We’re halfway through with the questions on my Audiobook Narrator Self-Assessment Quiz! To catch up, start with Analyzing the Audiobook Narrator Self-Assessment Quiz Part 1.
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What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us
are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
— Henry Stanley Hoskins (not Emerson as I originally believed)
It’s day 3 in a new year. Have you already broken your New Year’s Resolutions?
At the end of 2016, I took Michael Hyatt’s 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever course. (This book is based on that course.) On day 3 of the course, he wrote about New Year’s Resolutions:
The average person makes the same New Year’s resolutions ten separate times without success.
After going through all of the exercises in Hyatt’s course, I confidently started 2017 with several specific goals in the areas of health, career, and avocation. I was making progress on all of them until mid-May.
Drew’s parents, who were 93 and 92 at the time, had been in good health for their age. They both were able to walk and care for themselves, and they were still living independently in their house of 54 years. He still drove, they did their own shopping, and they did all of the personal care activities that we take for granted. We enjoyed lunch with them at a restaurant on 12 May. In a blink of an eye, life changed.
As I wrote over 10 years ago, in order for your ship containing job contracts to come sailing in to your harbor, you have to keep sending out promotional and prospecting ships into the world. But what happens when you don’t see any results from your efforts? It’s so easy to fall into a negative mindset, especially when it seems that every narrator you know is announcing on social media that they had scheduled work through the next 6 months even before they were just hired for a 10-book series.
I still am not at the level of success that I envision, and some days, the critical voice in my mind starts in on me about what I haven’t accomplished. I notice that mean girl never gives me credit for all of the things I HAVE done! No matter how circumstances may appear in the moment, the key is to push the doubts away and keep marching toward your dream.
In 2012, Dave Courvoisier wrote candidly on his blog about a dry spell he was experiencing in gaining work. In this article, I’m including and expanding on my response to him.
First, it’s possible to want something so badly that your desperation to have it can actually push it away from you. I wrote about this phenomenon in the article Voiceover and the Law of Paradoxical Intent.
I can tell you honestly that it was only after I truly ACCEPTED my life as it was that things really started to move forward for me.
Second, the number of jobs booked in a time period is only one small way of measuring success. I wrote about 3 techniques for maintaining a feel-good mentality about your career in the post The feel-good voiceover blog post of the summer!. I write my articles for myself as much as for my audience, and this is one post that I often re-read to maintain balance and objectivity during slow times.
I cannot overemphasize the 3rd technique too much — STOP THE COMPARISONS TO OTHER PEOPLE! It is the single greatest act of self-negation that keeps us from our good.
In fact, when I listened to Rob Lowe’s most excellent narration of his autobiographical audiobook Stories I Only Tell My Friends, I heard a compelling reason to keep going forward with your dream. When Lowe talked about meeting an unknown LeVar Burton about a week before ROOTS was aired on TV, he said:
“It showed me how quickly the rocket fuel of stardom can ignite, how unimaginably GIANT the g-forces can be as you are propelled into fame’s orbit.
Looking back, I also wonder at the mystery of destiny and fate. I marvel at the mercurial forces of fortune and am reminded that one must be ever vigilant to stay on one’s own path, without envy of others.”
When I don’t know what the next step is, I just take one. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s the best thing I could do at the time. It doesn’t matter if other people agree with me, cheer me on, throw spitballs my way, or totally ignore me.
It’s not about them. It’s about me. It’s about “staying vigilant on my path, without envy of others.”
All that matters is that I take that step…..because that step gets me one step closer to the life I’m meant to lead.
Shortly after I responded on Dave’s blog, I wrote the article Power of “I Am” In Maintaining a Positive Attitude. Whatever you put after those 2 words becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A passage in the 12/15/17 Science of Mind magazine daily guide really brings home this point.
“Whenever a negative, demeaning thought is believed and allowed to repeat, it is a prayer. “I am [blank] is a prayer. This thought repeatedly spoken becomes a belief. A belief becomes a reality, a prayer answered. By repeating the thoughts, “I am not good enough”…or “Life has always been a struggle”, I am actually creating that reality.
One of our greatest tools is practicing discipline with what we allow ourselves to think. The reality is that you must first believe your affirmation to be true of you.
…See and know your good, then praise and embrace it.”
We need to keep thinking and believing that the success we seek is coming to us. What we think about expands. If we focus on what we think we lack, we will continue to experience more of the same lack.
Just because things don’t happen on our timetable or in the way that we would expect them to show up doesn’t mean they aren’t going to happen. They probably will happen and be even greater than we could imagine!
Just keep smiling, taking steps, and sending out those ships!
When people ask my advice about getting training, I refer them to my article 10 questions to ask coaches and demo producers and the vetted coaches and consultants linked in the Connections section of my NarratorsRoadmap.com home page.
Recently, someone told me she wanted to develop confidence and wondered whether I thought a particular coach was sincere. I recognized that she really wanted to know if the coach was right for her before she committed to spend the money for the course.
I decided other people may find my answer with 4 additional questions to be useful, so I’m posting the modified version of my reply here.
A few years ago, I started my audio publishing empire with a public domain book. Today, I am thrilled to publish my first contemporary audiobook ROAD TO TARA: THE LIFE OF MARGARET MITCHELL by Anne Edwards.
I’m not the first narrator to acquire audio rights and publish an audiobook of a current book. Nevertheless, I wanted to retrace my steps in this article to inspire more of you to follow a similar path. As actor/writer/director Bob Fraser used to urge people, you can cast yourself!
Last updated 31 December 2024
I’m not a lawyer, but I have voiced an attorney in multiple audiobooks. Just because an author has passed away or isn’t easily discoverable, or the book is out of print, doesn’t mean you’re free to create the audiobook of her book!
Before you can record an audiobook, you must do due diligence to determine whether the book is in the public domain or still under copyright. When a work is still under copyright, the rights holder is the person or company that owns the audio rights to the book. The rights holder (RH) will receive the royalties from the sale of the audiobook.
If the book is still copyrighted, the RH could retain the audio rights and hire you as an independent contractor to produce the audiobook. You also could license the audio rights and become the rights holder. If you’re interested in this second option, I highly recommend you purchase my webinar with attorney and audiobook producer/director/distributor Jessica Kaye on this topic using the link on my Shop page.
The links on this page will help you understand the copyright laws in the US and UK and do your research to determine whether a book is in the public domain or find the rights holder for books still under copyright. By the way, members of my site NarratorsRoadmap.com have access to an exclusive video where I demonstrate how to use some the sites listed below. I also offer members a number of links not listed here, including some collections of potential public domain books I found on HathiTrust.org.
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