business bank account is important for many reasons. You want to keep your business and personal bank accounts separate so that you can keep track of your business earnings and expenses. Keeping them separate can make tax reporting much easier if you haven’t comingled money from your business and your personal life.
To set up a business account, follow these simple steps:
1.Acquire an Employer Identification Number (EIN) by contacting the IRS.
Call the IRS Business and Specialty tax line at (800) 829-4933 or go online (http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/Employer-ID-Numbers-%28EINs%29) to get your EIN. You need to do this before going to the bank.
2.After you have your EIN, go to the bank and set up a business account.
Bring your business documentation, such as your business name registration, incorporation documents (if you have incorporated), and your EIN. Chapter 14 talks more about setting up your business.
Setting up a PayPal account
Many people choose to connect their business bank account with a PayPal account. PayPal is a third-party service that lets you send money to anyone with an email address set up with a PayPal account. The service is free for consumers and works seamlessly with your existing credit card and checking account. PayPal is fast, easy, and secure, which means you can easily accept online credit card payments from your clients for voice-over work. After you have set up your free PayPal account, you can start receiving payments right away.
PayPal offers three types of accounts, which we discuss here:
Personal: Members who want the ability to send money from other PayPal users or accept debit and credit cards can use this type of account. eBay Tools and Merchant Services are limited for personal PayPal accounts.
Premier: These accounts are for members who have a high transaction volume, need to accept credit card payments, or want to access special features not offered with the personal standard accounts. Premier accounts include all the benefits of the personal accounts, as well as the special features.
Business: These accounts allow you to do business under a company or group name, accept all payment types for low fees, and accept payment from customers without PayPal accounts. Business accounts include all the benefits of Premier accounts, as well as special features.
To further compare these three options, visit the PayPal website at (www.paypal.com). After you’re a member of PayPal, you can take advantage of advanced PayPal techniques, create invoices, and build trust and credibility with the PayPal logo, a graphic known and respected worldwide.
Acquainting yourself with SurePay
Most voice actors at Voices.com use SurePay to get paid for voice-over work. SurePay is Voices.com’s escrow payment service that enables a client to make a full deposit upfront and have the deposit held until finished audio files are delivered through the Voices.com website. The SurePay system manages payments made by VISA or MasterCard, or through PayPal for you. You can control your payout preferences via the Preferences link in your Voices.com account.
The process starts when you get a job offer from a client. If the client accepts your work and you reach an agreement, the next steps include the depositing of funds in an escrow account, the recording of the voice-over, the delivery of the files, and the approval of work completed. After the client approves the work, the funds will be released to the voice actor either through PayPal or by check.
If you decide to use Voices.com, contact Voices.com for more information about SurePay or visit www.voices.com/surepay.html.
Managing Invoices
In order to ensure you get paid for your voice-over work, you need to keep detailed records, invoice your clients, and then manage those invoices. When managing the invoices, you want to make sure your clients pay in a timely fashion, depending on the terms that you set. The following sections identify what you need to do to manage your invoices to get paid and what you can do if your clients don’t pay in a timely fashion.
Handling purchase orders
A purchase order is a document that gives you permission to bill a client. It’s a companion document to an invoice. Larger clients that have accounts payable departments often issue purchase orders. The accounts payable department issues a purchase order to you, giving you permission to bill the client for the services described in the purchase order. A purchase order has a number often called a P.O. number; print that purchase order number on your invoice when you bill the client for work after you’ve completed the project. That way, your client (or more specifically, its accounts payable department) can quickly match up the invoice that you submitted with the original purchase order resulting in much faster payment.
The purchase order can be as simple as a one-line statement that says “voice-over services” or you can go into more detail, such as what is being recorded, how long it is, and how it will be used. Figure 15-2 shows what a purchase order looks like.
Figure 15-2: An example purchase order.
Illustration courtesy of Voices.com
Issuing an invoice
An invoice notifies the client to pay a certain amount due. An invoice should include the following information (Figure 15-3 shows a sample invoice):
Your company name and mailing address as well as the client’s company name and billing address.
Services rendered such as voice-over recording, editing, editing and mixing, as well as the total price.
A date that the invoice was issued and the terms for remitting payment.
Figure 15-3: An example invoice.
Illustration courtesy of Voices.com
A proven payment strategy is to require a 50-percent payment when you begin the work with the remaining balance due prior to delivery of the final product. You need to invoice twice then. You may also choose to invoice in quarters, depending on how complicated the project is.
When you get paid, keep these basic strategies in place to avoid
many payment issues:
If the client pays the deposit via PayPal, you can get started right away, working on the project.
If you’re waiting for a check in the mail, particularly for final payment, wait for the check to clear at the bank before sending the CD master.
Grasping payment terms
When you issue invoices, you want to make sure the payment terms are clear so your clients know how long they have to pay. For example, if the invoice is due upon receipt, that tells the client that he needs to immediately cut you a check. If the invoice says, net 30, the client has 30 days to pay from the date printed at the top of the invoice.
Make sure to use net 30 on your contracts. What this means is that your client has 30 days to pay the full balance that it owes you. Because many companies routinely pay between 30 to 90 days late on all invoices, never make your terms net 60 or net 90.
If you have a schedule for your client’s payments, clients can remember to pay. If you break up the payments into periodic invoices, you can increase your cash flow with a number of smaller payments rather than a single large payment after the work is complete.
Collecting on Overdue Invoices
If a client is late in paying an invoice, you need to take immediate action to ensure you get paid. After all, you’re expecting payment for your services, and you probably need the money to pay expenses and live everyday life. When you encounter unpaid invoices, we suggest you take the following action:
Send a friendly email or call. You should always send something first to the client in writing stating the overdue status. Clients appreciate both email and mail reminders. You can also call to remind the client. Telephoning is effective because the client has no choice but to listen to you. Even if the client doesn’t answer, the worst-case scenario is you either leave a message on voicemail or you speak to the receptionist, who will no doubt grow tired of hearing from you and send your request to the billing department to have the invoice paid immediately.
Voice Acting For Dummies Page 29