Recording & Submitting an Audition for ACX

hey guys welcome back to my channel today i thought i would go just a little bit deeper into acx and getting started there once you have your profile set up then you're like i have no idea what kind of books to look for or how do i audition how do i do any of this stuff how do i get started i'm completely lost well that's what we'll dive into a little bit today in today's video we'll go through finding a book and recording and submitting an audition and then some next steps so here we go okay so here is my acx page so i'm going to go and look for my next book to narrate so i'm going to go up to search and then i'm going to look for titles accepting auditions let's click that and looks like i have some filters that save time sometimes i don't always push through but you might have to reset your filters for each each time you search but okay so let's see what do i have them set at i have um pretty much everything except for erotica and sexuality and again if you want to narrate those there's nothing wrong with that and you do have the opportunity to give yourself a pseudo name pseudonym if you want um it's up to you but you do have that option either at the end when you submit the book for um approval to for the rights holder you can change your name at that point you could submit your name as whatever you want the pseudonym to be or you can create a whole other account um if that's all you want to narrate is just erotica and sexuality you can have a whole other account with just that different name it's up to you how you want to do it okay so i have everything except for erotica selected let's see gender obviously oh i did any let's move that to female that'll narrow it down a little bit uh compensation i have any um i think i ran through these before but obviously if you select unspecified you'll get a much broader return on available titles but if you want to really drill it down if you're tight on time or you know you're really specific about what you want to be paid then i would select what you want and you can select more than one so if you're looking for you know royalty share plus or just royalty share or even you know 50 to 100 per finished hour but let's for the sake of this let's just do you know what let's just stick with annie and see what we get i'm going to apply that and then as far as uh fiction or nonfiction is fine with me language obviously do you want to see i told you some of the filters don't save but obviously english is what i speak so i'm going to select english and apply that accent i am not super great with all accents i can do a couple but i'm just going to stick with american general because that is my native accent so i'll stick with that vocal style i don't really see a whole lot of these selected in books recently so you could probably get away with just doing any um as far as what i mean by that is the rights holder have the opportunity to really drill down and specify what kind of narrator they want sometimes they'll select some of these and sometimes they just select any themselves so i'll just stick with annie and see what we get um that's one i just did let's do voice age um i can pull any of these off but i'm gonna go with adult or middle aged because i am let's apply that let's go project length um for this demonstration i'm gonna go let's do under three hours because i don't have a lot of time to commit to these so let's look for incentive programs i'm not too sure that's relatively new to me i haven't really done much with incentive programs so i'll just select any and we'll get past that project status exclude titles with pending offers okay so we can exclude the books that already have an offer submitted to a narrator yeah i'm gonna exclude those let's apply that and let's see what we got okay so we have a whole 25 books but it varies from day to day from hour to hour because there's a lot more narrators on here than there used to be so let's just see what we have available to us right now okay great well here's one that immediately catches my attention meditation for beginners because i perform and create a lot of meditations for my clients and i myself meditate and know the power of meditation so i think i would be a very good match for meditation for beginners so i'm gonna select that one let's check it out okay so it's uh estimated to be just under two hours with a project budget of 50 to 100 per finished hour that's actually not too bad let's take a look at this okay so they want a soothing vocal style i can definitely do soothing language gender adult american general the only thing that i see that catches my eye is an amazon rating of zero and a sales rank of uh over a million it looks like they had just published this puppy and just uploaded it uh oh well yeah it's been a couple weeks i suppose today's the 30th of september about a week maybe so okay well it looks like they have some social media uh bestseller status awards reviews i'm not sure where those bestseller statuses are because they're definitely not on amazon pardon me while i chapstick so my one vice in the world dry lips this is my nemesis okay let's get back to this estimated audio release date not specified okay so she's probably going to release this as soon as she gets it um let's see what she has to say this book was created one goal of mice to change your life using art of meditation book will offer the reader down to the information okay so it's really just a step-by-step instructions on how to meditate for beginners so pretty self-explanatory let's check out the audition so they have a script sometimes the rights holders will just copy and paste something in here for the audition section they actually have a script uploaded so let's check this out open this up okay so it looks like it's broken down into like day by day practice steps okay cool so i think i'm going to audition for this one so what i'm going to do is this is a revision that i did let's go ahead and close those okay so i use adobe audition for adobe audition i'm going to hit shift control n for a new audio file and then i'm going to name this see how do i want to name this let's name this with my name first let's do angela.oldfast dot audition did i spell it right no audition and then the name of the book or the title of the book let's go back oh let's see what this this was oops i hit a wrong button excuse me meditation for beginners meditate for beginners and then as we know or may not know the sample rate for audiobooks is 44 100. your bit depth is always going to be 16 bits and mono you can always change this later but i always do it up front because sometimes i just forget so i'll set that and forget it okay so i'm going to start this recording i typically record a different way i have a tablet over here just off camera that i use to record and then i have my mic positioned thusly and then i narrate this way but for this demonstration i am of course going to narrate so you can see me so i'm going to start this and then pull what did i do with that pdf oh there it is beginner meditation week two in the world of meditation it's so much we could cover but i would be remised if i didn't hammer home the foundation this week we will dig a little deeper into your breathing techniques i will explore where you are currently do that again i use the clicker to mark my mistakes i will explore where you are currently and best practices for getting the most out of your session have you noticed a shift in the ease or depth of your meditation experience for the last seven days you've been sitting for five minutes each session do you remember how difficult that was the first time you may find that you're holding you may find that you're looking forward to your you may find that you're looking forward to your sessions now and that the time flies by quickly it's not the length of a it's not the length of a sitting that creates long-term change but the fact that you are taking the time and setting the intention that you are going to meditate and sit as long as you can for this reason you'll be continually reminded each week about the importance of practicing consistently if you haven't been sitting in meditation every day spend a few moments considering the obstacles that got in your way if anything got in your way during your session log those into your journal log those in your journal all right so stop that recording your sample can be i typically give them a couple of minutes you can make it as long as you want you can make it the whole section they provide you can make it you know one or two paragraphs it's up to you how much you want to supply to the audition but for audiobooks a generally longer snippet would be nice so the rights holder or author can get a feel of how you'll sound narrating their entire book but i think a couple minutes is fine it gives them enough of an idea of what you can do what your range is how you'll sound and if you know if they like your voice so i think that's fine so what i'm gonna do and i have an audiobook rack already pre-programmed i don't use all of these these some of these other little effects i have used for different kinds of um projects as i mentioned before i do a lot of made create a lot of meditations and affirmations things of that nature and sometimes i'll add an echo effect or a reverb so they for some reason oh i think i did an audio book a long time ago that had affirmations and stuff and they wanted the reverb and stuff so i had to add them to my rack so everything sounded uniform throughout the book it just made it easier but you just turn them off but i saved them to audiobook that's why they're there i don't use those but obviously a denoise um i i don't actually know to look at these i don't think these are in the right order they're definitely not in the right order but i'm gonna stick with this now just for the purposes of this run through so i'm going to apply my rack give that a second and have a sip of coffee while that does its thing okay great so now i'm going to go through and edit i'm going to turn my monitor back on actually no i can't well discovered i can't have my monitors on while i'm recording otherwise it has this really sick echo effect so i'm going to just put one headphone on so i can hear now your audition doesn't need to be perfectly formatted in the acx format as far as you know leaving the fi or five seconds to a second half a second to a second head of room tone and then the tail of you know three and a half seconds you don't have to do that for the audition but for those savvy rights holders that know acx formatting they might be looking at that to see if you can adhere to their formatting style so i always submit the audition the way that it would sound as a completed finished audiobook so the rights holder can see that i know what i'm doing okay so what i'm going to do is just quickly go through and get rid of my boo-boos and fix this up i'll be right back okay so now i've got my file all done i've checked my amplitude statistics and i am within acx formatting so i'm going to go ahead and save save this file i'm going to save it and i have folders for each different site that i find work in like acx voice 123 fiverr upwork they all have a separate folder and then i have different clients within those folders that makes it easy to find everything later okay so we have our file and now i'm going to go back to acx and let's see what do i want to uh first let's upload this is the oh hang on i gotta save it as mp3 i almost forgot and that's where we double check our formatting make sure you're at 44 100 you're at 16 bits and that you're at 192 make sure that i'm at 192 bitrate which i am so okay great uh yes overwrite it okay so now back to there we go there's our files let's open that and then for the message i'm going to say oh and doing my audition for and then you can add a personal note personal note if you like create meditate for i myself if i can spell correctly this is play book i would oh you know one thing i forgot to mention we were talking about the rankings earlier since this is paid up front per finished hour the ratings don't really matter that much because you are being paid up front you are not counting on the sales to make royalties so that is another reason why i'm going ahead and auditioning for this book because i know that i will be paid for it regardless of how well it does on amazon so that's one thing to note that i forgot to mention i will produce this audio book for you for 100 per finished hour so that would net me about 190 or so actually grossed me about 190 or so for this book which isn't that bad it's a it's a relatively small book eighteen hundred eighteen thousand words you can have that done in a day and that is where my video and audio decided to cut out so i s sorry about that i don't know what happened but basically all i did after that was just to verify that everything was filled out that the audition was the correct audition and then i submitted it and then all that's left to do after that is just to wait for the rights holder to respond sometimes they'll respond within an hour sometimes they'll respond in a couple weeks sometimes you know might take them a little bit longer sometimes they won't respond at all but that's just how it goes so that is how we find a book to narrate and submit an audition if you'd like any more information about me please check out my website at voiceoverangela.com i've got a whole section on you know recommended gear and stuff that i've personally used to help you get started on your journey in voice over or audiobook narration i also have a very big announcement coming soon i'm not quite ready yet but i'm working on a very large project to help other voice over artists as well as entrepreneurs looking to start their own online businesses i'm very excited about it but i'm not quite there yet but in the interim like subscribe leave me some comments i love hearing from you guys thank you so much i'll see you on the next video

Channel: VoiceOverAngela

Views: 70,642

Keywords: acx, audiobooks, how to audition for acx, how to narrate for acx, voice over, adobe audition, fiverr, voice actor, acx tips, audiobook narrator tips, audible

Id: 46vfN_shSPs

Length: 19min 56sec (1196 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020