🎶 Notes from the Booth: Still Here — Learning How to Be Found Again

It was crazy quiet in the booth.

Scary quiet. No books in the queue. No client emails asking for availability. The kind of quiet that has weight to it — that oozes into corners and doesn’t leave.

I have been a voice actor for thirty+ years. I have narrated more than 350 audiobooks. I have voiced campaigns for Mercedes-Benz, recorded audioguides for the Getty and MoMA, lent my voice to the Bundestag. I built a career across two continents and two languages.

And somehow in the last few years, the work began to dry up.

I am not alone in this. Colleagues have gone quiet in different ways — some have left the industry entirely, some have filed for bankruptcy. The arrival of AI-generated synthetic voices has reshaped this work in ways that are still unfolding, and the mood among some voice actors and audiobook narrators is frightened, angry and more than a little baffled.

Real livelihoods have been disrupted.

Mine among them.

Many years ago, I was living in an "ex" squat in Kreuzberg, Berlin, when my voice got flown to New York and installed at MoMA.

Briefly, but still.

Someone I had recently met needed a translator for a commercial shoot they’d been hired to do with an American director. They knew I was bilingual. I got the job.

This someone had a roommate.

Their roommate was doing graphics on a project for urbaninform. Suddenly, they realized their graphics project needed a voice to flesh out the graphics. The roommate — doing wardrobe on the commercial shoot that I was translating for — told them I was a voice actor.

They reached out.

And suddenly there I was — installed in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, all while living between two former squats in Berlin that were ... still pretty much being squatted, TBH.

I have never forgotten what that taught me.

When people know I exist, work finds me.

That has always been true for me.

It was true in Kreuzberg. It was true in LA when I got a call from the Getty to voice the audioguide to their only permanent exhibition, The Garden. Someone had heard about me and told someone else and they reached out and, once again, there I was, in a studio recording a project for arguably one of the most visible buildings in the world.

So there came a moment, sitting at the microphone in my Studiobricks booth in western North Carolina, when I wondered — Does anyone know I’m here?

And perhaps even more importantly:

Do the people who need what I do know how to find me?

About five months ago, I realized that the things I was doing to make myself present in the world were not working particularly well anymore.

I had a website. I emailed clients I had painstakingly and lovingly curated over years of outreach. I was on social media.

But I wasn’t generating enough work.

So I started wondering how anyone finds anyone nowadays.

And that led me straight to the internet.

Search. SEO. And all the crazy surrounding the new shiny thing on the block, AI.

As someone who exists on Instagram, I had been fascinated by accounts talking about AI — how to use it, how to prompt it, how to make it do magical things — and it all sounded mystical and more than a little intimidating.

Like you had to get it exactly right or something would blow up in your face or my laptop would slap me upside the head.

SEO wasn't much better.

Some years earlier, when I first began wondering about it, I lost fifteen hundred dollars to a scammy SEO firm during the pandemic. They sent me useless PDFs, ignored my questions, didn't refund my money and all the things happened that are a total bummer.

And because I lost money I didn't have, I filed the whole subject of search engine optimization under things other people do and understand and left it there.

But the wondering kept coming back.

My website existed. It was professional. It was pretty.

But was it working for me?

Was it actually doing anything other than sitting there in a sea of a gerbillion other websites — lost and lonely?

Why wasn't it generating new clients?

So I wrote a prompt.

My first one.

Something like: Acting as an SEO expert, analyze my website, christalewis.com, and give me a health score.

And the AI looked at my little five-page website and began to say vague thingy-things.

Things I did not understand.

It took asking the same question — variations of it, over and over, across several AI systems — before one of them finally stopped circling and essentially said:

You are never, ever EVER going to be found like this.

And then it gave me a to-do list.

I learned that my website needed to make sense not only to the people who landed on it, but to the systems running in the background that help those people get to the things they are looking for.

I learned words like schema and topical authority and entity verification.

I learned that simply writing I am an audiobook narrator on my own website doesn't necessarily make that fact matter or be true or in any way that is meaningful to a search engine or an AI system.

Those systems look for connections, context and corroboration.

I was a little insulted.

I mean, I have been working at the microphone since 1995.

My voice literally went around the world - over 80 times.

I have narrated more than 350 audiobooks.

Mercedes-Benz. Getty. MoMA. The Berlin Bundestag. Awards.

What do you mean you don't know who I am?

But the machines don't know what they haven't been told and they won't believe it if I am the only one telling them.

So I began looking for ways to a) tell them and b) get them to trust me.

I rebuilt my website. I created pages that actually explained the work I do. I connected things that had previously existed in isolation. I added structured information so that machines could understand what a human being looking at the site might grasp immediately.

And when AudioFile Magazine — which had reviewed my work for years — sold to Kirkus and its old reviews briefly disappeared into a mess of redirects, I put those reviews on my own website too.

The five-page website grew in something much, much bigger.

Last week, I ran an AI visibility scan on the website.

For certain searches, my name was appearing in comparison conversations alongside Julia Whelan, Scott Brick, Ray Porter and Bahni Turpin.

These are not merely well-known narrators. They are some of the biggest names.

I am not saying I am those people.

I haven't earned what they have earned, in the ways they have earned it. Their visibility is theirs, built over decades of extraordinary work that the industry has recognized accordingly.

What mattered to me was that I was there at all.

Somewhere in the enormous machinery through which people now search and ask and look for voices, I had become findable.

Not because I suddenly became more qualified.

I was the same narrator before I rebuilt the website.

The same voice, technique and talent.

What had changed was that I had learned how to make the work I had already done legible in the places where people today go looking for it.

And yes, the irony is not lost on me.

A technology that has helped upend the industry in which I make my living became one of the tools I used to figure out how to become visible within it.

I am not making an argument for or against AI.

I don't think this story resolves anything that easily.

I am only saying that I was sitting in a very quiet booth and had to decide what to do about the quiet and keep the lights on.

And somewhere along the way, I remembered something I had learned a long time ago in Kreuzberg.

Someone knew I was there.

Someone knew what I did.

And because they did, my voice ended up at the Museum of Modern Art.

Thirty years later, the infrastructure is different.

There are search engines and algorithms and crawlers and AI systems sitting between the person looking for something and the person who might be exactly what they are looking for.

So it is still true: that before anyone can choose me as their voice, they have to know I'm here.

I just had to learn how to be found again.

This article is original work by Christa Lewis, developed and refined with the assistance of AI tools.