I’ve just finished reading two rather interesting articles by the Manchester stand-up comedian, writer and photographer Ian Fox:  “How to produce a Free Festival Show” and “How to promote a Free Festival Show”.    With technology racing ahead in an ever fleeting present, it’s the past’s ability to harness thoughts snatched from experiences that allow us to plan future strategies.  Putting aside those thoughts  for the present, I await to read Ian’s follow-up  article on audience feedback.

In 2008 I interviewed the eminently talented Oliver Lansley who kindly gave us a lot of his valuable time in producing a particularly informative article about how he goes about promoting his show.   I also interviewed him for our series of 10 Questions and  learned a lot more about this charming young artist.

In the following years I interviewed the ingenious Dutch artist, Neel de Jong.  Linguistically accomplished I am not, but Neel embraced my questions with such gusto that I was in awe at her linguistic abilities.   Through her chosen medium of Dance, her dexterous exploration of “reality” clearly challenges her art.  Herein I saw another aspect of how artists have a natural leaning in the spacious embrace of the communicative arts.

It is always a pleasure interviewing artists;  they are utterly fascinating people with highly evolved communication skills.  Their ability to project this through the written word and expressive  movement shows their common ownership of the topical landscape and language.

While festivals and fringes world wide offer artists promotional bite-sized promos to promote their shows in that most tangible of forms, the festival brochure, one should not forget the free internet platform Festival Previews which welcomes artists worldwide to widen their promotional control by creating their own self-created web pages called, Virtual Flyers.  Here artists can upload their full press release, multiple press images, back links, video promo, collated reviews all aggregated onto one promotional page and use this to tweet to their own personal networks, media networks and twitter festival networks etc.

With independent media growing and mainstream media evolving from its traditional base, the formation of the Festival Media Network has begun to play an increasingly important role at the Edinburgh Festival, and especially the Fringe, where reviews and previews remain so integral but where more mainstream media coverage has been in decline for quite some time.

Last but not least I should give mention to a rather clever little book which was published way back in 2006 by James Aylett and James Lark.  Aptly called,   “Fringe: seeing it, doing it, surviving it – a complete guide to the Edinburgh Fringe“. This charming little book takes you on a youthfully comical yet informative journey.  I’ve always had it in mind to publish a review on the Amazon website but I’ve been somewhat amiss with other demands on my time.  Yes, this is a neat read!

So get the cerebral juices going in planning and promoting your next festival or fringe show;  we’re all out there to bring artists and the public together.