Robert is, as usual, right on target here, Eric.
Interestingly, I declined to submit for a somewhat similar lead today on Bodalgo.
So responding to your questions, Eric:
1. It's never a bad idea to check behind every conceivable door/lead for work, regardless of whether you're an aspiring v/o dude/dudette or a potential puppeteer looking for gigs doing matinee shows for the pre-k crowd. Read through every lead you might possibly be able to audition for, but at the same time being very honest about what you
SHOULD be submitting for, based on your capabilities and the clients' expectations, budgets, etc. Better to
NOT submit for some jobs than to submit something that you're wildly unqualified to do and begin to develop a reputation for delivering guano to the client.
2. See above
3.
The budget???? ah oh ho ho ho ho ho hah ha aha ha ahah ha!!!
Oh my Gawd. Robert took one approach to estimating the costs, but I'll have to beg to differ that coming up with a price that is close to $1/word is a bit excessive. Another route is a pure per-word fee. You could go with, say, .40/word which comes to about $3200. 8000 words also simply spoken in script form comes out to roughly 50 minutes of talking. However, you and RJ are both correct in that you have to realistically add in time for recording, corrections, editing, file-saving, looking up words, etc. So realistically figuring at least 3 minutes per word we're now up to 150 minutes, or 2.5 hours at least of billable time. My e-learning fees are $800 per finished running hour of audio. This means for each actual one hour of usuable audio I deliver to the client, after re-dos, editing, etc, I charge $800. In this case you'd be looking at charging at least $2000 if you went that route.
But we're splitting redwoods here. The point is: run, don't walk, as fast and furiously away from this acid-inducing, ulcer-infested lead as possible.