Blog

Posted on

Top ten ways to sell your Edinburgh Festival Fringe show on Twitter

Author Mark Fisher

AS THOSE who follow me @markffisher will confirm, I’ve been using Twitter relentlessly since the start of the year as a way of promoting The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide. I’ve been doing this for a number of reasons:

  • I have something to sell and Twitter is a way to communicate with would-be buyers.
  • A hell of a lot has been said about social media marketing (usually by new-media “gurus”) and this was an opportunity to put it to the test, separate fact from fiction and see if the self-appointed experts were blinding us with science.
  • Having written a book that gives advice to Edinburgh Festival Fringe participants, I feel the least I can do is put some of that advice into practice. If I’m telling you to get on Twitter and Facebook, I better get on it too

So what have I learnt? Here are my top ten observations based on my own use of Twitter and on what I’ve seen of other people’s use of it.

  1. The potential is astonishing. It’s easy to forget Twitter did not exist before 2006 nor Facebook before 2004. Until very recently, if you had wanted a respected figure to endorse your show, you would have had to go to considerable effort to contact that figure, let alone persuade them of your worth. Having done that, you would have had to go to the expense of producing vast numbers of flyers. If we’re talking about a figure such as Stephen Fry, you’d have to print 4 million flyers to reach the same number of followers – and even then, you would have no certainty the right people would see them. Compare that with Twitter: you send a tweet to the respected figure; if you’re lucky, the respected figure retweets it; straight away, many thousands of interested people will see it. A process that would have taken weeks can now happen in a couple of minutes – and at no cost. This is in addition to your regular followers who, by choosing to follow you, have already identified themselves as potential audience members.
  2. People are smart. They know if they’re being sold to. They know if they’re being hoodwinked. If you use Twitter purely as an advertising medium, they will see through you.
  3. People want to read something interesting. I am at an advantage withThe Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide, because it is packed with quotations from experts on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. If I send a tweet saying “‘If you’ve got a 2-star review, get a 3-star review next time,’ @StephensSimon in Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide http://t.co/a859PjMO,” it is unquestionably a plug for the book, but it is also pretty interesting – at least to my target market who recognise Simon Stephens as a leading playwright and a voice to be reckoned with. @lyngardner, the Guardian theatre critic, retweeted that one to 14,000 followers. That’s 14,000 more people who know about the book. But this brings us to the next thing:
  4. Know your market. It may give your ego a boost if someone with lots of followers retweets you, but if those followers are unlikely to be interested in your show, you aren’t going to achieve very much. Think about your show, think about what’s interesting about it, think about who it will interest and target them. In his recently published e-book How to Produce, Perform and Write an Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Show, comedian Ian Fox says he noticed his 2006 show The Butterfly Effect attracted a crowd who were interested in chaos theory as well as the usual comedy punters. The theme of your show could attract a new audience for you and Twitter can help you find them.
  5. Save a set of relevant Twitter searches. Work out the phrases your potential audience will be using, search for them on Twitter and select the option to “save search” each time. You can then check the results every day or so. The people who are interested in the same things as you could be the audience you are looking for.
  6. Go for the soft sell not the hard sell. What you’re trying to do is build up a community of interested people around your show. They won’t stay interested if they see only adverts. They will stay interested if you continue to give them interesting things to read or look at. By associating yourself with a shared interest, you will build and sustain interest in your show. It won’t happen over night; you have to think long-term.
  7. Back Twitter up with blogs, videos and other updates. When I post this blog, I will send a tweet about it. It is quite possibly the very tweet that led you here. You were interested in the topic I mentioned in the tweet and you thought you’d check it out. Sorry to get postmodern on you, but in the process of finding out about social-media marketing for an Edinburgh Fringe show, you have learnt there is a book called The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guideand maybe it’s the kind of book you’d like to read. Spend some time figuring out the equivalent for your show and produce blogs, videos and other updates on subjects that will interest your audience. Don’t be cynical about it. Although I’m winding you up with all this self-referential stuff, I’m genuine in my interest in the subject.
  8. Use all the media available to you. Some of your potential audience will use Twitter, some Facebook, some Tumblr. Try to be there for them in every case. I confess, I have limited presence on Google + and Linkedin and no presence on Tumblr; my kids told me it wasn’t my kind of thing – were they right?
  9. Don’t forget old media. At times, I have felt a little embarrassed at the amount of messages I’ve been sending out. For a while, the first thing people would say to me when I bumped into them was, “I see you’ve been busy with your social-media marketing.” It was hard to know whether to be pleased the message had got through or ashamed for being so blatant about it. But frequently, the next person I bumped into would say, “Oh, have you written a book?” However much noise you think you’re making on the internet, there will be many, many people who will not hear it. Either they’re not in your social-media circle or they’re not big computer users. You cannot afford to lose these people. For them, you need all the traditional and Fringe-specific marketing methods I describe in the chapter called The Marketing Campaign.
  10. Don’t rest on your laurels. Having built a community of people around your show, you need to keep them interested. Not only are they your potential audience, but they are also your potential advocates. Their word of mouth and endorsement will be invaluable. Keep them on side and don’t neglect them.

These are some initial thoughts, reached by trial and error and still open to refinement. If you’re anything like me, you won’t always get it right, but sometimes you’ll strike a chord and, when that happens, you should learn from it and try to strike that chord again.

No doubt you’ll have ideas of your own. Please add your comments below.

Posted on

Edinburgh festivals boost and World Fringe Congress

JUST back from a press conference in which the Scottish Government and other public funders announced enhanced support for Edinburgh’s year-round festivals, including the Edinburgh Fringe. Part of the package is a plan for a conference that should give Fringe participants increased access to international bookers. 

Collectively, the Scottish Government, the City of Edinburgh Council, EventScotland and Creative Scotland are funding the city’s 12 festivals to the tune of £3.2m in 2012. Of particular significance to Scotland’s theatre and dance companies is the Scottish Government’s extended commitment to its expo fund. The total budget for this has gone up to £2.25m to be shared among the festivals and spent on projects such as the Made in Scotland programme on the Fringe.

As well as this, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society has been funded by Creative Scotland to host the inaugural World Fringe Congress, bringing together fringe organisers and directors from around the globe to exchange ideas, foster international collaborations and create lasting networks.

Taking place in August, the formal meeting aims to “inspire and inform the fringe community and build lasting ties”. Organisers hope that out of all the networking will come international collaborations and exchanges.

“There is currently no forum in existence where the co-ordinators of fringes from around the world can meet their counterparts to exchange experiences and ideas,” said a Fringe spokesman. “Although festival directors from around the world come to Edinburgh each year to book work for their own festivals, this will give Edinburgh Fringe participants increased access to these bookers.”

A more detailed breakdown of who is attending will be made available closer to the time. Meanwhile, check out The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guideand the chapter called The Next Step, which offers expert tips about how to network and maximise opportunities for your post-Fringe career.

Posted on

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: telling it like it is

THE only thing bigger than the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the internet, which top scientists estimate is now 7.6 times bigger than the universe. This means, despite doing loads of research for The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide, I have only now come across two blogs that would have fed into the book very nicely.

The first of these is In the Name of the Flesh, a record of Ernesto Sarezale’s time on the Fringe of 2010. Sarezale describes himself as “a Basque cognitive scientist, published poet, performer, stand-up and cabaret act, and video artist living in London” and performed his show, In the Name of the Flesh, at the Banshee Labyrinth on Niddry Street as part of the PBH Free Fringe.

If you dig back to his earliest posts, you’ll find standard publicity info about the show, but then from this post about the first performance, you start to get a flavour of what the whole wild experience is really like. This remark is typical:

It was nerve wracking to have to get the bar staff to assist me with the video connections. Especially when I left briefly for the toilet and found a queue of punters waiting outside to see my show!

From then on, mixed in with his comments on other shows that he’s been seeing – themselves revelatory about the eclectic mix the Fringe offers – he gives updates on the show’s progress and its variations from performance to performance: one post is even called “Every night is different“. 

Sarezaleis honest about lessons learned along the way, such as the realisation that it might have been better to list the show as theatre and not comedy in the Fringe Programme. Anyone thinking of appearing on the Fringe for the first time would do well to cast their eye over his“15 (or so) lessons learnt at the Edinburgh Fringe 2010” (he gets extra points for linking to an article I wrote). 

His post-Fringe comments are particularly good, being frank but not cynical, and giving a clear sense of the battering and the exhilaration you can get from a run in Edinburgh. Rather charmingly, in “Was it worth it?” he puts the lows in a tiny point size and the highs nice and big. 

Still in reflective mode, his very latest post, from just the other day, looks back on what he wanted from his Fringe run and what has happened to him since; as the penultimate chapter of my book suggests, the Fringe stays with you long after the final curtain.

Then last year, Sophie Caswell blogged about her experience bringingto Edinburgh a show calledI Know What You’re Thinking by her mind-reading partner Doug Segal. Her Fringe Trimmings blog starts with details of the earliest marketing campaign, then after a couple of updates, pauses for a few days because the pace, in her own words, is “f**king frantic“. 

As withSarezale’s blog, it’s the reflective posts that give much of the flavour, whether it’s “My top 10 Ed Fringe moments“, capturing the craziness of it all, or “Farewell Edinburgh, you sexy sexy beast” admitting how hard it is to say goodbye.

Then in “Come to Edinburgh where the streets are paved with opportunity“, she reveals how the show was spotted by a comedy promoter, leading to a return trip in 2012:

Edfringe is like playing SuperMario you have to leap over a lot of barrels to get to the boss fight at the end, by which time you’re exhausted – but if you win, you get to the next level…. and that next level has totally different challenges … and
comes under the category of ‘uber-exciting-scary and even harder work’.

Naturally, as every good social networker knows, this can only mean one thing: a new blog, this one called Further Up the Fringe. Watch that space.

I’m sure there are many similar blogs out there – do tell me if you know of any good ones. There’s also one promised by magician Ian Kendall who told me when I met him the other day that he had a 21-year track record on the Edinburgh Fringe and had never lost money. If he really “can’t get [his] bahookie in gear,”  as he said in a recent tweet, that’d be a great place to start.

Posted on

Should you join the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society?

Author Mark Fisher outside the Fringe Office

THERE was an interesting exchange of Twitter messages this week between me and comedians Elise Harris and Andrew J Lederer. The 140 characters of Twitter are not ideal for expressing the subtleties of a complex debate, so I hope Elise and Andrew will add their own comments at the end of this post – in the meantime, I’ll try and do justice to what they said, the approximate order in which they said it and what I was thinking at the time.

It started with this tweet from Elise:

Wondering whether it’s worth going in the main book with my Edinburgh show this year. Advice from anyone who’s done the Fringe without it?

By “book”, she was referring to the 280-page Fringe Programme, traditionally regarded as the bible for fringegoers and the index of everything that’s on in the world’s biggest arts festival. Eying my chance to gain a reader of  The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide(yes, dear reader, I’m that shameless), I replied:

@eliseharris All advice is not to go it alone unless you have a very particular reason. See my book: edinburghfringesurvivalguide.com #edfringe #edfest

To which Elise said:

@MarkFFisher well the book is expensive and no longer seems worth it at all. Doesn’t seem to bring people in, even.

And I said:

@eliseharris It’s your choice, but signing up for @edfringe gives you more than just programme entry. It’s discussed quite a lot in my book.

What I had in mind were two stories related in my book about performers who had gone ahead without being in the Fringe Programme. One told me he’d had a disastrous time and had returned for a second year determined to do things right; the other  managed to grasp victory from the jaws of defeat, but only with considerable professional support and a great show (and even he said he wouldn’t do it the same way again). My general feeling is you have competition enough without making yourself invisible by avoiding the Fringe Programme.

I was also thinking about what else you get for your payment to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society. The entry in the Fringe Programme is the most visible benefit – online as well as in print – but what you’re paying for is also a way to sell your tickets through a central box office as well as an extensive set of support services in areas such as press and marketing and post-Fringe planning.
Elise said:

@MarkFFisher if I had the spare funds I would but it’s looking increasingly tight and I won’t ever see that money again.

At this point, Andrew joined in with these three tweets:

@eliseharris @MarkFFisher Don’t know what it says in your book Mark, but I do know for many, the cost of “official” entry is a useless waste

@eliseharris @MarkFFisher The Fringe Society “extras” amount in a practical sense to nothing unless you are a neophyte.

@eliseharris @MarkFFisher Last note: U gotta be in SOME book & it’s gotta be one people use, either the main, the free or the big venue one.

My comment about this was:

@ajlondemand @eliseharris Andrew = old hand so take him seriously, but 2500 companies choose @edfringe programme so he’s in a minority

Being in a minority doesn’t mean he’s wrong, of course, but anyone contemplating going it alone would be sensible to consider the possibility that there is wisdom in this particular crowd. To this, Andrew replied:

@MarkFFisher @eliseharris @edfringe And many/most of those 2500 should be. I agree.

I added:

@eliseharris @ajlondemand Do you need reviewers, agents, promoters, judges and auds to see your show? If so, how will they know it’s on?

What I hadn’t realised at this point was that Elise is planning to perform in one of the free festivals. This does put a different perspective on things. For a start, if your show is free (and unticketed), you have no need of a box office. I’m guessing that’s what Elise means when says she “won’t ever see that money again” – she would be paying for a box office that would not pay her anything in return.

The question then is how valuable the Fringe Society’s other services are to her. There is no fixed answer to this question: it depends on what she wants to get out of her run on the Fringe. Only she can answer that.

But for a free show, it’s quite possible that the most effective use of funds is to do as Andrew suggests: make sure your show is listed in your venue’s programme and concentrate on flyering audiences on the street. Andrew said this:

@MarkFFisher @eliseharris She’s in the Free Fringe. Audiences come directly from the FF programme. & Flyering. A press release may get press

@MarkFFisher @eliseharris Likewise, a listing in the Society programme may not. Judges are irrelevant to most shows.

Equally, though, Elise herself then made the point that being in the Fringe Programme had the knock-on benefit of getting you included in, for example, newspaper listings:

@ajlondemand @MarkFFisher yes you need to be in a book of some sort. Though need to be in big book for most listings. Might have to think.

As for my point about all the various people – “reviewers, agents, promoters, judges” – who may be using the Fringe Programme in addition to regular audiences, she said:

@ajlondemand @MarkFFisher yes Free Fringe best for getting people in, and reviewers tend to be useless anyway. Official listings the problem

I’d be interested to know what she means by reviewers being useless – not because I am one (I know how useless I am), but because even in the past few days, I’ve been finding reviewers very useful as a way of promoting my book. Putting their nice comments on my website here strikes me as a very effective way of persuading people not only to buy the book but also to take me seriously in anything I might do in future. The value of reviews on the Fringe is partially to do with attracting audiences and partially, for those that want it, to do with raising your profile, persuading funders, getting gigs, or whatever, after the festival.

All of which brought us to a final volley of comments from Andrew (and one from Elise) which, I think, are worthy of further discussion:

@eliseharris @MarkFFisher Over time, as the Free becomes an ever larger component, the press will b forced to list its shows wout Fringe reg

@eliseharris @MarkFFisher In the short term, I’ve found that if you’re in a good free venue at a good time, you’ll get an audience.

@eliseharris @MarkFFisher And it helps if you have a good show. ‘Specially now, w/Twitter, etc, people spread word quickly if you do.

@ajlondemand @MarkFFisher though a bad venue at a bad time and nothing will help!

You know what? I think my comments to @eliseharris & @markffisher re @edfringe would be helpful to people. So, look. #edfringe

I’m interested to hear what other people have to say about this. One thing I would emphasise, however, is that Andrew’s perspective is likely to make most sense a) if you are performing in the PBH Free Fringe or the Laughing Horse Free Festival and b) if your only concern is getting audiences. The picture changes quite dramatically if you are performing anywhere else or if you have any additional reason for appearing on the Fringe, such as being spotted by an agent, getting post-Fringe gigs and other professional concerns.  The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guidegoes into this in much more detail.

Posted on

Miriam Attwood’s tips for surviving the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

MIRIAM Attwood, former media manager in the Fringe Office, gives her tips for a successful run on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Come to the Fringe for the right reasons: “They’re all completely different reasons, but they are the right reasons for them.”

Keep your marketing image consistent: “If you’re going to have council poster boards, it needs to be the same image and exactly the same theme as in the programme, so that people who flick through the programme and think it is interesting will see it again.”

Have faith in your ability to go it alone: “If from the moment you do your programme entry, you plan, you are meticulous about everything you do and bring in extra people to help, you can do it all yourself.”

Avoid hype: “Being honest in your marketing about what you’re doing is exactly the right approach.”

Get a plan and stick to it: “Be organised, do a good show, be prepared for exhaustion and heartbreak, think about what you want, be open about your aims, make sure your whole company is engaged, plan, read any bit of supporting information you can, talk to companies that have done the Fringe before and come and talk to the media team in the Fringe Office. The majority of people I speak to at the end of the festival who have made a plan and fulfilled it are happy.”

Don’t feel obliged to over-do it: “The view that a lot of Fringe comedians present on television is to do with crazy stories of wild nights out. But you know that 18 nights of their festival, they went home at midnight, having had a couple of drinks after the show and maybe they had two nights when they ended up in the Penny Black [a pub with very late licensing hours]. People come and work hard – and sandwich in some craziness within that.”

Support your fellow performers and get them to support you: “They feedback criticism and comments and they’ll say, ‘Do you realise you’ve got this amazing vision? Do you realise this show is about a massive news story at the moment and have you emailed The Scotsman arts diary?'”

Find more words of advice in The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide.

Posted on

Launch of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide

A celebrated author, yesterday

AND we’re off. A lovely launch yesterday at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (aka Venue 150) where we sneaked in after the Fringe Society roadshow to declare The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide well and truly open. 

I was struck not just by the physical manifestation of so many books laid out on the table – all real – but also the people in the room who, whether they were quoted in the book or not (and many of them were), were a cross-section of the Fringe community.

Among the crowd were Tomek Borkowy, director of the New Town Theatre; Laura Mackenzie Stuart of Creative Scotland; Judith Doherty and Debroah Crew of Grid Iron; Keith Bruce, arts editor of the Herald; Joyce McMillan, theatre critic on the Scotsman; Kath Mainland and her team from the Fringe Office; Claire Wood from Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group; Andrew Dixon, chief executive of Creative Scotland; Neil Cooper, theatre critic on the Herald; Thom Dibdin, theatre critic for the Stage; Trish McGuinness, arts publicist; Laura Cameron Lewis, producer and theatre-maker; Dani Rae, theatre producer; Mhari Hetherington, arts administrator; Dana MacLeod of the British Council; Shona Craven of onstagescotland.com; Malcolm Kennedy, in charge of public entertainment licensing at the City of Edinburgh Council; Sam Gough of the EICC; Trisha Emblem, former deputy administrator of the Fringe Society; Amy Taylor of TV Bomb and . . . well, you get the picture.

First, Anna Brewer, my editor from Methuen Drama, gave a very generous speech. She described how she’d come up with the idea of a book about how to do a show on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and sent her proposal to an unknown theatre critic (me) to comment on. One of her questions was about who should write the book, whether it should be a Fringe insider, a collection of specialists or a single author. This she remembered, was my reply: “As a freelance
journalist, I am biased. Not only do I think there should be a single author,
but I think it should be me.”

It did the trick.

In my speech, I described how my favourite section of the book was the index. This, I explained, was partly because, as the son of two librarians, I had a weird thing about alphabeticalisation. It was also because the juxtaposition of entries in the index summed up the endlessly fascinating, multifarious nature of the Fringe. 

To give an example, I asked the assembled group for a letter of the alphabet. Someone shouted out “P”. I began reading from the book:

  • Palace of Holyroodhouse – the Edinburgh residence of the queen
  • Palin, Michael – a sometime Fringe performer
  • Paradise is Closing Down – a play by Pieter-Dirk Uys which was the first ever show brought to Edinburgh by William Burdett-Coutts, artistic director of Assembly
  • Parks, Brian – the New York playwright whose work was brought to Edinburgh by John Clancy
  • Parsons, Nicholas – BBC entertainer and regular visitor to the city
  • Passion Flower – a cabaret show by jazz singer Becc Sanderson
  • PBH Free Fringe – Peter Buckley Hill’s innovative way of keeping costs down
  • Pearson, Debbie – co-director of the similarly innovative Forest Fringe 
  • Penelope – a play by Enda Walsh

The selection was chosen at random but, as I suspected, it gave a sense of the mix you find in every hour of the Edinburgh Fringe: highbrow and lowbrow, comic and serious, local and international, musical and dramatic, esoteric and mainstream, high-profile and underground.

My point, in a speech designed to thank people and say “it couldn’t have happened without . . .”, was that the book, like the Fringe itself, couldn’t have happened without this amazing collision of disparate elements. That’s one of the things that made it a joy to write and that, year after year, makes the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the most exciting place on the planet.

If you’ve had anything to do with it at all – thank you. 

Posted on

How big should your venue be?

Keith Fleming and Gail Watson in Barflies

EDINBURGH’S Grid Iron is back in action from tonight, this time with a tour of Barflies. This was the show, based on the writings of Charles Bukowski, that the theatre company performed in its own local – the Barony Bar on Broughton Street – during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe of 2009.

The show was one of that year’s hits. Tickets were like gold dust and would-be audiences were so desperate to see it they had the kind of wild-eyed look you only ever see on the Fringe.

There were many reasons for this. Grid Iron has a formidable reputation on the Fringe, with a 15-year track record of site-specific shows that have got the festival talking. Choosing to perform Barflies in a real pub sounded like a novelty worth checking out. And fans of Bukowski liked the sound of it.

People were also interested in the creative team, including producer Judith Doherty (who has lots of wise things to say in The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide), director Ben Harrison, composer David Paul Jones and actors Keith Fleming and Gail Watson (in a part now being played byCharlene Boyd). It also had the full weight of the Traverse Theatre’s marketing department behind it. 

Added to that, it was a good show, so it’s not hard to understand its success. 

But one other factor contributed to the particular fervour the show generated. That factor is scarcity. The Barony Bar is an average-sized pub, not a fully kitted-out theatre. Any show there will have a limited audience capacity. Driving the buzz around Barflies was a feeling that tickets were rare. Getting to see it took some effort. Scarcity made the show seem more valuable.

If you can achieve something similar, it is great for a show’s reputation outside the theatre and it’s also great for the atmosphere inside. Whatever size room you’re in, your performers will almost always prefer to play to a packed house than a half-empty one. 

That’s a point made by Martyn Jacques in The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide. With his band the Tiger Lillies, he’s had the experience of having a nominally successful run on the Edinburgh Fringe that he didn’t enjoy as much because the room was rarely sold out. He finds it much more enjoyable to play to a sell-out crowd in a smaller-capacity space. It’s more exciting for audiences and for performers.

Of course, it is very difficult to guess how many people you are likely to attract to your Fringe show, but given the choice, you might find it better to go for a smaller venue than a larger one. It sounds counter-intuitive, but you might have a better time – and so might your audience.

Posted on

Mark Fisher on The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (from The List)

Mark Fisher with a backdrop of Edinburgh Castle pic: Lotte Fisher

Published in The List

The theatre critic’s new book delivers some essential advice to aspiring Fringe performers

 

1 Choosing a title takes ages

It’s as straightforward as they come, yet The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide was a title born of months of discussion. The subtitle, How to Make Your Show a Success, was arrived at no quicker. My editor couldn’t believe it.

2 The Edinburgh Fringe is the most exciting place on Earth

Actually, I knew this already, but the process of researching the book really brought it home. Not only were all the actors, comedians, directors, producers and publicists I spoke to passionate about the Fringe, but they reinforced the sense of it being unique. No festival on the planet has such a combination of scale, discovery, opportunity, unpredictability and exhilaration. That’s why it’s addictive.

3 You don’t have to mortgage your house

No question the Fringe is costly and no question it’s only the elite few TV-name comedians who make money, but I heard relatively few stories of financial ruin. Whether you treat it as an expensive holiday or a long-term investment in your career, you should be able to come up with a manageable budget. If you have a clear grasp of costs and a realistic projection of income – plus a bit of fund raising – you should be able to break even.

4 Flyering works

To you, it looks like a load of waste paper, but time and again, performers told me how much difference well-targeted face-to-face marketing made to their audience numbers.

5 Overdoing it the night before can do more than ruin your show

Among the book’s horror stories is the time comedian Ed Byrne stayed up all night, nodded off at Edinburgh Airport and missed his flight to the Reading Festival.

The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (Methuen) is published Thu 16 Feb.

© Mark Fisher, 2012

Posted on

Good timing or Fringe box-office arms race?

ROUND about now is when many companies are deciding whether they really should perform on this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, applying to venues and making all those decisions that’ll affect them for the rest of the year.

As long as they stay focused, there’s plenty of time to make the decisions that will suit them best. The other day, someone on Twitter was wondering if it was too early to start looking into accommodation for August. The answer, according to The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide, is that although some people book as early as the autumn, you should still be in good time if you wait until March – and even July is not impossible if you’re prepared to accept a more limited choice.

The answers to this kind of question are related to the timing of the Fringe Office as a whole. The Fringe Programme is published in June, which means the final programme deadline is mid-April, which means you should ideally have sorted out your venue and dates by some time in March. Everyone follows much the same pattern which is why, until recently, it has been generally accepted that nobody talks about their Fringe shows until the programme is published.

In recent years, however, there has been pressure from the more commercial end of the market to announce headline acts much earlier. If you’re a top-name comedian, you’re used to launching a UK tour anything from six months to 18 months in advance. With a lot of tickets to sell, such people are nervous about giving only a couple of months’ notice.

Today’s Scotsman reports that not only have a number of big-name shows gone on sale already for 2012 (as I noted in this blog about Alan Davies here), but also the Fringe Society is including them on its edfringe.com website. Neil Mackinnon, the Fringe Society’s head of external affairs, is quoted saying:

“As soon as a company knows they are coming to the Fringe and venues are
ready to put tickets on sale, we can put a show on the website.”

This is a significant change in policy and opens up the possibility of a competitive festival getting more competitive still. Will it encourage participants to show their hand ever earlier just to gain an advantage at the box office? And will it be the smaller companies that suffer as a result? 

The evidence from the past couple of years suggests that need not be the case. In fact, it may even be beneficial. If someone buys tickets for a Rhod Gilbert, Jimeon or Jason Byrne today, it’s likely they’ll have money in their pockets again for a less mainstream act by the time August comes around. If, on the other hand, they do all their spending after June, there’s less chance of them having the money to spread around.

If the trend continued beyond a handful of TV names playing 1200-seat rooms, it could diminish the impact of the Fringe Programme launch in June. But this is the world’s biggest arts festival and there are many hundreds of companies still to commit, let alone announce their dates, so we’re still a long way off any kind of box-office arms race taking place.

Watch this space all the same.

Posted on

Does your venue care about the same things as you?

THERE’S an interesting insight into how an Edinburgh Fringe venue manager may be thinking in this new post on the website of Eco-Congregation Scotland, a charity that helps churches act in an environmentally friendly way. 

A number of Fringe venues are church halls, although the churches often have little or no involvement in the actual programming. How such venues behave is the subject of the post, which points out that:

Congregations who act as venues are being encouraged to see their
letting as part of their ministry rather than purely a commercial
venture.

There are two things to be said about this. The first, as discussed in The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide, is that it’s easy to assume your choice of festival venue is purely a question of economics and logistics: how much does it cost and what do you get for your money? These are crucial questions, of course, but for many participants, so too is the question of a venue’s ethos. 

To use the example above, if your company has a strong religious conviction, it may prefer to rent a space in a venue that shares those beliefs than one that was indifferent or even hostile. The same is true in reverse: if you’re putting on a satanic comedy, you may get a frosty welcome in a church hall. 

But it’s not simply a question of religious belief. The Eco-Congregation blog goes on to talk about the audience as a “community” – and if that community is important to you (be it a community of physical-theatre fans, political thinkers, folk-music experts or whatever), then it will also be important to you to find a venue that has a similar sensibility. In such cases, the venue manager will be looking for performers who share their vision. The Fringe is more about love than money andyou could be just who they need.

The second observation about the Eco-Congregation blog is to do with the increasing awareness of environmental issues on the Fringe, indeed all of Edinburgh’s festivals. The question of theatre’s impact on the environment is one I wrote about here in the Guardian a few years ago and it remains a subject of concern for all the arts.

In her introduction to last week’s Annual Review 2011, Edinburgh Festival Fringe chief executive Kath Mainland praised a pilot scheme involving 20 Fringe venues reducing and recycling their waste. She said that towards the end of the 2011 Fringe, a recycling day resulted in venues and companies recycling “over two tonnes of paper”. You can expect to see more such initiatives in festivals to come.

I’ve included more about green initiatives on the Fringe, including material not in the book, on the venues page of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide website.