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Episode number 300300. Welcome to Aveeo's Journey podcast and welcome to the last podcast for season one. And this journey, I'm going to talk to you about what the next journey is going to look like and what I'm going to be doing for that and, yeah, the future of VO's Journey podcast. So thank you for 300 episodes and let's do it. This is VO's Journey. With your host, the incomparable Anthony Pica. All right, so number 300 today. First, again, I want to thank everybody so much for an incredible journey so far. I started this podcast off in 2018, late 2018, early 2019. And the whole idea behind Aveo's Journey podcast was to document my journey from starting out as trying to become a voice actor to hopefully becoming a voice actor and then going full time as a voice actor and building my voiceover business. And after 300 episodes and eight years later, I can honestly say it's been a success. It's been a success and I've built a successful voiceover business. And thank you all so much for your support over the years. It's been amazing. And, you know, it's funny because starting out, if you go back and listen to episode one, if you haven't listened to all of them, I totally understand there's 300 of them. But if you go back and listen to episode one, I'll never forget, I go back and listen to it, or just the beginning myself, to remind me how far I've come. But I think, you know, it was. I think I sounded like, hello, welcome to Avio's Journey. Early on, right, because it was. I was recording about 1 or 2am in the morning, and, you know, I was just starting out on the journey. I'd only been doing voiceover for about a year, a year and a half or so. And it was, you know, the idea behind the podcast originally, right, was to start to create a podcast so that potential voiceover clients would hopefully hear my podcast and want to hire me to be a voice actor. That was the point of the podcast and of course, to document my journey from going from nothing to hopefully going full time. And I'm so pleased to say that the podcast documents that, you know, it documents one guy's journey from going from, you know, starting to. To becoming a full time voice actor and then landing to where I am now. So I want to talk today about kind of the next chapter in this podcast and aveo's Journey, because if you haven't noticed, this is this has all been season one, season one of Avio's Journey. It was a very long season. It was a very long season. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to. We're going to start season two, and season two is going to be another journey, right? I'm going to be documenting another journey, but it's going to be different than the first journey because I've already made it as a voice actor, right? So that journey is still happening, but it is a new journey now. So the new journey we're going to be documenting and moving forward, right? Is going to be documenting my journey on building a successful audiobook publishing company. All right? And basically, you know, the documenting, working with voice actors, helping voice actors grow their business, helping authors publish their work, right? And sharing with you the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations, the challenges, just the day to day stuff that goes into building a publishing company for voice actors. And over the last two years, and more recently over this past year, been very passionate about our certified human voiceover and sticking with all human voices and everything we do. And you know, that's been kind of the backbone of Academy Voices and Veo Journey Academy. And so the two of these coming together in this podcast is going to be the journey that I'm going to be documenting. So, you know, we've basically, I basically started this about a year, a year and a half ago, Academy Voices. And now you could probably say that I actually started Academy Voices a couple of years ago, but when I started it, I was unclear about how I wanted to or what the direction of Academy Voices was. I wanted to create something, first of all, that had, when I first started and created, I wanted to create something that I could bring, I could get work for voice actors because, you know, I had worked with so many voice actors, I had coached, I've coached so many voice actors over the years. Now I've watched hundreds and hundreds of voice actors on their journey and have helped them on their journey. And so many of them are so talented, so much unique voices to offer. But for this reason or that, their marketing or their ability to get people to even hear them was very hard for them to do and they struggled with it. You know, marketing is not easy. You've talked about it a lot. It's a challenge, it's a constant grind and it's a journey of its own. So I wanted to create a place where education went to that next level of actually doing. And that's what Academy Voices was early on and early on, I wanted it to be all about getting any type of work, commercial work, e learning, radio promo, audiobook. Didn't matter what it was. I wanted it. I wanted all. Any type of work. And I worked really hard. I built the website. I coded a bunch. I coded a bunch of different. I made a bunch of different code on how to find people, how to find people in our roster. I from, you know, just. Just making it searchable, you know, meaning like so if you wanted a male or a female narrator, if you wanted a specific language, a style, a tone, all that stuff, I did all this work and you know, it was very challenging and I put all this work into it and you know, I found was. Is that we weren't getting any work. Could it. I couldn't get any work because I was taught first off, I was targeting too broad of a market, everything right. And Academy Voices was just being drowned out. No, you know, it was very difficult to get anybody to really come to the website. And I realized I was up against. I was up against behemoths, right? When you're up against voices.com and you're up against voice123 and you're up against the voice realm, you're up against Budago and you're up against Veoplanet and you're up against ACX and you're up against Fiverr and you're up against Upwork and you're up against the voice realm and you're up against, you know, all of these places and then some, right. It's very difficult to actually get anyone to know you exist. And you know, I didn't have the. The loads and loads of money that these websites spend on Google Ads every month. And you know, that was very discouraging because it felt like I'd done all of this work. You know, I made all these promises to voice actors because I was so excited to put this together and to show people. And I had voice actors signing up left and right and was very thrilling. But I couldn't get any work. And I felt really frustrated with the fact that I could not get any jobs coming in. Now we had a sporadic job here or there that we brought to voice actors, but generally speaking, I just. I couldn't get. I couldn't get jobs. So I kept working on it, kept working on it. And you know, I looked back in my journey, my personal journey as a voice actor. And you know, when I first started as a voice actor as maybe, you know, I started doing audiobooks, it was my Bread and butter. And audiobooks was the backbone of how I went full time. You know, I was doing a couple audiobooks a week. You know, I was making quite a bit of money with audiobooks in the beginning of my journey that helped lead me to leave my job. And I realized looking forward too, I started, you know, diving in and doing more research again. And I found that even, even now, audiobooks especially now are the number one published media in all of media. Doesn't matter what it is, whether it's books, whether it's movies, whether it's video, whether it's anything, any pub magazines, anything published media. Audio books are the number one listened to media in the world, right? And now we've reached about two and a half billion dollars in revenue revenue yearly. And they're talking about in 2030 at getting up to in the 30s, right, $34 billion. I mean that's heck of a jump. And some, some in third in 2032, they're thinking over 50 billion. I mean that's why you're starting to see Amazon, right? I mean if you, if, if you haven't seen it, you have. Amazon is, you know, like they're running commercials over TV on Audible, on about Audible and you know, Spotify and all these places are, you know, the audiobook industry is massive and, and it just continues and continues to grow. And it's been growing since I, I mean since I got into, you know, I listened to tons of audiobooks before I even started to be, before I was a voice actor. And you know, that was a reason originally I became a voice actor was because I wanted to narrate audiobooks. And I knew then it was growing. And as my time as a, as a voiceover artist has continued over the years, it has continue to grow year over year, year over year, the audiobook industry just continues to grow. It's never stopped, just even despite AI, it's continued to grow and they've tried to implement AI into audiobooks and it just, it does, it continues to grow. AI is not carving out their, you know, their section and audiobooks because you know, we want human narrators. But anyways. But beyond that, it was something that I realized I needed to get back to basics and I needed to follow my own journey and apply that to Academy voices journey. So I made the decision to change somewhat of our direction right about a year and a half ago and completely focus on audiobooks only now does that mean that we all won't do some other work? No, of course not. We always do whatever Work comes to us, but our main focus, our number one focus is audiobooks at Academy Voices and publishing audiobooks. And that was a huge decision because, you know, there was a lot of voice actors who want, you know, don't want to do audiobooks. Right. And that's okay, of course, but there are, you know, but that was my. So I was a little concerned about that. But I decided, hey, listen, I've got to make some sort of decision. And we've got. We're not. We're not getting any traction. I have to decide, you know, and by the way, this is another note for voice actors or authors and anyone listening, right, There comes moments in your business where what you're doing isn't exactly working. And sometimes a little small course correction needs to be made, like where you're offering your services or how you're offering them. You know what I mean? To large course corrections. Like you need to start offering a new service. You need to start expanding what you do. You need to start looking at different systems. Maybe you need to make a hard right turn or a hard left turn. Right. You need. There are times where you have to make those decisions. You've got to take those chances in your business when you've hit a wall, all right, when things are stagnant. And, you know, this was one of those moments with Academy Voices like I had made in and avo's Journey, you know, quite a bit. And so I decided to do that. And then we were off to the races. I said, okay, now we're doing audiobooks. Now the next challenge comes. Came in, which was, okay, so I've got voice actors, I've got audiobooks, right? And royalty share audiobooks from authors was pretty, you know, that was one thing, but I could not. It was the same sort of thing. We didn't have a brand yet. No one still knew Academy Voices. I wasn't doing really socials at the moment because I was running my voiceover business and veo Journey Academy, right. So no one knew Academy Voices. So I realized I needed something to generate revenue. And I had an idea which was. And what's funny about this is that I had this idea when I first started as a voiceover artist. So when I first started as a voiceover artist, as you know, many of us do, I started with royalty share audiobooks off of acx. And early on, and by the way, early on, ACX was quite different, meaning you could make a lot more money through acx. You not only made money through royalties, but you also made money when they first started their subscription program, and if someone subscribed and they listened to your audiobook, they bought your audiobook with their first credit, you and the author got to split a $50, a $50 bonus. And that might not sound like much, but if you had like, you know, 20 or 30 people, you know, buy your audiobooks with their first credit, and it was $25 a piece that, you know, like, the author got 25 and you got 25, you were talking 500, $750 extra bonus a month on top of your royalties, right? So you had a lot of happy campers. And, you know, that. That was the narrators that, that audible built their back on, right? That was built, you know, that's, I mean, that's, that's the truth of the matter. And as they're doing now, as well, what, they're starting this pool and they're going to be shifting some other things too, again. But they, you know, they slow. They took that away. And, you know, as Audible does, they just take and take, and Amazon does take the majority of all the money for themselves. But anyways, so that's, that's, that's not what this podcast is about at this moment. But anyway, the point is, though, is I started early on and I, you know, that was. That was something I realized because I was like, hey, this is great. If I could make royalties every month, then I could add that to my revenue streams. And all I would have to do is figure out how many audio, like how much money per audiobook I made a month in royalties and then take how much money I needed to make as a, as a person, as a worker, or what I was making in my job and just do that many audiobooks and I'll make those royalties and then I could leave my job. And I realized early on that I needed to have a certain amount of audiobooks and royalties to make that happen. And it was something like, I always had this dream I needed like a thousand audiobooks, right? Or something. Because if I was doing, I think it was. If I made, you know, a couple of dollars a month, it was something like two. It was. So whatever number I came up with at the time, what I was making, it was like $2 a month per audiobook that I had or something like that. And I needed a couple thousand dollars or where that, that was the goal, right? The goal was a thousand audiobooks. And I always thought if I had a, you know, if I could get a thousand audiobooks, that would be great. Now, as time went On I realized by myself doing a thousand audiobooks in, you know, a couple of years even by myself would be just darn near impossible. As time went on, I just could not do it. And I had this other idea because I had gotten hired off of Fiverr for an audiobook and it was, it was. What was the name of it? It was a financial book and it was Think and Grow Rich. And I got hired for this and they paid me quite a bit of money. They paid me like $3,000 or something if I remember correctly. And I did the audiobook and they told me the only thing was, is that I had to use a pseudonym. But they were publishing this book because it was in the public domain. And I was taking, I was like, wow, okay, so that's fine. I didn't think much of it and I realized, you know, why isn't anyone doing this, right? Is using not just authors but also public domain work or things that come available. Why isn't. Then I realized they are. And I went on Amazon, right? And Amazon was doing that very thing right under like behind the scenes, not being very public about it, but it's available on there. And I noticed that that was something that I've always loved. I love history, I love classic literature, right? I mean Charles Dickens, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, I mean all the, you know, Jane Austen, all these stories, you know, I'm going further down. I love them all, you know, Herman Melville, all the just incredible authors throughout time and history. Anyways, point is, is I thought, hey, I, I could start while we are building our, our name, right, to bring more authors and to trust us. We can start also by growing our portfolio with royalty share public domain audiobooks. However, I thought, well, can this make any money? And that was the thing. So we did an experiment. I got some voice actors with me and all of us, we did a couple, we did a couple of audiobooks and I only published one and this was about two and a half years. So this was right when we had started. So it was about a year before I switched over to all audiobooks and it was Hansel and Gretel was our first audiobook that we ever published, Hansel and Gretel. And you know, it was a short one as well because I didn't know, do they have to be long? Do they have to be short? You know what I mean? And also I knew that I didn't want to just go through Audible. I wanted to publish everywhere. Audible, Spotify, Google Play, Apple Books, Nook, Barnes and Noble Libraries, right? Hoopla, bibliotheca, chirp, all of the different. I wanted to publish everywhere, but I didn't know could I publish without having books and things like this, Nature, whatever. So the answer was, I don't know. We're going to try. And so I published Hansel and Gretel. And I waited and I forgot about it, you guys, I'm not gonna lie. And I absolutely forgot about it. And, you know, I was that. And then as I was telling you earlier here about, I was trying to research and figure out what do I. What can I do with Academy Voices to make it work? I thought, oh, let me look and see what's going on. That one. And lo and behold, it had made some money. Now, not a bunch, it made like 15 or $20, right? But the point is that I was like, holy crap, it actually made money. And I was like, well, that's the missing. Right, because again, if you're going to start a business of any kind and you're going to do something, it has to make money and you have to figure out how to get it to make money and pr. And before I could not figure out how to get Academy Voices to make money, and I was like, well, hey, this isn't it. Because again, we didn't have a name yet. We didn't have authors who trusted us yet, you know, and, you know, why come to us when they can go to all these other places? So this was it in my mind. This was the moment I figured it out. And so that's exactly what I did. I said, okay, we're going to start doing more. We're going to start putting some together. We're going to start putting them out there. And I had set the goal for what if? And I always think this is funny, right? We always start what if? We had a thousand audiobooks published. So that set us off on this journey to get to a thousand audiobooks published. And as time has gone on, we have now hit 6. 600 audiobooks. We had 600 audiobooks published this year. And we are going for that thousand mark I've had. You know, we now have a team. I have a team of people who help and work for Academy Voices who are doing incredible stuff. We have almost 400 narrators now that go through Academy Voices. And we're scrolling and we are pushing that limit to get to that thousand. That thousand audiobook mark. And royalties have really. It has shown me that this works, right? The royalty payments we were able to pay voice actors. And, you know, it's A really cool, special thing. And now we're starting to get authors. You know, I had a couple authors the other day sign on again, and we're getting traction, starting to build a name for ourselves. It's a long term. It's a long haul. Just like building a voiceover business or becoming an author and writing books. Right? And building a brand, building your portfolio. It takes time and it takes effort. But so all of that story, but the point of all this story, too, was to say we are now moving forward with Academy Voices and BO Journey Academy as a place, even though they're separate. BO Journey Academy is where we help voice actors start and grow their voiceover business. And Academy Voices is where we help voice actors and authors, authors take their books and turn into audiobooks and narrators to get jobs and earn money in a safe environment that's run by voice actors. You know, even we are. I'm taking both of these things and we are. I'm moving into season two of Avio's Journey podcast that's we're now going to document that journey. And, you know, this show is going to involve coaching for voice actors still, you know, help for authors, you know, back inside information about growing a publishing company. What happens when I'm listening to narrator submit auditions? What happens on the type of performances they do? What happens on helping them grow that revenue and to win more jobs and to become better voice actors in their business. Same with authors. And then how the business works and how you grow a business. Because I'm gonna screw up and I'm gonna fail. Just like I've said many times, right. This show is about helping the new and upcoming voiceover voiceover actors start their business and sidestep all the crazy things that I seem to step on. Well, it's gonna be the same sort of journey here. Cause I'm gonna step on a lot of crap and I'm gonna screw up a lot in building this, you know, production company, this audiobook publishing company. But the cool thing is, I think is I'm going to document and share with you all all those trials and tribulations, and it's the next journey. It's the next chapter in Aveo's journey. So listen, you guys, thank you so much, as always. This episode 300 and would be nothing's going to change when it comes to the name or anything like that, because I'm not going to change that. But it's going to be into season two, right? And I'm going to be documenting the journey of creating an audiobook publishing company and, you know, showing voice actors how to get work and how to grow their businesses, helping authors, how to take their books and turn audiobooks and then actually sell their audiobooks and all sorts of things like that and meet in the middle with VO Journey Academy. So thank you all so much for listening. Have a wonderful day. I will talk to you all soon for episode one of season two. All right, everybody, peace.