Bad deals. We all get them.
And they seem to come when you are at some sort of low point.
Almost as though the Universe is trying to tempt you into taking them.
But in my limited experience on this Earth, I’ve come to realise, if you’re not happy entering a deal then you should probably walk away.
Let me explain.
Recently I decided to start upping my game in the Audiobook world.
I worked with an Author I knew and completed a 144k word audiobook in 12 days.
Pretty impressive even if I say so myself.
And so I thought, hey this is great, now I can go out and start auditioning and taking on more audiobooks.
So I went to the place most voice actors go to, the backend of Audible.com, which is called ACX.com and began auditioning for titles I thought would work.
To my delight, I began winning auditions.
The only thing was these were low-budget ones.
Ok, I can work with a low budget. It just means I need to get the author to chip in and give me the information I need such as character info, and voice types.
Here’s my experience:
Author 1. Refused to do zoom calls because he “doesn’t really do Zoom.”
Sure, I can work outside of zoom, but if he wants a low budget I’ll need a spreadsheet with more info.
He told me he could pay me $75 for a 50k book with a Royalty share on the sales. Only he had no sales or reviews on his Amazon book.
He also refused to give me any info. Basically he wanted me to do all the work, take all the risk on an unproven author and for peanuts.
Hmm. I’d love to do a passion project but this guy would be hard to work with and wasn’t flexible.
I dodged a bullet there.
Author 2: This guy was fitting the bill wth 10K word books. Interesting to read. Zero budget though.
Still, I could work with this and in theory it could be done in 5 hours.
Only, he decided to write the book with two Marvel characters (Tony Stark and Peter Parker), which he didn’t have authorisation from Marvel.
“I’ll change their names to Stark and Parkey,” he said.
Er no. I’d much prefer not to get sued by Marvel thank you very much.
And so the search goes on…
It’s not easy on this path of freelancing.
But sometimes you have to know when to walk away from a bad deal.
Besides, now I can use that time cooking more BBQs for my family.
