Will AI Replace Voice Actors and Authors? | Aaron Ryan

Uh, but I really mostly, I feel not safest, but I feel most in my wheelhouse and most comfortable and in my element, uh, scribing, uh, any post-apocalyptic or dystopian fare.

Welcome to another edition of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Athens, Georgia. If I'm not mistaken, that's home of the University of Georgia. I can't say go dogs, but thank you for listening. Joining me today, author Aaron Ryan. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm an OU alum and, um, recently moving to the SEC. I just, I can't. I can't say Go Dawgs. It's easier than Hook 'Em Horns. I can tell you that. That just goes all over me. Tell us about how you became an author.

Wow. So, gosh, it's really funny because I think I have multiple origin stories as an author. So I'll try to like— Of course. I explaint to you. So the very first one I remember is I was a kid. I was in second grade. Mrs. Walker gave everyone an assignment to write a little novella. And I think I must have been, uh, in the thick of reading the novelization of E.T. by Alan Dean Foster. So committed blatant copyright ripoff and infringement by taking some of what he put and putting it in mine, although my own spin and, you know, my, my exquisite stick figure drawings that I put in there, you know, crudeness aplenty. Um, that's the first thing I remember writing, but I remember being in a young authors club when I was 10. There's— in fact, there's newspaper clippings my mom kept and showed me. And I look back at that and go, of course I'm an author now. I was in a young authors club. And then the third one would be reading The Lord of the Rings as a kid. Just absolutely— not The Hobbit, not The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings blew my mind. Just exposed me to the robustness of world building and character, you know, establishment and everything. So kind of showed me what I could do, not that I'm any Tolkien, but what I wanted to do as well. So there you go.

My kids, two of them, had a middle school English teacher that that's what he taught from was Lord of the Rings. That was it. And it was all the grammar and, what's the word I'm looking for?

The languages.

Vocabulary. Yeah, like that was how he taught English. And I'm like, huh, that's interesting.

Yeah, I would have loved to have been in that class.

Yeah, I mean, Tolkien seems to just stand in his own, you know. I, I too love those, uh, books. I also remember, yeah, you said world building. That's, that's what I really liked. I, I played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid and The whole imagination of building just this, this whole world, uh, really intrigued me. And of course, Tolkien— excuse me— had a lot of influence on Dungeons Dragons. Um, and, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know that anybody's risen to his level yet, uh, uh, in the modern age, although I think the author's name is Pierce Brown. Red Rising series.

Have you read that? I've heard of it. Yeah, I haven't read it, but it looks phenomenal. It looks phenomenal.

Well, I just— my son said, hey, you know, last year he said, you need to read this. And I'm like, yeah, okay. And as I started reading it, I went through all 6 books as fast as I get them from the library. And now I'm sitting here because the way it ended, and I'm like, Mm, there's gotta be another book. But that's the power to me of world building and storytelling is like, you just really can't get enough. Like, I want more. Yeah. I described it, I actually got my wife, who's not a sci-fi fan, to start reading it. And I described it to her as kind of like Game of Thrones in space. Like, that's not a, great analogy, but it's the best I can come up with. But yeah, just powerful stuff, powerful writing. I mean, like, really great storytelling.

Anyway, character development. Sounds like it. Yeah.

Highly recommend. So what is, what is the genre of your preference?

I'm a sci-fi writer at heart. Post-apocalyptic and dystopian is kind of my wheelhouse. But for those of you who are joining us visually, there's a, there's a smattering, excuse me, of all kinds of different genres behind me. There's nonfiction, there's kids' books, there's There's a literary criticism, historical fiction, thrillers, alien invasion, blah, blah, blah. But I, I would not have written those kids books that you wrote. Yeah. Those are all these ones right here. If I can point to them correctly, these are, uh, the kids books that I would not have written but for having a now 10 and 6-year-old son. So I wrote one for the older, uh, of the two. And then I just don't know why I didn't even see this coming. I brought it home and, you know, showed it to him and Brennan's going, "Oh, it's wonderful." And then my 6-year-old Asher goes, "That's great, Daddy. Where's mine?" And I don't know why I didn't see that coming. So, it evolved into a trilogy, and this is the one for Asher, The Sword of Joy right here. But I really mostly, I feel not safest, but I feel most in my wheelhouse and most comfortable and in my element scribing any post-apocalyptic or dystopian fare.

Well, you, you, that's interesting because one of— I, I can remember, I don't remember the author, uh, I remember one author that I read when I was young that wasn't an adult writer was Ursula K. Le Guin. I don't remember specifically what book I, uh, books I read from her, but I remember they're, they're, they're being very compelling. But I, the one, and maybe she wrote this series, The Dark Is Rising, uh, Undersea Over Stone it's, it's wild that I read these books when I was 7 and they're still stuck with me at almost 56. Like, I— they were just so, uh, compelling, right? I, I don't, I don't know. It's just, it— that's the power of a great story.

Yeah, Tolkien is a master at that. And I would dare say Ted Decker, although I haven't read— not Ted Decker, uh, Pierce, uh, Brown or whatever it is with Red Rising. I, I if you are left with this compulsion and this yearning for a new element or a new installment in the story, that's powerful writing. Because the, the thing for me as a writer is I love where fantasy blurs the line with reality. I have some of my favorite characters in the Dissident Saga, their birthdays are on my real life Outlook calendar, uh, because they're alive. They're, you know, they're your creations and the story exists on, even though I'm not, you know, presently reading it. And you, you know, you want them to call every now and then, you check in and see how they're doing, and they're very real to you. So, so is the narrative.

Yeah, I heard another author talk about like their characters talking to them, like, you know, there's just like this compulsion to get, get it out because like they, they're so real, right?

This shirt says, being a writer is the best way I know how to get paid for being insane. That is, I can relate very much to that, that, that author that you're mentioning.

Yeah. Um, okay, so you said you also do voiceover. How did you get into that?

Accidentally. Um, and I think that's one of the best ways to stumble into something is you just, you're left reeling and you go, wow, I kind of, I really like this. Uh, but I was working as a telemarketer. I'm really glad this interview isn't going, you know, anywhere on the internet so anybody finds that out. It's just right.

But I too was a telemarketer, so I— maybe we could swap stories.

It was a cool job, I will say that. I was calling people on behalf of local radio stations and I was selling, uh, PSAs or CSAs, some people call them. And so, um, you know, you would say, hey, it's, it's Aaron Ryan on behalf of KPLZ, how you doing? And instantly they go, oh, what, what'd I win? You know, they think they won something. And we would sell them the PSAs, but you have to read them a sample of the PSA. For example, keeping kids away from drinking and driving, or encouraging parents to use a kid code so their child doesn't get abducted. And then good sound advice brought to you as a courtesy by Bob's Plumbing. Well, I'm on the phone with Bob, and Bob goes, yeah, that sounds great, we'll buy if you read. And I was— I'm the telemarketer, I'm, I'm going, oh, uh, hold please. And you know, I, I had to look around and get Can I read this? He wants me to read this. And so I got into the studio, I slapped the headphones on, read the script, heard it with the sound, soundbed, and went, I like this a lot. This is cool. So kind of stumbled into it.

So that's a different origin story than one of our guests, recent guests. Connor Quinn is an OG voice actor, but he actually started in acting as a child. And then morphed into voice acting, which it's interesting you use the term voiceover versus voice acting. Would you make a distinction in that?

No, they're totally interchangeable. Voice actor, voiceover artist, voice, voiceover, you hear it all the time and it just, it's completely interchangeable.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. He told an interesting story, his coach, and I don't know how old Connor is, but he's at least as old as I am. He was— his, his coach out in California was the guy that did the voiceover for Hanna-Barbera for like Yogi the Bear and some of those people. And, you know, he remembers distinctly him telling him, like, specifically Yogi the Bear, like this character is, is real to him. He knows why he wears a tie, why he wears that hat, you know, all of the background psychology that goes into that character that you don't know because it's never spoken about. Right. But like, that's how he, he's developed the character to do the voice. And like, it's not about the— your voice or the voice. It's about the character.

Right. Well, as a voice actor/voiceover artist, if you please, I, I, my bread and butter predominantly comes from e-learning and from corporate. Like, for example, I'm the voice of UnitedHealthcare right now. So all the commercials that you see, radio, TV, web, with a smattering of some other voices that they've had, that's been me and it's been super lucrative. You talk about a profitable creative. That's another one that I stumbled into and it's really provided a huge bounty of income. Very lucrative, uh, but for AI, the economy, lowballing clients, underbidding colleagues eroding at that bottom line. But it's been super, super fun. Now that's not acting per se. I'm bringing a script to life, reading it normally. So it's a, it's a measure of acting. But then you switch to audiobooks or you switch to character and video games. Much more acting is involved in that. But one of the best things I ever learned as a voice actor is what you have to sound absolutely natural. It sounds— needs to sound very conversational. You can't sound— you can't read and sound like you're reading is the issue there. And many people fail at that.

I think that just reminds me, I was rewatching the Seinfeld episode where they did the show Jerry, where they wrote the pilot to produce a movie. A show about— which is essentially the same show. And they were inter— they were, they were, uh, interviewing or casting characters. And, uh, Kramer comes in to interview for his own piece, and he, he reads the script completely unnatural for him. Like, it was like he was trying to act And, and the, the whole thing was so funny because the guy that actually took his spot was acting just like Kramer. But, but when Kramer auditioned, he didn't act like Kramer. He, he started acting like somebody else. It was, it was wild. But I don't know, that just triggered that story. Um, okay, so the, the purpose of this show, um, is to talk about how you make money doing that. So what has, what has that journey been like?

Well, for voiceovers, um, it's very much driven on a, uh, on a, you know, rise and fall on my own merits. I mean, authoring is as well, but voiceovers, it requires a constant, uh, dedication and discipline in auditioning. Uh, you can't reel in a job if you're not actually casting out your voice. So auditions, man, there was a, there was a time where I was doing roughly, um, 50 auditions a day, so, or 40 to 50. So that's 200 to 250 auditions a week. And you don't get tired. You just, you know, you fire out a batch of them here, a batch of them there. There's 8 hours in the day that you can easily get up to that number. Um, but it does require discipline and it's weeding out the ones that aren't paying fair market rates. Uh, they can go to Fiverr for stuff like that. Mm-hmm. This is part of the problem where you have, you know, a fair market rate of say $3,200 for a single national TV spot for for a year. Mm-hmm. And then you got somebody on Fiverr going, oh, I'll do it for $300. And it behooves us to toe the line for the market rate, uh, so that we're all, uh, eligible for that. You've got the guys that are undercutting that on Fiverr and other sites that just harms that bottom line. So, but you have to keep auditioning. You have to stick to the market rates and know what pays what. And not kind of sell out, as it were, not to be mean. Authoring's different. It's basically just, it's writing stories. It takes a lot longer to do, but it's, I love the phrase out of In the Line of Fire with John Malkovich and, oh my gosh, the '95 clip.

Can you say that as John Malkovich would say it?

I can't do character. I don't do characters very well. I can do a few accents. But, um, gosh, I would love to speak like John Malkovich. It's so, um, stuttered and pronounced, and it's— he's got a beautiful speaking voice. And Clint Eastwood, you know, you just have to go like this and drop your eyebrows. Um, that's more Jon Hamm though. Um, but that, that, that phrase that he says when he is about ready to— he's drawing ever nearer to the president, he's going to assassinate him— and he says to a group of businessmen around him that we look at the next quarter's, uh, fiscal quarter, the Japanese look at the next quarter century. So, with authoring, that's the long game. You're playing the long game of establishing legacy and good books that will eventually just, you know, develop a tidal wave following, go viral, as it were, and provide, you know, for your family in the long run. Those dividends aren't really paying right now. Some of them are. Um, but it takes a lot more effort to sustain it.

So I want, I want to go back to the, the voice acting and you said, you know, uh, keeping up the market rate. So let me ask a question. If, if I wanted to go get Matthew McConaughey to do my voiceover, I'm assuming he's going to get more than $3,200.

Yeah, not necessarily. If it's paying a union rate, they're going to pay him the same as they would pay me, a union voice actor.

Okay, so it is a union, uh, union, uh, structure. But is that okay? So then usually then you're being hired by an agency, correct?

Um, and it's— that's usually always the case. You do go through an agent for union rates. There are marketplaces, uh, aplenty online like Voices.com, Voice123, VO Planet, Badalgo. These are sites that you can sign up by paying a yearly membership get access to a horde of auditions, but the overwhelming majority of those don't pay fair market rates. It's good to pad the pockets. They're good for, you know, you can make a real decent income through them, but the overwhelming majority of them do not pay fair market rates. It's more of a one-off non-union usage.

Interesting. I guess I didn't know there was a union there in the voice actor space. But that actually makes sense since, you know, everybody else in the creative space from writers to actors, you know, they all have unions. I am curious. This is more a perspective from your standpoint. Do you see the influence of unions in the creative space waxing, waning? What, what do you, what do you see?

No, I actually see it rising. And the reason for that is primarily AI. Uh, we, uh, and infringement issues are abounding. So AI, when it kind of burst onto the scene in, in whole in 2023, the spring of 2023, uh, that's when I was making an exodus from a very toxic online voiceover community and saw me returning to, uh, other creative pursuits like music, like authoring. I'm still very involved in voiceovers and, and, you know, it still pays our bottom line. But I just went to Fan Expo in Portland in February, met the Hobbits. All 4 of the Hobbit actors were there. Sean Astin is the president of the SAG-AFTRA union. And so I watch his videos. He's very active in, uh, in promoting legislation and trying to keep the— those fair market rates solid and, and having encouraging people to toe the line. It's not always going to be the case because the non-union side eats away at the union side, and it's way easier to get into the non-union side than the union side. You have to pay to be in the union. You have to, you have to, you know, get an agent in order to be, to get those union jobs usually. So it's a competition between, between everybody. I think that it is eroding that confidence in the SAG-AFTRA union. But the fact that you have AI really harming rates, really seeing a lot of infringement and deepfakes and all that stuff, that's just making the union rise up and say, we've got to toe the line and help everybody here.

So it is this— it is the Screen Actors Guild is the union you're—

you belong to? Yeah, SAG-AFTRA, they're merged.

Okay, okay. Well, you know, that kind of prompts a thought. I— and you're going to say, where the hell did this come from? I honestly think we should bring back guilds as a manner of education and qualification in the sense that there's a dearth of authenticity in the marketplace across all different segments. But like, I take my industry, accounting, and I see some people out there that are promoting tax advice on TikTok or LinkedIn or whatever. And some of them are making good money, you know, selling webinars and programs about like how to pay no tax and this kind of thing. And we've snuck into a couple of the webinars to kind of like hear what they're saying because we're just curious. And, uh, we left with like, these people are going to end up indicted. Like, yeah, it's, it's flat out fraud, right? Um, but there's, there's nothing to keep people from buying or following their advice, right? And, uh, you know, obviously we have a a rigorous, um, profession with the AICPA, uh, you know, state licensing, all of those things. But for most, most of what we do, uh, except in a very few states— like California is one of them— um, there's no regulation either at the federal or state level. Um, and so like there's nothing to keep somebody from— it's truly, you know, buyer beware. Like, yeah, you have to have a license in Oklahoma where I live to cut hair or do nails. You do not have to have a license to prepare someone else's taxes for money. And there's no federal requirement, right? And so, you know, free market, yeah, sure, fine. But, you know, there's, there's I don't know. I think going back to a guild structure where, like, if, you know, you have to earn your way into the guild, you have to be selected and vetted. Yeah, vetted. And, you know, it's also the way the knowledge is passed down. You know, I think about somewhere along the line in the last 50, 60 years, education became a profession. As opposed to the people that knew the subjects were the ones that taught. Like, I remember my math teacher was this, this, uh, crazy Persian woman, uh, that she, she was brilliant at math, and, and I could sometimes understand her, sometimes I couldn't, but she was passionate about it, and I loved math because she taught it and, and she knew it and she could teach it in a way that I could understand it, as opposed to somebody that is a, quote, professional educator. And so, like, I know how to educate, but I don't necessarily deeply resonate and deeply understand the subject that I'm teaching.

Yeah.

Right. And so going back to a guild structure where, you know, maybe we go through education through 8th grade like they used to, and then after that, you kind of pick your own path. And if you want to go into a vocation or or some profession, then you, you go to somebody that knows it and they teach it. I don't know, I'm just kind of ranting.

Um, no, I think it's a great thought. I'm a very active member of the Authors Guild. I, I value it. I value the membership and the collective. Um, it's, it's certainly not a herd mentality. It's a lot of people who are doing what I'm doing, and I'm doing what they're doing, and we're finding new ways to, uh, to perfect our craft and to, uh, learn, you know, the best ways to do it. So yeah, there's influencers out there, which is a wild west of unregulated community of people just saying this. And because you like them, you like the way they look, the way they sound, what they're saying. It's kind of like— there's a scripture in 1 Timothy, I believe, it says in the later days people will gather around them people who say what their itching ears want to hear. That's what TikTok is. And we just, you know, we like them, so we'll listen to them over the viable, vetted advice over here. You pair that with AI. And you've also got a wild west of unregulated usage over here. So, you've got influencers like people with SeeDance creating AI versions of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt up on a rooftop having a fight that neither one of them consented to, neither one of them are in, and looks 100% believable. And you've got, you've got the dumbing down of society happening right there. And you've got intellectual property being violated, copyright being violated, no consent. It's just, there's so much wrong with the online dissemination of information and entertainment right now.

Do you see some backlash to that? I mean, because what I see is this nascent movement to go offline, like to be more in person and really the whole— you said you'd gone to a convention. Maybe that ties into that. Like, I just see people like opting out of the algorithm, just for a term to use. What do you see?

I do see backlash, but I think that legislation just takes way too long to catch up to the detrimental effect of unregulated technology or unregulated people. And, uh, the backlash that I'm seeing is just— is more reactive than anything. It's lawsuits from, uh, the original rights holders against Seedance. There's another case, I forget what it was. It was, um, Scarlett Johansson was in a movie called Her, and she's an AI voice, and they then— the producers or somebody took her voice and made an AI, uh, like trained it, you know, with an LLM model, whatever, and made an AI persona that she objected to initially, they did it anyway. And so she sued them, and I believe that's been settled or taken care of. Uh, as a voice actor, one of the very first things that we ever saw on this plane was a colleague named Bev had done work for the Chinese Institute of Acoustics. I think she had a contract in place, but what the Chinese Institute of Acoustics did was then sell those recordings to TikTok. So unbeknownst to Bev and without her consent, so colleagues were— who are on TikTok are watching these reels and going, hey Bev, I just heard this, here's this link, is this you? This sounds so much like you, it's uncanny. And she's going, oh my gosh, that is me. And so she sued TikTok and they settled out of court. I think that's the only backlash that you're going to see is in the courts, right? Right now. Um, but I think that you just have on a, you know, it as an author, it hurts to see authors pitted against authors saying, you wrote this with AI. No, I didn't. Yes, I did. You know, yes, you did. And I didn't write it with AI. They didn't write it with AI, but there's, everybody is suspect right now cuz no one knows what to believe.

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Trust deficit. And I think what you're saying is that there's a large swath of the population that doesn't care. Like, yeah, I don't, I don't care that it's not the original. I find this entertaining or, or useful. How do you, as, as an author and an actor, protect your IP? How do you, how do you do that?

Well, there's not much that you can do. Um, boy, it's, that's a really good question because on a frightening level, I've done so much voiceover work, uh, particularly of a non-union nature. So it's, it's out there wherever it is out there, and it could easily be harvested and fed into an LLM model and by scammers who will then call my elderly parents and say, hey, it's Aaron. I'm in Bangladesh. I've been stranded here. I didn't want to tell you, but I had to take a trip and I need money. And they're going to send me money. And I— that just frightens me to my core. Um, as an author, all we can do is literally register our works with the Library of Congress and get a copyright number on it. Uh, poor man's copyright doesn't do anything. You need a leg to stand on in court and actually, you know, gain any punitive damages with a copyright number. So every one of my works is registered copyright. That's how I do that. But for voiceovers, the only real protections that you have It's largely a trust system, and if you have the umbrella covering of, uh, of my agent, uh, and the SAG-AFTRA union, then they would go after them, uh, if something like this happened. But it's, it's just so— they've all been really kind of done on trust where you have them sign a contract. I do have every one of my clients sign a contract that enforces usage compliance.. And if I find that they have violated that contract, then I can— then I've got legal grounds to take them to court. But it's— it's just when you— when you're dealing with intangible digital assets like this, it's so easy for violation to occur.

Yeah. And then when you start dealing with multinational actors, you know, that are not actors as in professional actors, but like bad actors, it's, it's, it's real hard to enforce, right? Like, if you, you know, how do you— all you can do is like get it off the platform of YouTube or TikTok or whatever, but like that doesn't keep it consistent, right? But yeah, um, okay, I'm gonna pivot. So back, back to your, your, your journey as an author and a voiceover actor. What, what were some of the money challenges that you had?

Well, I mean, let's go back to the very beginning, though, actually, because I started in 2007 entering self-employment, and that required not a considerable amount of startup. I needed a good computer, right?

Right.

And I was plagued from the get-go, as I was with my recent PC I was mentioning to you, with just a headache of a babble of problems with memory and the CPU and, you know, the drives, whatever. So I kept swapping things out, and I was ready to just give up. I remember sitting on the toilet— that sounds wrong, I was clothed— but I was sitting on the toilet, and my face was— 2 o'clock in the morning, face buried into a pillow, and I was bawling. I could feel self-employment in my teeth. It was right there. I wanted it so bad, but this darn computer kept you know, kept holding things up and causing problems. Um, I, I really needed to invest into something, uh, again, more memory. More memory? I just bought memory. Okay, more memory. And what that did though, early on, is it taught me a great lesson that there's a huge difference between expense and investment. There's a huge difference. And I've, I've preached that as a voiceover business coach, and I've preached that to fellow authors I have spent a fortune on advertising and promotion of books because there's 7,500 books published every single day on Kindle Direct Amazon. 7,500. To stand out in the crowd, you have to promote. You have to drive traffic to your books. You have to pay for ads and try this. And none— an expense would be, oh, all right, if I have to. An investment though is like, no, this is so worth it. I want to drive traffic to my books. All it takes is one influencer to find that book and go, I love this. Everyone needs to get this. Um, but those hangups can slow you down and can trip you up if you're looking at them only as an expense.

I love, I love that distinction. I, I think about like Red Rising that we talked about. When I went back and looked, I think he wrote that original book in 2015, 2017, and I'm just now discovering it in 2025. You know, that, that, that shows that there is a cumulative long-game effect to a lot of this stuff. And it's something that I talk about in my book, Profit First for Creatives. You know, The creator has a tendency, maybe not all of them, maybe not you, but there's oftentimes a shiny object syndrome and there's a new technology, there's a new toy, you know, a camera, whatever. And, you know, you want the latest and greatest. But I talk about in the book about having a clear path of knowing when you spend this money, how is it going to make you money? And I, and I think that's what you're talking about, an investment, right? Like, it's not just an expense. To me, would be something that is table stakes, like, you know, internet access, or, you know, some kind of software subscription that you just have to have to be in business, right? Right. But then beyond that, having a clear idea of if I spend this money, how? Quantify. Like, how, how is this going to make me money? And having that mindset, it's not, it's not necessarily about the calculation, right? Or whether the calculation is right, accurate. It's, it's, it's more the mindset of I'm in business and therefore if I spend money, it has to have a purpose.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was a wedding videographer. Blech. Never again. But I did that for several years. I won several awards. I was good at it. I enjoyed it. And coincidentally, every single major vocation in my life, you know, excluding Paperboy, of course, has been about storytelling. It's been about leaving a legacy. So, wedding videographer, you're storytelling, you're capturing their legacy. I'm on dual storyteller tracks as a voice actor telling someone else's story and an author telling my own, and I love that. But, you know, 4K, here it comes. I'm filming HD and my technology looks wonderful. The resulting footage looks wonderful, but some client comes to my site, "Do you film in 4D?" "No, we actually have the, you know, Panasonic XH-A1 or whatever it is, and that's still limited to HD." "Okay, thanks anyway." And so the investment was— oh, I've got an even better one than that. The investment was getting a 4K camera, and then I start getting clients who want 4K. Even better, such a minimal investment for something like Voices.com, a voiceover marketplace. It's $399 a year. I'm grandfathered in. It's higher than that now, but I have made— I think in my first year on Voices.com, I made at least $50,000 on the jobs that I did. And that is a tremendously successful investment for an annual cost of $399. Now, did it require the time investment of auditions? Sure, absolutely. But it also bridged me, bridged that gap. Clients would leave Voices.com and then become a direct client of mine, and then, then, or they would, I would refer them to my agent, and then they would start paying union rates through the agent. So these are little bitty investments that proved very successful in my life.

Yeah. And I think that overarching thing is just a business mindset. Um, and knowing that your intent being in business is to make money, which some creators balk at, uh, they, they, they have this false paradigm in their brain that if, if I accept money for my creation, that that somehow sullies the creation.

Yeah.

Um, But, but I, you know, I just, I just came from a— I was speaking at Military Creator Con last week and listening to the panel discussion with the creator, Mara Long. That's a real name. It's not made up. Yeah. No, of, of just how you navigate that It is a real feeling that creators have that doing something explicitly for money and doing something, creating something just because you want to, those are two separate paradigms, if you will, right?

Yeah.

But being okay and really understanding that the power is combining those two, where you're doing something that resonates with you from a creative level, but you can also be compensated for it.

Yeah, you're absolutely right when you talk about the people who get emotionally hung up over— they feel it's— they're in some kind of moral quandary. I shouldn't be making a profit from this. And I don't— I disagree. So, here's where I would love— there's nothing more that I would love vocationally right now than to no longer be a voiceover artist who also writes books. I would love to be an author who also does voiceovers. I would love for that to be paying our mortgage. And therein lies the difference is one of those is paying our mortgage. Do I love what I do on both sides of that? Absolutely. I mean, is it like— excuse me. Is it exciting? Are both of them— am I passionate about both of them? Yes. Are they both creative pursuits? Absolutely. But I've got a family, I've got a wife and two little boys that I can't just sit here and enjoy voiceovers. Wouldn't it be cool if it also paid our mortgage? And it does. Wouldn't it be cool if it bought our cars? And it has. Wouldn't it be cool if it sent us on vacations? And it has. So I don't struggle with that. And I'm always surprised by people who do. It just seems weird.

Well, yeah, I don't— my daughter is a figurative oil painter, and she actually has an episode on the show 2 years ago where we discussed this. And like, I think, you know, what she said, and I believe this to be true, that ultimately creativity is of a divine nature. Like, yeah, that what— when, when you create something from inception out of yourself, that there you're connecting with something greater than yourself, right? Absolutely. That comes from someplace not necessarily within you. And, um, I, I think maybe the idea that, that being compensated for that somehow taints the, the divinity of it, maybe even. But, you know, I would also say that, you know, I believe that your, your vocation is your ministry, right? So, so like, I don't— I think the two are completely compatible if you let them be.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. And I do look at voiceover certainly as a ministry. I do look at authoring certainly as a ministry because Now, no one is going to, you know, really get particularly moved about an alien invasion up here and make a life-changing, you know, just make life choices based on that. But they may on You Are My Whole Earth, which is a book I wrote for my two boys. It's about being a daddy, not just being a father, but being a daddy and getting down on their level and letting them know how incredibly important they are. That's my biggest investment, by the way. By the way, is my two sons. Um, I just love, uh, I love the fact that I get to do what I love to do. They say find what you love to do, you'll never work a day in your life. I think it's absolutely true. And I get to come out here to this shop, which was an 880-square-foot concrete and framing shop that we had turned into two-thirds rec room, playroom, uh, one-third office and voiceover booth. And I get to make things. As a, as a person who serves, who will claim, um, uh, Christianity and serve the Creator, I love that I get to mirror that. I love that I get to create. It's the coolest thing to come out here and create and then just leave that storytelling legacy. So really satisfying.

When I wrote my book, I interviewed Todd Henry, um, author. I think his most successful book was The Accidental Creative. And he was talking about how the root word in Greek of passion is perikos, I think. I don't remember exactly, but he said in the Greek it means suffering. And his statement was, you know, we tell people to follow their passion, but if you're telling them to basically follow their suffering, that has a different resonance. But I think the thing about it is that it's something you're willing to suffer for. It's not necessarily that you would suffer or are going to suffer, but that's how deep it is in you. Because when you're sitting on the toilet with your face in a pillow, you didn't quit. And that's because it was passion driving you. If it weren't passion driving you, you would have said, I'm going to go find something else to do.

Right. Absolutely.

You said, you said felt it in your teeth. Like, I've not, I've not heard that. That's, that's, that's a pull quote right there.

I loved just the very notion of working for my own dream and the work, the notion of working for someone else's dream just no longer appealed to me. This is my dream of my own that nothing, nobody can take away from me. This is mine. I rise and fall on my own merits. I'm not dependent on anyone. I love— I was given this phrase, though, by a gentleman, one of my very, very first clients ever, when I was right in the middle of all of these, these, you know, technical kerfuffles and mishaps with my computer. I was telling him, I don't know how much longer I'll be able to serve you because I'm having all these problems and blah, blah, blah. And he said, just remember this, he said, and I believe this is a Confucius quote, I could be wrong. But he said, "The temptation to quit will always be greatest just before your greatest success." And I look back now on nearly 2 decades of self-employment. Is that right? 2007? Yeah. No one said they'd be math. Pretty close. I believe that's right. Close. Almost 2 decades of self-employment where I was this close to giving all of this up. If I could disable the screensaver, you'd see a beautiful voiceover studio behind me and and the shop and the house and everything. And I almost gave that up over 2 additional sticks of CPU memory or computer memory. It just blows me away in hindsight. Yeah.

Yes, I love that. So how do people find out more about you and how to get your books? What's the best way to do that?

Yeah, my favorite question, by the way. Thank you. They can go to authoraaronryan.com. Let me enunciate. It's not awfulaaronryan.com. It's authoraaronryan.com. On the whim, I actually purchased that domain as an investment to forward to authoraaronryan.com.

Um, now that I've thoroughly confused you, authoraaronryan.com, uh, or you can go to awful author, awful Aaron.

I, I didn't renew it cuz I was like, oh, that was, that was funny for a while. But I was like, I, I don't think I still have it. I have to check. Um, but yeah, authoraaronryan.com has all the links to the, the subsites for other books and book series and the socials. Or authoraaronryangroup.com will forward you to a private and exclusive Facebook page where I give author tips, videos, encouragement, discount codes, giveaways, news on my books that have been adapted for the screen and are being pitched to streaming networks. Right now I'm really excited about that. And so it's just, it's kind of a private community that you can go to. So, love it. Those are the two.

Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, hit the little envelope and shoot us a text and tell us what you want, and we'll get rid of Aaron. Until next time, ta-ta for now.