A long time coming... (Navigating the minefield of Web presence and self promotion!)

Other than yesterday's announcement concerning the release of the eventful.com widget enabling fans to 'Demand the Band!' it's all been a little quiet here since the post detailing our manic week back in April... Trust us, it's been anything but quiet behind the scenes!!

The promotion of a band is getting harder these days, especially if you want to avoid handing your soul to some 'gifted amateur'* who considers himself an expert in management/promotion, many venues no longer organise gigs themselves, handing the responsibility over to a promoter. There are exceptions of course, The Duchess and The Boardwalk being two examples, but these are becoming few and far between. Having said that, it's not hard to get your name out there, the likes of MySpace, Facebook and Last.fm make it easier for bands to get exposure and, to an extent, build a fan base prior to pushing for gigs outside of their hometown. Another excellent example is iLike which offers many of the same tools as the likes of MySpace and Facebook while tying in to the iTunes store and offering an app which bolts on to Windows Media Player and the iTunes app on our PC. Twitter has also become an established tool in involving your fans, enabling interaction on an almost instant basis wothout having to give out your MSN/Yahoo! Messenger details. The problem arises when you want to convert that online interest into tickets/sales/'real' fans... where do you start?

We were very lucky last year in that, due to our charity single for HELP for HEROES, we received a lot of interest from radio and websites prior, in all honesty, to doing anything else of note with the band. We have since kept that interest alive by ensuring we are active on our own site and all our social networking profiles, we've been seen 'out and about' as a band. We've made a point of interacting with fans at other band's gigs, we've been in the press, we've pushed ourselves on local, regional and internet radio, we've done it all... except get the gigs!

Yes, we played live last year, but not as much as we would have liked. We were also offered 2 or 3 gigs late January/early February of this year which we were unable to commit to due to 'real' life commitments and the illness of my wife. Then, once we were all back home and raring to go there were no gigs available! So we've had an apparent period of inactivity since last Christmas.

Over the last 2-3 weeks we have been digging away in the depths of the internet, trawling websites, social networking sites and the like, searching for contacts at venues throughout the country trying to book gigs. We've been lucky so far with two of the first batch coming up trumps and resulting in gigs in York and Sheffield. These gigs however are at venues who organise their own nights. Which brings me back to my first point: it's getting harder to promote your own band these days, despite the abundance of tools you can use to make people aware you exist...

It's a bit of a paradox really. You can't get gigs unless people know who you are, and people won't know who you are unless you gig. (I'm not counting the umpteen friends and businesses who will automatically jump on your MySpace and Facebook profiles). The simple answer is to send emails, electronic press kits, 'snail' mails, physical press kits, promo CDs to everyone in the business you can get the details for, the difficult part is what comes next...

Once you've found their details (there are some excellent resources available such as The Unsigned Guide) make sure you understand how they wish to be contacted... some will ask you to email or call them prior to sending anything in, some will only accept contact through their MySapce profiles, others will only accept requests to the promoters they use. You must understand how these people work in order to proceed at all!

And once you've figured out who to send what, and when, you send it... and wait...

It's a bit like a job application, in fact it's exactly like that. You may hear from some straight away with a yes or no, you may receive a polite 'We'll consider you in the future...', you may receive nothing. The important thing is knowing how long to wait before you chase it up, you mustn't stalk these people, you will distance yourself from those you need to befriend if you hassle them on a daily basis. There's no strict rule here... just play safe!

All this may sound a bit 'doom and gloom' ish, but it's not meant to be! It's a challenge, and it's there to be overcome... and overcome we will. In our case we've all been in this game long enough to know that tenacity, obstinacy and shear balls are what it takes. Read the biog of every established act and they'll say that you need to just keep banging your head against the wall until one day/night it all falls into place... so we're just going to keep on banging our heads!

Add to all the sedentary admin and promotion work the fact that we have been working on new material (some of which has been uploaded in rough cuts to Facebook, ReverbNation, iLike and this site with an exclusive on the ReverbNation site!), polishing the old material and working on the actual set/show for the upcoming gigs, you'll perhaps be able to forgive us all for not updating the blog!! Next week will be great fun with several rehearsals and more writing sessions! (And I'll be sketching out my ad-libs for between the songs... what? You didn't think we made them up on the spot did you!!)

We're hoping to be able to announce more gigs within the next week or so, we've got an exciting announcement to be made within the next few days (for more than a hint check our tweets!) and there'll be more merch available in the not too distant future...

It's been a long time coming, but it is coming together...

Slainté,

Grae
MORPHEUS RISING
...resurrecting British Heavy Metal!

* I will qualify that statement by asking you to check out the number of 'promoters'/'managers' who use hotmail, gmail or yahoo email accounts to do business. It's a given that, in order to present a professional business front, you should at least own your own domain name! (And bands should also take note... once you're past the practicing in your bedroom stages of your career a simple MySpace profile is no longer sufficient. For as little as £20 you can own your own site name, produce a website and have your band's own emal addresses).