Tour customers and businesses will often ask of a storyteller “Hey I really enjoyed your tour - how much would you charge to produce a tour like it to suit my purposes?”.  VoiceMap publishers can and should take advantage of the set of skills they have developed in making their own tours to provide their production services as a fee for service. The unique local relationships and knowledge that you possess can lead to profitable production deals. 

All-inclusive production for a typical tour including everything from script writing to testing typically is in the range of $4,000 to $10,000 US dollars depending on complexity, and VoiceMap has produced packages of tours with individual contracts totaling over $50,000. The fees you charge will be up to you and informed by our past experience. You will generally keep the lion’s share of production contracts, and VoiceMap will keep any annual hosting fees along with the fees for services you ask us to be responsible for (usually audio and script editing and occasionally voice-over services). 

You don’t need to wait for someone to ask for your services either - VoiceMap will be happy to support you with additional materials, education on our platform, and sales advice to proactively make proposals to organisations for tour production. We can also provide assistance with any technical pieces that you do not want to handle yourself, for example sound mastering and effects design or professional translation and voice-over work in any languages you need. Once the tour is published, we continue providing hosting and distribution services and customer support for listeners, as with all our tours.

When the tour is offered for free – for example, as part of a museum entry ticket or a destination marketing campaign – or distributed privately – for example, a hotel that offers the tour as part of their welcome package or a bus tour operator that uses the tour solely on their routes – we do require the organisation to pay an annual licensing fee.

Who commissions tours?

A wide range of organisations commission VoiceMap tours:

• Tourism boards and destination marketing organisations use self-guided audio tours to promote their region
• Museums, galleries, and cultural institutions to add for visitor experiences
• Hotels and hospitality groups to offer guests a local experience
• Property developers to showcase neighbourhoods
• Event organisers for festivals, conferences, or special events
• Educational institutions for campus tours or educational content
• Local governments for heritage and cultural preservation projects

How to get started

1. Enable "Get Hired" on your profile. This adds a "Commission this Publisher" button to your VoiceMap profile, making it easy for organisations to reach out to you directly.
2. Build a portfolio. Your published tours serve as your portfolio. The more tours you have, and the better their ratings, the more likely organisations are to commission you.
3. Network locally. Reach out to tourism boards, hotels, and cultural organisations in your area. Many of them don't know that self-guided audio tours are an option.

To inquire about the potential to act as a VoiceMap producer, please email [email protected].  We’ll send you quotation sheet templates along with fee structures we have used in the past, and look forward to discussing your ideas.