How to Be Your Own Booking Agent

It may seem daunting to be your own booking agent, but for anyone with a freelance career in the arts, it truly puts you in charge of your artistic and financial destiny. In this article, we'll discuss how to find your niche, or target, audience, putting together an electronic press kit and talk about making calls and following up with potential venues.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Computer, Phone, Internet Access.

Finding Your Audience.

1. Finding the right audience for your particular brand of music may seem like a tough task, but a good place to start is to think about venues you would enjoy playing at. Go to places you already go to in order to check out live music and volume/atmosphere-wise places you think would be a good fit for your music.

2. Make a list of venues you would like to contact as you search.

3. As you make your list, open up a blank Word Document or Excel spreadsheet on your computer and enter venue names, addresses, phone numbers and email contact information. This information can be found on almost all venues websites. If you have trouble finding contact information, don't hesitate to call and ask for information about who does the booking for the venue, then add that information to your list.

Making Your Electronic Press Kit

4. Next, you'll want to put together an electronic press kit. This can be as easy as putting together a professional-looking myspace.com music page or putting together a free website or a blog site such as Wordpress.com.

5. Myspace.com may be the simpler, cheaper option for most musicians due to the free mp3 hosting, as well as the site already having a calendar feature for you to post upcoming gigs. Using myspace.com is great due to its cut-and-paste, step-by-step template process of entering band information, uploading photos and uploading mp3s.

6. Regardless of what you choose to do, every electronic press kit needs the following information: a short biography about your band with a short informational biography about each member (this can be as short as a sentence), the type of music you play, venues you've played, your best mp3 samples and photos.

Contacting Venues

7. Once your electronic press kit is ready to go, it's now time to start calling venues. Depending on what kind of time you have, you may have to slot out some time in your day to make these calls, but it will be worth it in the end once you start procuring gigs.

8. Most venue managers are there in the early to late afternoon, and calling before the evening rush (6 p.m. or so) is usually best. When you call, introduce yourself and ask to speak to the person that does the booking at that particular venue. If they aren't in, ask for phone and email contact information and when a good time to reach them might be.

9. Once you have email address information, go ahead and send them a short query letter about booking your group with a link to your electronic press kit. Ask them to get back to you about a good time to speak on the phone or meeting in person regarding booking.

Following up with Venues

10. It's a good idea to wait a few days after sending an email query, and then follow up by email or phone or both.

11. Remember to contact various venues, using the same process so your "eggs," so to speak, are not all in one venue's basket.

12. Once you get in at one venue, doing the best job you can, being on time, etc. will have you booking more gigs in no time.