I like to remain positive about my career and all that comes with it.
But, let’s be realistic… sometimes you just gotta vent!
So we all know we have to be on those casting sites, mainly LA Casting and Actors Access and perhaps Backstage and Now Casting. This costs money. We all know we have to have a headshot and this, also, costs money. How about putting these wonderful expensive headshots onto your monthly/ annually paid for sites in order to get more work? Well, you guessed it, that costs money too.
Where does this money come from? I don’t know.
So I finally got my brand spanking new headshots, which I love and am going to ignore the pretty penny I had to pay for them with, and decided to give myself a clean slate on all the casting sites by taking down all my old non-professional pics to upload all my new awesome ones. However, having to enter in my credit card information a gazillion times totally zapped all the fun out of putting up my new pictures!
For LA Casting it costs $25 to upload any initial picture and then $15 for each additional picture (only if you do it all in the same session). So, I decided to narrow down my 5 new pics to 3 and yet that cost me a lovely $55. Moving on…
For Actors Access it costs $10 per picture, not as bad, but still adds up. So for the 4 pics I uploaded, that cost me $40.
That’s $95 just to put a couple pictures up!!! Not to mention the $10/mo for LA Casting and the $65 (?) a year for AA. I don’t even remember anymore. Plus the cost of those headshots in the first place, and the makeup artists, and the retouching, and the formatting and the printing. I’m scared of the grand total.
BUT, it’s okay. This is my investment in my career. These are the steps we need to take, just like for any career. If I wanted to be a doctor I’d be thousands and thousands of dollars in debt just for med school. These are the dues we pay, but to have the career we want to have (not should have) is priceless. =)
Make sure you are getting the ROI. I just made a comment on your organization blog posting about PerformerTrack. Really there’s no smarter way to see the money going out vs. the money coming in. And remember no matter what people tell you you “have to do or be on” it’s up to you to decide what works for you. I no longer list on vo casting sites because I have clients, I network, I think outside of what everyone else is doing. Oh and my team works with me too.